Assistant
The Assistant controls the painting, layer creation behaviour, brush sharing, and raw development options in your document. It also lets you choose whether or not to be alerted of layer operations as they occur.
Alert messages inform you that Affinity Photo 2 has performed an action that you need to be aware of. This is as a result of the last operation you performed. The Assistant can decide the default type of action to take.
Settings
The following settings can be adjusted from the dialog:
- Enable assistant: When enabled, actions are carried out according to the dialog's current settings.
- Painting with no layer selected: Creates a new pixel layer for your brush strokes using 'Create pixel layer and paint' if there is no pixel or vector layer selected; 'Take no action' means that no pixel painting is allowed.
- Erasing from vector layers: Erases on a created layer mask applied to your vector layer; immediately rasterize the vector layer and erase directly on it; or take no action.
- Other brushes on vector layers: For retouching pixel brushes (e.g., Burn Brush Tool, Smudge Brush Tool, etc.), any applied brush stroke rasterizes the vector layer by default. You can change this behaviour by selecting 'Take no action' which doesn't convert the layer or apply the stroke.
- Brush tool sharing: Choose whether a selected brush tip is shared between tools of a similar nature (e.g. Dodge, Burn and Sponge Brush Tools), shared across all tools, or the brush tip is independent.
- Applying filters to vector layers: For effect and retouch filters from the Filters panel, applying a filter to a vector layer rasterizes it by default. You can change this behaviour by selecting 'Take no action' which doesn't convert the layer or apply the filter.
- Adding adjustment layers to selection: If you've created a selection, any adjustment applied to the selection is added as a new adjustment layer above the currently selected layer (Take No Action) or made a child adjustment layer of the selected layer instead (Create adjustment layer based on selection). With no layer selected, a new adjustment layer is added to the top of the layer stack in both instances.
- Adding mask layers to selection: Analogous to 'Adding adjustment layers to selection' above, but for mask layers.
Settings specific to default behaviour during raw development are also hosted on the dialog:
- RAW Engine: Provides a choice of RAW processing engines for you to use—Affinity's own Serif Labs engine (used by default) or Apple (Core Image RAW) engine.
- RAW output colour format: Choose between RGB (16bit) or RGB (32bit) output when developing a raw image. Choosing the latter option allows you to maintain a full 32-bit float environment from initial raw development to export and take advantage of extra precision.
- RAW tone curve: If the default 'Apply tone curve' option is active, your raw image is adjusted using a suggested tone curve. The 'Take no action' option makes no tonal correction; the image can be altered within the Develop Persona's Basic panel later.
- RAW exposure bias: Choose whether to apply exposure bias value if stored in the raw image's EXIF data. Like Histogram stretch, both 'default' and 'initial' give the same results but reports zeroed or actual values, respectively. The 'Take no action' option ignores the exposure bias value.
- Default map region: Sets the map that displays in the Develop Persona's Metadata panel to a chosen region if the raw image contains no GPS location data in its EXIF data.
To change Assistant options:
Do one of the following:
- From the Document menu, select Assistant Options and select options from the relevant pop-up menu.
- From the Home screen's Settings (General tab), tap Assistant Options and select options.
To switch off alerts or the Assistant completely:
- From the Document menu, select Assistant Options.
- Uncheck Enable assistant.