PeterinJapan

Hello, Affinity Photo community. I moved from Photoshop to AP and enjoyed its new features, while struggling to either re-learn new muscle memory, it was just too hard. Here are the major reasons why I moved to another app (Acorn) as my main image manipulation app over AP:
Command clicking of objects does not select their layer (and, while held, activate the Move tool). This is a Photoshop action that I just couldn't un-learn.  Perhaps the biggest weirdness, the tool I select is for the current document is not "sticky." If I switch to another document, the tool is reset to the tool I was using when I had that document open. This is not standard activity on any Mac program I can think of.  One of the most Mac-like systems going back to 1984 is that you draw a square marquee box, then add to the selection by holding the shift key, or subtract from the selection if you draw more marquee boxes holding the option key. That...doesn't work in AP in a standard way at all.  Having Macros was a good idea, but they are strange and difficult to use. When I recorded a a macro to make a selection, copy the contents of that selection and paste (my goal is to bring the right half of a book that was scanned so both sides will be closer and I can hide the ugly book binding from my image)...the data that is pasted is always the original data from the file I created the macro with. In order words, the clipboard data is saved inside the macro and that data is always pasted into whatever other image I run my script in, not the new data from a new file I'm working with. The effect renders AP useless for automation of any kind.  There is no Applescript support. While I am an expert at using Keyboard Maestro to do UI scripting to accomplish the automation I need, most other users are not. One big reason I switched to Acorn is its robust Applescript support, meaning I can automate just about any process. Yes, I know we're living in an age where codebases are shared across Mac, Windows and iOS and that Applescript is a dinosaur as far as technologies go. But some kind of useful automation is important for a tool like this. Another major frustration was that the command F key (to repeat a filter I've just run) resets when I switch to a new file. If I'm doing a blur filter on ten files, I can't use command F to quickly repeat my blur on each file, but have to manually choose it.  The program doesn't support basic Mac behaviors like, being able to command+click the title of a document and see its folder location, or option+clicking close to close all windows.  "Paste inside" just does not work, and no amount of updates made it work. What I am trying to do is, paste a larger bitmap image into a selection and have it "paste into" as Photoshop does, pasting into a new layer but constrained inside that box. I use this a lot when making memes and important images for work and not having it was frustrating. The "workspaces" idea was nice, but it only moves my palettes into the pre-set position and doesn't affect the "bar of unforgivable visual complexity" (whatever it's called...the contextual floating bar in at the top that is so overloaded with data it makes my eyes bleed). So I always had the bar showing up over the images I was working with when going from laptop mode to docked mode.  I was not a fan of the "auto scroll" feature which caused my image to zoom endlessly when I tried to draw a box marquee from one side to another. As my cursor approached the edge of the image, everything starts scrolling quickly. What pasteboard in the world moves when you approach one edge? If there's a way to "lock" the pasteboard I couldn't find it.  Working with text was...unique. There is no requirement to "accept" text changes, and I was put off by this. How do you select tools using the keyboard if you've just typed some text but can never "commit" the text changes? You apparently grab your mouse. Speaking of text, if there was an easy to select text spacing (the spacing between text lines) it was needlessly complex. I guess what I was looking for was "space between same styles" in the Paragraph tab...though something this important should be in the Character tab instead, IMO, as it's basically as important as font, font type (bold, etc) and font size and should not be located in some other place. Also, the ability to highlight some text and grab the size selector to show the text live was good, and I could use up/down arrows to move up or down a point size...but I had to press enter after each arrow to see my text size accepted.  Since you can't do some things on the background layer, I often had to copy and paste it into a new layer...which got named Background, instead of something less confusing like Layer 1.  The biggest, biggest frustration was the "beeping" that happened when I selected a tool that was already selected (as if this were an "error" I needed to be warned about). Since my workflow requires that I type M if I want the marquee tool, T if I want the text tool, etc. I turned off all the "cycling" tool options so that there was only tool per keypress, so that I didn't have to look to make sure I had the right marquee selector chosen. But this gave me the error beep in my ears constantly during usage. When I made a bug report about it (below) I was politely told the programmers had turned down my request. I felt that I was violating the "Affinity Photo community culture" by pointing out what was frustrating to me, and this made me feel future bug reports would also be politely declined.  In case you think I've got nothing bad to say about AP, it was great overall, and Inpainting (Contextual fill) is the best I've ever seen. And command+drag to duplicate a layer and drag it was genius. There were just too many minor frustrations for me to keep using the program as my daily driver.
So thanks very much to the creators of Affinity Photo for an amazing tool. I will continue to use it, and hope I won't be viewed as a strange creature by the community (if I am) for thinking that some conventions are better off working the same way as all the other programs I use for 15+ hours a day. I'll keep updating and checking out new versions avidly!

