John-B

It appears to be fully transparent. When I select From Layer and paste into a new doc, it doesn't select the entire layer, just the black areas. It doesn't matter the blend mode, radius, or intensity settings of the Outer Glow, the entire image is filled. The only difference is how dark the fill is. I can adjust it so the fill in the rest of the image is barely noticeable, until I paste it into something else and the darkened rectangular area becomes very visible.

When I turn on Outer Glow for this image, the glow fills the entire image. It doesn't matter what the radius is set to. I've turned up the Intensity so you can easily see it. In addition to the actual glow around the image's outline, the rest of the image is filled with a slight tint. I don't know if it's because this image is irregular or what. Please tell me how I can add a normal outer glow to this image without tinting the whole thing. Affinity Photo 1.10.8, macOS 14.5. It happens when I copy into a new image. To reproduce: Paste the image, add Outer Glow.

That is what happens for me as well. If you click Don't Save, the window goes away. It only remains if you click Save (I incorrectly said click OK in my OP, meaning the default). Steps to reproduce: Open a document. Edit the document, but don't Save. Close the doc. In the save reminder dialog, click Save. The empty window remains every time for me. Affinity Photo 1.10.5, Mac OS 12.4 (Apple Silicon).

Whenever I close a document window without saving, and I then click OK in the dialog that asks me if I want to save the document, the document goes away, but the empty window is still there. I then have to close the empty window. This happens 100% of the time when the save reminder dialog pops up. If I close a window that doesn't need to be saved, the window closes normally. I'm using the mode with separate windows, I don't remember what that's called.

Sometimes the ghost window follows me when I switch to another app.

I ONLY use separated mode, so it would be nice if this were fixed. On the bright side, I never intentionally drag one window into another, so it doesn't happen very often.

The ghost windows disappear with everything else, but they come right back. The only thing that SOMETIMES makes the windows go away is clicking in another AP document window. A few minutes ago, that fixed it, but I tried just now, and no amount of clicking anywhere will make the ghosts go away. Actually, I just went back to AP and clicked through each of the open windows several times, and the ghosts did go away. I just have to be persistent.

Whenever I have two documents sharing the same window in tabs (which I only ever do accidentally), when I drag one out, it leaves behind ghost windows. These transparent windows are on top of everything else. Eventually, they go away, but I usually have to restart AP since it can take a while. This happened on my old machine, a late-2015 iMac, 10.14, and it happens on my new machine, a Mac Studio 12.3.1, Photo 1.10.5.

I noticed this in the recent update notes: Is that relevant to this discussion?

Looks like Xara is an subscription-based online graphics app. Are you suggesting using Xara as a go between? That is, subscribing to another app to translate Affinity Photo files? A $12.95 per month subscription doesn't seem like a great solution. Or are you suggesting using Xara instead of AP? That's not an option for me, as I don't use subscription-based apps. As far as I'm concerned, formatting is not as important as edibility. Even if all formatting is lost, it would at least save the time of re-entering all the text, which is time consuming and error prone.

Are you saying I can export in one of those formats, then open in Photoshop and be able to edit the text?

That makes it a bit challenging to exchange files with PS users. Seems like if editable text can be imported, there'd be no reason it could not be exported. Maybe it's a copyright issue, PS's file format is proprietary?

When I export a document in Affinity Photo in PSD format, text layers are no longer editable.Text layers are not exported as text at all, they get converted to pixel layers. It makes no difference if I select "preserve accuracy" or "preserve edibility." Is there any way to export to PSD while maintaining editable text layers?

This discussion has taken a pointless turn. What difference does it make how AP represents and arranges image data? I create and edit files in AP format, but save them out in TIFF, PNG, or JPG formats. It doesn't matter to me HOW AP saves the data internally, it's the data that AP saves that's important. Even more important for this discussion, a portion of those data have been made non-editable for some unknown and apparently arbitrary reason.

Affinity Photo HAS all the necessary functionality already, they just disable it for the alpha channel. You can currently select and edit (using all the existing editing tools) any channel EXCEPT the alpha channel. So it's not a matter of adding new functionality, which I could understand not being a high priority. Unless it really is some intellectual property issue, it would appear they are intentionally crippling their software. I'd like to hear an official response as to why they don't do something that's about as simple as changing the value of a Boolean variable.