4 Sep 2020

Check Out Version 1.8 of Affinity Photo, Designer, and Publisher

Adobe has been the king of computer-based photography, design, and publishing for decades, and that's unlikely to change. Even so, three applications from Serif's Affinity division are worth looking at.

The company produced three similar programs that had free versions. DrawPlus X8, PhotoPlus X8, and PagePlus X9 are still available without cost from Serif's website. These applications are no longer being developed and no support is available, but they were starting points for Affinity Photo, Affinity Designer, and Affinity Publisher.

The latest releases, all version 1.8, will be more than sufficient for some users who don't need Adobe's video, audio, and website design tools, and who don't like Adobe's software as a service (rental) model. Change is challenging for some, and the switch from paying a large fee every 18 to 24 months instead of paying a small monthly fee has annoyed some users.

Affinity's three applications for Windows and MacOS computers each cost just $50. Photo and Designer have IPad versions that cost $20 each. Updates have been provided without charge so far, and presumably that will continue until the company has a version 2.0 release.

So if you're looking only at the bottom line, the three Affinity applications cost $150 versus $600 per year for Adobe's larger collection of apps, or $120 per year for the Adobe Photography plan. Looking at just the bottom line is a horrible way to make a buying decision, though, so let's look at the features that are new in version 1.8 to see what value they add to the applications.

Affinity Photo

The photo application will probably have more users than the other two, so let's start there.

The newly released version of Affinity Photo has better support for plug-ins. Nearly all plugs-ins are provided as files with the extension 8BF, which is a standard developed by Adobe and released publicly. That means any application that accepts 8BF files can probably use plug-ins designed for Photoshop.

Any plug-ins that are added to (1) Affinity's plug-ins folder (C:\ProgramData\Affinity\Photo\1.0\Plugins\) will be detected and enabled automatically. Users who have plug-in packages that have been installed elsewhere simply need to (2) add the location so that it appears in the program's (3) search locations. Plug-ins are found (4) in the Develop module under Filters.

Before selling the plug-ins to DXO, Google provided a free version of the Nik plug-ins. The free plug-ins are still available, but somewhat dated.

One potential issue with Affinity Photo, whether plug-ins are used or not, is the (5) huge file size of raw images that are saved in Affinity Photo format after being edited. A digital negative file that's about 25MB, when edited in On1's photo editor gains only a 54KB sidecar file, but when it's round-tripped from Lightroom to Photoshop, the resulting TIFF is nearly 157MB. But the Affinity Photo file grows to 270MB, nearly 11 times the size of the raw file!

Processing raw files has been substantially improved to support 32-bit output. This means that more detail will be retained in highlights and shadows.

Nearly all photo editing applications have a lens correction option that attempts to correct lens distortion. All lenses have some amount of distortion, and this can be a significant problem with zoom lenses. Applications recognize the type of lens used (1) and then apply corrections to deal with known issues. Some photographers use lenses that have no electronic connection to the camera, and that means the application doesn't know which lens was used. Affinity Photo allows the user to apply any known lens correction to any image.

There's also a (2) full manual mode that allows the user to adjust barrel and pincushion distortion, modify vertical and horizontal tilt, change rotation and scaling, and enable or disable chromatic aberration reduction, defringing, lens vignette removal, and control post-crop vignetting.

Affinity Designer

The designer application is likely to be the second most popular of the three applications because it's a good choice for creating logos, ads, and graphics for use in presentations.

Some of the improvements are complex and others are features that only graphic designers will care about or understand. Here's one example: An updated Pantone Library. Pantone is the definitive reference for colors used in nearly all applications worldwide. The company was acquired by X-Rite in 2007, and X-Rite was purchased by the Danaher Corporation in 2012. The Pantone Matching System makes it possible for manufacturers of products from dresses to automobiles to match colors without long and involved consultations.