Hello, Affinity Photo community. I moved from Photoshop to AP and enjoyed its new features, while struggling to either re-learn new muscle memory, it was just too hard. Here are the major reasons why I moved to another app (Acorn) as my main image manipulation app over AP:
Command clicking of objects does not select their layer (and, while held, activate the Move tool). This is a Photoshop action that I just couldn't un-learn.  Perhaps the biggest weirdness, the tool I select is for the current document is not "sticky." If I switch to another document, the tool is reset to the tool I was using when I had that document open. This is not standard activity on any Mac program I can think of.  One of the most Mac-like systems going back to 1984 is that you draw a square marquee box, then add to the selection by holding the shift key, or subtract from the selection if you draw more marquee boxes holding the option key. That...doesn't work in AP in a standard way at all.  Having Macros was a good idea, but they are strange and difficult to use. When I recorded a a macro to make a selection, copy the contents of that selection and paste (my goal is to bring the right half of a book that was scanned so both sides will be closer and I can hide the ugly book binding from my image)...the data that is pasted is always the original data from the file I created the macro with. In order words, the clipboard data is saved inside the macro and that data is always pasted into whatever other image I run my script in, not the new data from a new file I'm working with. The effect renders AP useless for automation of any kind.  There is no Applescript support. While I am an expert at using Keyboard Maestro to do UI scripting to accomplish the automation I need, most other users are not. One big reason I switched to Acorn is its robust Applescript support, meaning I can automate just about any process. Yes, I know we're living in an age where codebases are shared across Mac, Windows and iOS and that Applescript is a dinosaur as far as technologies go. But some kind of useful automation is important for a tool like this. Another major frustration was that the command F key (to repeat a filter I've just run) resets when I switch to a new file. If I'm doing a blur filter on ten files, I can't use command F to quickly repeat my blur on each file, but have to manually choose it.  The program doesn't support basic Mac behaviors like, being able to command+click the title of a document and see its folder location, or option+clicking close to close all windows.  "Paste inside" just does not work, and no amount of updates made it work. What I am trying to do is, paste a larger bitmap image into a selection and have it "paste into" as Photoshop does, pasting into a new layer but constrained inside that box. I use this a lot when making memes and important images for work and not having it was frustrating. The "workspaces" idea was nice, but it only moves my palettes into the pre-set position and doesn't affect the "bar of unforgivable visual complexity" (whatever it's called...the contextual floating bar in at the top that is so overloaded with data it makes my eyes bleed). So I always had the bar showing up over the images I was working with when going from laptop mode to docked mode.  I was not a fan of the "auto scroll" feature which caused my image to zoom endlessly when I tried to draw a box marquee from one side to another. As my cursor approached the edge of the image, everything starts scrolling quickly. What pasteboard in the world moves when you approach one edge? If there's a way to "lock" the pasteboard I couldn't find it.  Working with text was...unique. There is no requirement to "accept" text changes, and I was put off by this. How do you select tools using the keyboard if you've just typed some text but can never "commit" the text changes? You apparently grab your mouse. Speaking of text, if there was an easy to select text spacing (the spacing between text lines) it was needlessly complex. I guess what I was looking for was "space between same styles" in the Paragraph tab...though something this important should be in the Character tab instead, IMO, as it's basically as important as font, font type (bold, etc) and font size and should not be located in some other place. Also, the ability to highlight some text and grab the size selector to show the text live was good, and I could use up/down arrows to move up or down a point size...but I had to press enter after each arrow to see my text size accepted.  Since you can't do some things on the background layer, I often had to copy and paste it into a new layer...which got named Background, instead of something less confusing like Layer 1.  The biggest, biggest frustration was the "beeping" that happened when I selected a tool that was already selected (as if this were an "error" I needed to be warned about). Since my workflow requires that I type M if I want the marquee tool, T if I want the text tool, etc. I turned off all the "cycling" tool options so that there was only tool per keypress, so that I didn't have to look to make sure I had the right marquee selector chosen. But this gave me the error beep in my ears constantly during usage. When I made a bug report about it (below) I was politely told the programmers had turned down my request. I felt that I was violating the "Affinity Photo community culture" by pointing out what was frustrating to me, and this made me feel future bug reports would also be politely declined.  In case you think I've got nothing bad to say about AP, it was great overall, and Inpainting (Contextual fill) is the best I've ever seen. And command+drag to duplicate a layer and drag it was genius. There were just too many minor frustrations for me to keep using the program as my daily driver.
So thanks very much to the creators of Affinity Photo for an amazing tool. I will continue to use it, and hope I won't be viewed as a strange creature by the community (if I am) for thinking that some conventions are better off working the same way as all the other programs I use for 15+ hours a day. I'll keep updating and checking out new versions avidly!

