Lightsmith

Sadly, I ended up using Photoshop (an old version) to clear the background.

Hi MEB, I used Photo for this on a scanned blue signature. The white removal left a faint grey fill rather than complete removal. The flood select was changed but still selected part that must be miles away from the selection colour. The whites were about 246 on the scan, not 255.

Found this and tried it out, but as white wasn't 255,255,255 (presumably) only a partial removal took place, leaving RGB at about 20 ish. In contract the CS2 (!) backround removal works perfectly on the same image. What did work on Affinity was the background removal brush, but it does need a bit of work to ensure all the background has gone. AfPhoto isnt quite there yet, but getting close. I also tried a magic selection, but not only did it select the white, but also part of a deep blue section. Not possible to use that reliable thn.

I'm glad I found this thread, it looks like an software wierdism. I had four layers, one where i selected an open Affinity image and two where I dragged them in from explorer, plus the origibal image. The pasted image behaved as expected but the two dragged layers just got deleted rather than the selection. All were pixel images, so I cannot see why the problem exists but MEB's response works perfectly. There are some wierd aspects to Photo but c'est la vie. The problem is, really, that the image layer is an undocumented feature.