So users have access to the latest PMS color swatches. At least a dozen PMS swatch collections exist -- from four-color CMYK printing on coated or uncoated stock to metallics, pastels, and neons. Once the user has (1) selected a color, the color can be modified. The (2) default seems to be tint, but there are also (3) sliders that represent the color as RGB percentages, RGB values, HSL (hue, saturation, and lightness), LAB colors, and more.

Fun fact: The LAB color space, defined by the International Commission on Illumination (CIE) in 1976, expresses color as three values: L* for the lightness from black (0) to white (100), a* from green (−) to red (+), and b* from blue (−) to yellow (+). CIELAB was designed so that the same amount of numerical change in these values corresponds to roughly the same amount of visually perceived change.

A stock photography panel that was present previously in the photo and publisher applications is now included in the designer application. It links to three sources of free stock photos: Unsplash, Pexels, and Pixabay.

To use it, just enter a search term (I decided to use "cat"), select one of the resulting images, and drag it onto the design. The first time you use any of the services, you'll need to acknowledge that the images are being provided by a third party, not by Affinity.

The new version has improved the Expand Stroke feature. This is an esoteric feature, but basically it's intended to be used once a design is finished. At that time the user can finalize/expand a shape to lock its structure. Once this has been done, the user has a "flattened vector" that can be transformed. Like I said, esoteric.

Other new features are even more esoteric: Boolean operations on shapes and elements, for example. In a vector program such as Affinity Designer, text is simply a group of geometric objects. The Boolean operations make it possible to combine the various letter forms in ways that are easy to imagine but difficult to accomplish.

And before we wander any deeper into the weeds, let's move to on Affinity Publisher.

Affinity Publisher

Publisher is the most specialized application and therefore probably the one with the smallest user base. If you're designing something that will be printed commercially, this is the application to use. It may not be Adobe InDesign, but it's a capable application for many jobs.

When you're dealing with a commercial printer, it's important to deliver files without errors. A good editor will catch spelling, grammar, and logical errors in the presentation, but might not notice missing typefaces, bleed problems, missing linked objects, images that have been stretched or squished, text that overflows a frame, low-resolution images, lines that are too thin to print properly, and more.

These are the kinds of problems that can be easily overlooked and Affinity Publisher's pre-flight check has been updated to identify and warn about 20 common problems, problems that are difficult and expensive (or impossible) to fix once a job is on the press.

When the job has a text-overflow problem, a small eyeball icon appears next to the area where the problem is. Clicking that icon reveals the text that doesn't fit in the frame.

Master pages have been made smarter in this release. A master page contains design elements that are intended to appear on every page that uses the master page. Problems would arise if the user wanted to apply a new master page to a page in the document: Any elements that had been added to the page would be dropped. That can still happen if you want it to, but most designers will be happy to find that Affinity Publisher's new smart master pages can retain and reposition or resize any elements that were on the page if a new master is specified.

Affinity Publisher can import InDesign documents, too. This does not mean that users can work collaboratively with InDesign users; it's a one-way street. Publisher can import an InDesign file that has been exported in InDesign Markup Language (IDML) format. Previously, Affinity Publisher could accept a PDF file created by InDesign, but that's far from ideal.

 It's a Sweet Deal, but Not a Suite Deal

If you need just the photo application, you'll spend $50. Add the designer application and you're up to $100. Include the publisher application and it's $150. What you are buying is one to three capable applications at bargain basement prices.

Unlike many other applications, the Affinity programs are licensed on a per-computer basis. Most of the competing applications allow installation on two or three computers. But installing all three applications on two computers would still cost half of the annual cost of Adobe's Creative Cloud. Creative Cloud includes website, audio, and video applications not available from Affinity, and Adobe's Photography plan ($120 per year) is still a more comprehensive choice.

But the Affinity applications are still well worth consideration because the value proposition is hard to ignore.

Additional details are available on the Affinity website.