Hello, Affinity Photo community. I moved from Photoshop to AP and enjoyed its new features, while struggling to either re-learn new muscle memory, it was just too hard. Here are the major reasons why I moved to another app (Acorn) as my main image manipulation app over AP:
Command clicking of objects does not select their layer (and, while held, activate the Move tool). This is a Photoshop action that I just couldn't un-learn.  Perhaps the biggest weirdness, the tool I select is for the current document is not "sticky." If I switch to another document, the tool is reset to the tool I was using when I had that document open. This is not standard activity on any Mac program I can think of.  One of the most Mac-like systems going back to 1984 is that you draw a square marquee box, then add to the selection by holding the shift key, or subtract from the selection if you draw more marquee boxes holding the option key. That...doesn't work in AP in a standard way at all.  Having Macros was a good idea, but they are strange and difficult to use. When I recorded a a macro to make a selection, copy the contents of that selection and paste (my goal is to bring the right half of a book that was scanned so both sides will be closer and I can hide the ugly book binding from my image)...the data that is pasted is always the original data from the file I created the macro with. In order words, the clipboard data is saved inside the macro and that data is always pasted into whatever other image I run my script in, not the new data from a new file I'm working with. The effect renders AP useless for automation of any kind.  There is no Applescript support. While I am an expert at using Keyboard Maestro to do UI scripting to accomplish the automation I need, most other users are not. One big reason I switched to Acorn is its robust Applescript support, meaning I can automate just about any process. Yes, I know we're living in an age where codebases are shared across Mac, Windows and iOS and that Applescript is a dinosaur as far as technologies go. But some kind of useful automation is important for a tool like this. Another major frustration was that the command F key (to repeat a filter I've just run) resets when I switch to a new file. If I'm doing a blur filter on ten files, I can't use command F to quickly repeat my blur on each file, but have to manually choose it.  The program doesn't support basic Mac behaviors like, being able to command+click the title of a document and see its folder location, or option+clicking close to close all windows.  "Paste inside" just does not work, and no amount of updates made it work. What I am trying to do is, paste a larger bitmap image into a selection and have it "paste into" as Photoshop does, pasting into a new layer but constrained inside that box. I use this a lot when making memes and important images for work and not having it was frustrating. The "workspaces" idea was nice, but it only moves my palettes into the pre-set position and doesn't affect the "bar of unforgivable visual complexity" (whatever it's called...the contextual floating bar in at the top that is so overloaded with data it makes my eyes bleed). So I always had the bar showing up over the images I was working with when going from laptop mode to docked mode.  I was not a fan of the "auto scroll" feature which caused my image to zoom endlessly when I tried to draw a box marquee from one side to another. As my cursor approached the edge of the image, everything starts scrolling quickly. What pasteboard in the world moves when you approach one edge? If there's a way to "lock" the pasteboard I couldn't find it.  Working with text was...unique. There is no requirement to "accept" text changes, and I was put off by this. How do you select tools using the keyboard if you've just typed some text but can never "commit" the text changes? You apparently grab your mouse. Speaking of text, if there was an easy to select text spacing (the spacing between text lines) it was needlessly complex. I guess what I was looking for was "space between same styles" in the Paragraph tab...though something this important should be in the Character tab instead, IMO, as it's basically as important as font, font type (bold, etc) and font size and should not be located in some other place. Also, the ability to highlight some text and grab the size selector to show the text live was good, and I could use up/down arrows to move up or down a point size...but I had to press enter after each arrow to see my text size accepted.  Since you can't do some things on the background layer, I often had to copy and paste it into a new layer...which got named Background, instead of something less confusing like Layer 1.  The biggest, biggest frustration was the "beeping" that happened when I selected a tool that was already selected (as if this were an "error" I needed to be warned about). Since my workflow requires that I type M if I want the marquee tool, T if I want the text tool, etc. I turned off all the "cycling" tool options so that there was only tool per keypress, so that I didn't have to look to make sure I had the right marquee selector chosen. But this gave me the error beep in my ears constantly during usage. When I made a bug report about it (below) I was politely told the programmers had turned down my request. I felt that I was violating the "Affinity Photo community culture" by pointing out what was frustrating to me, and this made me feel future bug reports would also be politely declined.  In case you think I've got nothing bad to say about AP, it was great overall, and Inpainting (Contextual fill) is the best I've ever seen. And command+drag to duplicate a layer and drag it was genius. There were just too many minor frustrations for me to keep using the program as my daily driver.
So thanks very much to the creators of Affinity Photo for an amazing tool. I will continue to use it, and hope I won't be viewed as a strange creature by the community (if I am) for thinking that some conventions are better off working the same way as all the other programs I use for 15+ hours a day. I'll keep updating and checking out new versions avidly!

