Robin Whalley

You may have got to the bottom of your problem but in case you haven't... The setting you share for your "Color Matching" diaog show the colour handling is being passed to the printer AND that it's set to the EPSON Colour Controls. This ignores the colour profiles and hands everything over to the printer. I suspect the reason that you achieve a good result with this is that the Fotospeed Pearl paper doesn't require much of a change in softproofing. My best guess at what's causing your problem when using the Generic ICC profile is that the profile is wrong. I did some testing of Fotospeed papers a while back and found several of their generic profiles were wrong. I reported this with my evidence and they corrected them. I suspect what happens is tht people have custom profiles made but don't follow the test print instructions properly. The resulting profile is then used more widely as a generic profile and so you end up with an incorrect profile and a colour shift. I really would encourage you to have a custom paper profile made using the free custom profiling service on the Fotospeed website. It's very quick and easy and if you follow the instructions in the pack you will know the results will the accurate. I suspect it will fix your problem but if not, it rules out one probably cause.

The Stamp Layer is a layer that consolidates all the other layers in the image into one new pixel layer. It's never been available as a menu command which is why I recommend learning the shortcut keys. You can though achieve the same things using two steps in the menu. In the Edit meny seelct "Copy Merge" which copies all the layers in the image onto the clipboard and consolidates them. You can then use Edit and Paste to paste the clipboard as a new layer in the image. I recommend doing this if you ever need to apply a change to the image that's going to be destructive. That way if you go wrong, you can throw away the layer and try again.

Thanks. That's good news.

I'm using Affinity Publisher 1.7.3 on Mac Catalina 10.15.3 Yesterday I created and worked on a new document without problem. The document is for a book with facing page layouts and has two Master Pages (A and B). I was able to apply, clear and change without issue but today when I reopen the document I'm experiencing the following bug. When I create a new page using Master Page A and then a second facing page using Master Page B, I can't flow the text from the first page into the second. I can see that the text frames from Master A still exist on the second page that has Master B applied to it. This causes strange behaviour such as images added to the second page vanishing when you try to pin them. This turns out to be because Publisher is pinning them to the false text frames from Master A that still exist on that page. I also noticed from searching the forum that a few people have reported problems with missing images and this may be the issue. I was able to resolve the problem as follows: Go to the Layer panel where I could see Master A and Master B. When I expanded both Masters in the Layer panel I could see they had elements for the facing pages that shouldn't have been there. Select the Move Tool from the tools palette and click the Detached button to unlock the page design. I could then delete the unwanted text frames (that shouldnt have been there) from each of the Masters in the Layers panel. After this click the Finish option to close the detached mode. After making these changes, the pages and text flowing worked fine, as did the image frame pinning. I was able to recreate the problem and fix it consistently. The following points seem to be key to the bug: Create, edit and save a document with two different master pages, after which close Affinity Publisher. Restart Affinity and open the saved document. Add a new page with one Master page and then add a facing page with the other master page. Check the layers window and you will find there are elements from both left and right master pages present. Text flowing and image pinning now doesn't work proerly as Publisher becomes confused with the "phantom" text frames. Apply the work around above and the system works again. I hope this can be fixed in a future release as I think it may be the source of quite a lot of issues.

Shortly after Affinity first launched, I used the software to layout the print edition of my latest book. To say that it was a painful process was an understatement. I constantly encountered bugs and wasted hours searching for work arounds. I eventually finished the book layout after around 80 hours and the results were acceptable. At this point decided to leave the layout alone because every change threw up a new problem. Today I’m creating a print layout for my latest book and wasn’t looking forward to the experience. But what a surprise. I’m powering through the layout process and after a couple of hours have 40 pages complete. The latest version of the software feels very professional and I’m even enjoying the process. We don’t say it often enough so here goes... Well Done

Another alternative to using a luminosity mask is to use blending ranges by clicking the gear icon for the layer. I did a YouTube video on this not long ago https://youtu.be/v5njz09W-HA. You can also combine this with the luminosity masking approach for greater control. It’s a shame about the macro restrictions. I keep meaning to revisit the subject and I’ve just moved it up my to do list.