Short Circuits

Beware Fraudulent COVID-19 Contact Tracing

Scammers are inventive. They pay attention to the news and COVID-19 has been quite profitable for them. So profitable that Medicare and the Centers for Disease Control have launched a campaign to let people know how contact tracing works and, just as important, how to spot a fake.

Most of the contact tracing scams have used phone calls so far, but its virtually guaranteed that email scammers will follow.

It's easy to identify a scammer.

• A legitimate contact tracer will never request or demand payment.
• A legitimate contact tracer will never request your Social Security number, Medicare account number, or Medicaid identification.
• A legitimate contact tracer will never request bank, credit card, or other financial information.
• A legitimate contact tracer will never ask about your salary.
• A legitimate contact tracer will never ask for credit card numbers.

Anyone who asks for any of this information should be assumed to be a crook. Ignore the email or terminate the phone call. There is no point in dealing with the scammer.

If the Call or Email is Legitimate ...

If you've been identified as a person who has been in close contact with someone who tested positive for COVID-19, a contact tracer or public health worker from your state or local health department may contact you. This is done to help slow the spread of the disease.

Medicare says that all information you share with a contact tracer, like who you've been in contact with and your recent whereabouts, is confidential.

Although a contact tracer will never request payment, identification numbers, or credit information, the tracer may ask you to self-quarantine for 14 days. The CDC says this means staying home, monitoring your health, and maintaining social distance from others at all times.

The contact tracer will also ask you to monitor your health and watch for symptoms of COVID-19, to notify your doctor if you develop symptoms, and to seek medical care if any symptoms worsen or become severe.

To review more information from the Centers for Disease control see the department's COVID-19 website page.

It's MY Browser, so Keep Your Mitts Off It!

Have you ever opened your web browser only to find that it's not your web browser? Some program developers build into their application installers a process that changes your default browser or your default search engine. Even Microsoft does this if you are distracted during an operating system update.

Microsoft's new Chromium-based Edge is a fine browser. Bing is a fine search engine. But Edge and Bing aren't my preferred browser and search engine. If you've found that your computer's default browser isn't the one you want or that the browser's search engine has been changed, it's easy to reverse the changes.

So let's see what we can do to fix this, starting with the default browser.

I'm going to assume your computer is running Windows 10, so go to Settings > Default Apps. You'll see options for email, maps, music players, and other major categories. Click the web browser button and then select the browser you prefer from the list of installed browsers.

Browsers other than the one you selected may still bug you occasionally if you open them. They'll want you to set them as the default browser. These messages usually include a "do not show again" option. Click that.

Setting Your Preferred Search Engine

Search engines are a bit more complex because they are set for each browser, not at the operating system level. That's good because you can specify any search engine you want as the default for each browser. Duck Duck Go is the default search engine for Firefox, Google is the default for Chrome, and Bing is the default for Edge.

The process of changing the default search engine is similar for most browsers, and there are only two primary systems these days: Firefox and everybody else. Although Microsoft's new Edge browser is based on Chrome, it is the most difficult browser to modify. (Surprised?)

Overall, there are more similarities than differences.

 Click any of the small images for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

Firefox

1. Click the three horizontal lines at the top right (“hamburger menu”).
2. Select Options from the drop-down menu.
3. Select the Search tab at the left side of the screen.
4. Select your preferred search engine from the list.

Chrome

1. Instead of horizonal lines, Google uses three vertical dots. Click the icon.
2. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
3. Choose the Search Engine tab at the left side of the screen.
4. Select your preferred search engine from the list.

Edge (Chromium based)

Microsoft probably has a reason for making so many changes to the process used by Chrome even though they both use the same code.

1. Instead of Chrome's vertical dots or Firefox's horizontal lines, Microsfot uses horizontal dots. Click the icon to display the drop-down menu.
2. Select Settings from the drop-down menu.
3. Choose the Privacy and services tab.
4. Scroll all the way to the bottom of the page and click Address bar and search. You'd almost think that Microsoft is trying to make it hard for users to figure out how to use a different search engine.
5. On the next screen, scroll all the way to the bottom again and select your preferred search engine from the list.