Hello, Affinity Photo community. I moved from Photoshop to AP and enjoyed its new features, while struggling to either re-learn new muscle memory, it was just too hard. Here are the major reasons why I moved to another app (Acorn) as my main image manipulation app over AP:
Command clicking of objects does not select their layer (and, while held, activate the Move tool). This is a Photoshop action that I just couldn't un-learn.  Perhaps the biggest weirdness, the tool I select is for the current document is not "sticky." If I switch to another document, the tool is reset to the tool I was using when I had that document open. This is not standard activity on any Mac program I can think of.  One of the most Mac-like systems going back to 1984 is that you draw a square marquee box, then add to the selection by holding the shift key, or subtract from the selection if you draw more marquee boxes holding the option key. That...doesn't work in AP in a standard way at all.  Having Macros was a good idea, but they are strange and difficult to use. When I recorded a a macro to make a selection, copy the contents of that selection and paste (my goal is to bring the right half of a book that was scanned so both sides will be closer and I can hide the ugly book binding from my image)...the data that is pasted is always the original data from the file I created the macro with. In order words, the clipboard data is saved inside the macro and that data is always pasted into whatever other image I run my script in, not the new data from a new file I'm working with. The effect renders AP useless for automation of any kind.  There is no Applescript support. While I am an expert at using Keyboard Maestro to do UI scripting to accomplish the automation I need, most other users are not. One big reason I switched to Acorn is its robust Applescript support, meaning I can automate just about any process. Yes, I know we're living in an age where codebases are shared across Mac, Windows and iOS and that Applescript is a dinosaur as far as technologies go. But some kind of useful automation is important for a tool like this. Another major frustration was that the command F key (to repeat a filter I've just run) resets when I switch to a new file. If I'm doing a blur filter on ten files, I can't use command F to quickly repeat my blur on each file, but have to manually choose it.  The program doesn't support basic Mac behaviors like, being able to command+click the title of a document and see its folder location, or option+clicking close to close all windows.  "Paste inside" just does not work, and no amount of updates made it work. What I am trying to do is, paste a larger bitmap image into a selection and have it "paste into" as Photoshop does, pasting into a new layer but constrained inside that box. I use this a lot when making memes and important images for work and not having it was frustrating. The "workspaces" idea was nice, but it only moves my palettes into the pre-set position and doesn't affect the "bar of unforgivable visual complexity" (whatever it's called...the contextual floating bar in at the top that is so overloaded with data it makes my eyes bleed). So I always had the bar showing up over the images I was working with when going from laptop mode to docked mode.  I was not a fan of the "auto scroll" feature which caused my image to zoom endlessly when I tried to draw a box marquee from one side to another. As my cursor approached the edge of the image, everything starts scrolling quickly. What pasteboard in the world moves when you approach one edge? If there's a way to "lock" the pasteboard I couldn't find it.  Working with text was...unique. There is no requirement to "accept" text changes, and I was put off by this. How do you select tools using the keyboard if you've just typed some text but can never "commit" the text changes? You apparently grab your mouse. Speaking of text, if there was an easy to select text spacing (the spacing between text lines) it was needlessly complex. I guess what I was looking for was "space between same styles" in the Paragraph tab...though something this important should be in the Character tab instead, IMO, as it's basically as important as font, font type (bold, etc) and font size and should not be located in some other place. Also, the ability to highlight some text and grab the size selector to show the text live was good, and I could use up/down arrows to move up or down a point size...but I had to press enter after each arrow to see my text size accepted.  Since you can't do some things on the background layer, I often had to copy and paste it into a new layer...which got named Background, instead of something less confusing like Layer 1.  The biggest, biggest frustration was the "beeping" that happened when I selected a tool that was already selected (as if this were an "error" I needed to be warned about). Since my workflow requires that I type M if I want the marquee tool, T if I want the text tool, etc. I turned off all the "cycling" tool options so that there was only tool per keypress, so that I didn't have to look to make sure I had the right marquee selector chosen. But this gave me the error beep in my ears constantly during usage. When I made a bug report about it (below) I was politely told the programmers had turned down my request. I felt that I was violating the "Affinity Photo community culture" by pointing out what was frustrating to me, and this made me feel future bug reports would also be politely declined.  In case you think I've got nothing bad to say about AP, it was great overall, and Inpainting (Contextual fill) is the best I've ever seen. And command+drag to duplicate a layer and drag it was genius. There were just too many minor frustrations for me to keep using the program as my daily driver.
So thanks very much to the creators of Affinity Photo for an amazing tool. I will continue to use it, and hope I won't be viewed as a strange creature by the community (if I am) for thinking that some conventions are better off working the same way as all the other programs I use for 15+ hours a day. I'll keep updating and checking out new versions avidly!

