Picksy

Quite true about the crop tool being a little faster if it is a rectangular region, but it is effectively what MEB was saying. I just put "crop a photo" in quotes and expanded a little because people coming from other software into Affinity may not see cropping through the eyes of Photoshop. The tutorial that Createsean references is all about using a region to mask and image, though, so if he was trying that it must have been salient to his situation.

My bad, I got here via a search and didn't see the purple bubble. But I suppose it is worth noting that a problem is not new to the current beta...

What toltec is saying is that the Picker button on the curves dialogue turns on click-and-drag adjustment. So once you click on the Picker button clicking and dragging your mouse on a spot in the image UP increases the Output for all pixels at the Input level of the spot you clicked on. Dragging DOWN reduces this. So, click on a shadow and drag up to brighten shadows (reducing contrast), etc. Affinity will consider the original Input value (pixel brightness value), so if you click in the exact same spot twice you will just continue to move the same dot in the curves dialogue curve spline. Note that Ctrl-z will undue all of your curve adjustments at once. If you really want to fix one dot on the curve then play with others you can click the Merge button on the curves dialogue, so that the first Ctrl-z will undo the Merge and the next Ctrl-z will undo just the last dot you created on the curve spline.

Getting this in latest release, 1.7.1.404. It is caused by the lower blur...blurring the image, not the upper blur blurring the mask itself. This isn't a work-flow scenario, but it shows the point. It definitely exports to PNG.

Am I missing something here? Is there a reason not to just create a rectangle and give it the stroke (or using Appearances even several strokes) that you want to use to create the frame, then put the picture into the rectangle as a child layer. Now you can control every aspect of total size and shape, picture zoom and even distorted shape, and picture framing within the rectangle just by clicking either the mother or daughter layer (rectangle layer or picture sub-layer) in the layers stack and manipulating the elements however you please. Cropping without Crop.afdesign

The obvious may be getting missed here: For a beginner, to "crop a photo" in designer simply create a rectangle of the desired size then drag the photo's layer (in layer list) onto the rectangle's layer. Now you have the photo masked, and you can click on the > by the rectangle's layer to expand it, click on the photo's (sub)layer to select it, and then drag the photo as needed within the "window" of the masking rectangle.