Affinity Photo 1.9+ and Filter Forge Issue

I should start by saying that I doubt this is a Filter Forge bug. I'm posting here primarily to see if others have experienced it and to discover if there might be some fix/workaround that I'm missing.

Is anyone else having problems with compatibility between Affinity Photo 1.9/1.10 and Filter Forge 9/10/11 on Windows 10? After a hiatus for most of 2021, I have recently returned to a project in which I was previously using Affinity Photo 1.8 and Filter Forge 10 without any issues. In the interim I updated Affinity Photo to 1.9 and more recently to 1.10. I now find that no selection information is passed from Affinity Photo to Filter Forge. Filter Forge works fine if the filter is applied to an entire layer, but does not work at all if there is a selection (the selected region does not appear in FF and the preview window is always blank). For my needs this renders the FF plugin useless, and Filter Forge is a key asset in my workflow.

If I uninstall Photo 1.10 and instead install Photo 1.8, the two programs work together exactly as expected, with selections once again being honored. There are, however, two problems with this as a solution:

- I have many files that I opened in Affinity Photo 1.9 or later, so they can no longer be opened in 1.8.
- In the long term I definitely want to be able to update Affinity Photo to later versions.

I discovered this thread on these forums: https://www.filterforge.com/forum/read...&TID=15412

It appears to be outdated, however, since Affinity Photo 1.8 and FF 10 work together without issue. Does this mean that Affinity Photo broke the interface again in 1.9? Or something else?

Any insights anyone can offer would be much appreciated! FYI - I made a similar post on the Affinity Photo forums a few days ago, but the response has been underwhelming (i.e. none).

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GMM wrote: James, welcome to the forums! Right now we are in contact with Serif devs discussing the way to make FF officially compatible with AP. I don't know all the details but here is what I'm told: - There are two kinds of selection in AP: regular selection and smart object selection. Smart object selections are known to fail when passed to the plugin, Serif are looking into that. - Regular selections should work correctly in AP 1.10/FF 10. If you have issues with regular selections please make a video showing the issue and send it to the support team - we'll pass it to the Serif developers.

Thanks for the welcome and the response! As far as I can tell, the problem occurs even with regular selections. I have made a couple of videos to show the issue:

1) Single pixel layer, selection, filter: https://vimeo.com/647390146/3a1ac3dac3

2) Two pixel layers, Merge Visible, selection, filter: https://vimeo.com/647390462/a5631ea4ae

The second video was made in response to a question from a moderator on the Affinity forums. That forum thread can be found here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index...ent-859297

It sounds like there is an awareness of the Affinity Photo and Filter Forge selection issue on the part of both team, and that is really good to discover. Hopefully a solution can be found to get these two excellent tools talking again soon!

Thanks,
James

Here is the response from Serif. No comments from my side:

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Selections not being passed through is due to hardware acceleration. If you turn hardware acceleration off, the selection will be passed through. This is true for 1.8 to 1.10 - the reason it was picked up is because in 1.8, hardware acceleration was disabled by default.