Thanks @gunda that works well enough! 
@GarryP Sorry my request was vague. Here's a good example: I wanted to draw a circle to highlight something in another bug report. There is no "stroke selection" command but using Gunda's Outline basically did the same thing. May I suggest that the default outline of 0 pts is useless to users, and the default should probably be 1? I hope you consider adding Stroke in the future. 

@gunda Thanks, this worked as a good enough workaround for me

Speaking as another new user who went looking for this, the other posters who suggested outline are correct for a basic stroke:
1. make your selection.
2. from the select menu, choose the second to bottom option, outline.
3. select a non-zero radius to set the stroke thickness, and select inside, outside or centre, as you would in Photoshop edit | stroke
4.  choose the flood fill tool and choose your colour from the swatches tab
5.  Click inside the selection.  You may need to create a pixel layer if you don't have one already selected or if you want the stroke on a separate layer.  If the stroke is very narrow, you may need to zoom-in in order to use the flood fill tool.
Certainly do-able, but an edit | stroke command would be more efficient and also useful to ease the transition from PS.

Thanks! Unfortunately...selecting the copy menu item leads to a repeatable crash on my M1 Macbook with Mac OS 11.1. I'll open a bug report and attach the crash report.

Using Affinity Photo 1.8.6 on a fully updated Intel iMac running Mac OS 10.15.7 (19H15), I have the following major frustration, when coming from Photoshop:
One of the "holy grails" of using Photoshop is that you can switch to "move mode" allowing you to select layers and move stuff around freely just by holding the command key on a Mac (control key on a PC). Sadly this doesn't seem to work on Affinity Photo, or work reliably, and I am forced to hit V or select the Move tool manually. Considering the move tool is mostly used as a "click to select other layers" tool, and considering that I do this perhaps more than any other thing when working with an image, we'd really like to get "command + click = select layer and move always" to become a thing in AP.
In. my example, I have various layers and am moving them around, organizing them into whatever final layout I need. I need to easily select the layer without de-selecting the tool I'm using (brush, eraser, whatever). But I have to type V and move into Move mode before I can do these selections. This is one of the biggest frustrations coming from Photoshop. 
(Yes, I know AP is not Photoshop and I shouldn't want it to be, but I've got 30+ years of muscle memory using Photoshop and it will be to the benefit of Affinity Photo if more users can easily move over and work in the way they're accustomed.)

Command-T is of not much use as long as free transform is not available... (though perspective tool can substitute somewhat)
Text tool has never been a trouble for me (but then I find PS text tool clumsy too)
CMD-click always makes pixel selection out of a layer, regardless the tool. No trouble for me...
True, PS way is neater. Affinity does this with ALT+SHIFT+CMD+N which is quite a collection of keys. On the other hand PS creates background layer and pastes clipboard as a new layer which is not neat. (Not to mention I get often clipboard contents pasted as smart object when contents was just plain pixels..)
I find Affinity to be much worse in this regard.
No there is no such thing. I wish devs would change behaviour that selection would transform to crop selection when changing tool to crop tool. Thus cropping would be simple press C press enter and it would be possible to fine tune crop selection if needed.
No it does not. Inactive panels obscure active panels and save/open dialogs which should never happen. I though can close the useless application window with CMD-W.
I still tend to use PS for simple destructive fixes and do AP only for complicated compositing.