Spare Parts

Photoshop Camera Adds More Fun Filters

Adobe's recently released free Photoshop Camera app for Android and IOS devices continues to improve with the addition of more free lenses. Perhaps they should better be called filters because they're not physical devices like lenses that are used on cameeras. They're also not filters like the devices that photographers used to put in front of their lenses for special effects.

 Click any of the small images for a full-size view. To dismiss the larger image, press ESC or tap outside the image.

I stepped out onto the driveway in late August, leaned against the car, and used a variety of Photoshop Camera lenses to do a few selfies. Effects can be applied while you're taking the photo, or you can add the effect later. You can even change the effect later. The four images here were each separate exposures, but they could have been created using the same base image. The second image from the left shows how a photo taken on a sunny afternoon can be converted to look like it was a night. And there were no balloons behind me.

When you're preparing to take a photo or to add an effect to one that you've taken previously, you'll see the image and, at the bottom of the phone's screen, a list of lenses. Most of the lenses have several options. Artful 2, for example offers eight possibilities.

The lenses are free.

< Here's another series of images. The original is on the left and three of the resulting images follow. Note that these images are all reversed left to right because that's the way the Android camera creates them when using the phone's rear-facing lens. It would have been easy to flip them in an image editing application, but I left them alone.

Starting with a plain photo of some commercial buildings, I used one of the lenses to add more damratic clouds to the image, but later decided that I'd like to see what Artful 2 would do for it.

Photoshop Camera dan be downloaded from the Apple App store on an IOS device or from the Google Play store on an Android device.

Acronis Updates TrueImage for 2021

Apparently Acronis is looking forward to the end of 2020 as much as the rest of us and released TrueImage 2021 in the third week of August.

The primary improvements for 2021 deal with protection against malware. Those who use TrueImage's online backup service have continuous back that's typical of cloud-based systems. Regardless of how users set TrueImage to work, integrated real-time protection and signature-based defenses are intended to stop cyberattacks from harming data.

An on-demand antivirus can scan the full system or just the files typically targeted by malware. Artificial intelligence examines system behavior to halt attacks in real-time. Acronis says this can shut down malware, ransomware, and crypto-jacking applications before they can cause damage. The 2021 version also adds web filtering and videoconference protections keep accidental infections and unwanted hackers off your computer.

Beware, though! The protective components made one of my primary applications unusable and Acronis has not been helpful in resolving the problem. I have turned the protective measures off.

For additional details, see the Acronis website.

Twenty Years Ago: Gigantic 19-inch Monitors

How big is the monitor on your desk and do you have more than one? In 2000 I had a single 17" monitor. It was a cathode-ray tube device, so it was heavy. It was also deep and it ran hot. I really wanted a 19" monitor, but my desk wasn't deep enough to accommodate one. I also really wanted a flat-screen monitor, but they were far beyond my price range.

It's easy to forget how primitive things were 20 years ago. And a decade before that a 13" monitor would have seemed large.

Viewsonic displayed CRTs and flat-panel monitors at the 2000 PC Expo where it showed off its "short yoke" monitors. The yoke on a CRT device was essentially a magnetic lens that bent the electron beam vertically and horizontally so that it would cover the entire screen. Yokes were responsible for the depth of a CRT case.

Viewsonic was offering "a 19-inch monitor that's just 20 inches wide, 19.7 inches high and a little under 18 inches deep. The GS815 is Viewsonic's first short-depth monitor in the 21-inche category. The specs include a 0.21mm horizontal (0.25mm diagonal) dot pitch, a maximum resolution of 1920 x 1440, and a wide video input bandwidth of 300MHz." Take a look at the flat-panel monitor on your desk: It's probably less than an inch thick!