RichardMH

It will help them if you can find a crash report

FWIW Photo 2 with develop assistant settings all take no action and some editing. I use ROM RGB colour space and its a wide gamut monitor. Remember in camera jpegs have some processing so may take some playing around to match them.

One option is to use the free Capture one Express for Fujifilm to do the raw conversion and send a tiff to photo. Iridient X Transformer is another option but its not free. I've used Capture One Express for Sony quite a lot in this way as it handles highlights better than Photo.

Does unchecking Matte edges help?

A common cause of instability is related to the GPU. Are your drivers up to date? Try turning off hardware acceleration Edit->Preferences->Performance. I find V2 to be much more stable than V1.

I've been in touch with Topaz support and they say its a known problem with 3.7.0 that they hope to have fixed in 3.7.1. They suggest using tiffs. For me its not a problem with Photo AI.

I still have this problem. Topaz haven't updated De Noise AI for some time. DxO Photolab and 3D LUT Creator don't like them either so I don't think its a APh problem. Do you want a file sent to the above link?

What Walt Farrell said. If I send an image as an embedded or linked layer the Nik plug ins are greyed out until I rasterize the layer. Its OK if I send a pixel layer.

It's a known problem. Do you have a few images open?

Photo is much more a Photoshop replacement than Lightroom. And as you've noted it's highlight recovery is not good. I use another app for the raw conversion. Xnview is popular to manage images and can be set up to send them to Photo. I use FastRawViewer to cull images. And I run the Topaz and Nik plugins from Photo.

If you literally mean you can't find it, View->Customise Tools shows all the tools and you can drag it to the tool bar. Otherwise a screen shot of what you are seeing would help.

Edit->Preferences->User Interface->Background Grey Level should do what you want.

They have sales from time to time. Got mine at the black friday sales. They also throw in an older version of photolab essentials which is a good raw convertor and has some DAM functionality.

I wonder if this is due to you running an older version of Nik. Nik collection 5 is OK for me. Also there is a fairly convoluted procedure for the Nik plugins. You need a custom plug in folder. You must have set it up for V1 so maybe you are pointing Photo 2 at the wrong directories. I have mine on my D drive. The sub directories contain the plugins. https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/articles/5091760579869-How-do-I-install-Nik-Collection-for-use-with-Affinity-Photo-

Other things to try. In Windows, Settings->System->Display->Graphics, make sure Photo.exe etc is set to high performance. In Windows Settings->Apps->Installed Apps->Affinity Photo 2 (etc) Advanced Options, scroll down to Reset and try Repair. Then if that doesn't work, maybe Reset (after saving assets etc)

Only thing you don't seem to have is backup. I run a 4Tb external drive and back up my working directory at 1 am every morning. Use SyncBackFree. Update SyncBackFree (2brightsparks.com)

Might be worth using Task Manager and/or Resource Monitor to see if anything odd is happening with memory. What you describe sounds like memory issues but you shouldn't get that with 32 Gb.

HSL works properly for me. Windows 11.

Also confirm this. Windows 11. First image lost adjustments when several loaded. The rest were OK.

Put this through Topaz De Noise then Frequency Separation back in Photo. Turned up the exposure on the Low Frequency layer and adjusted the levels on the High frequency layer. Then a bit of fiddling with HSL and threshold.

Rule of thirds grid is also in the crop tool.

Have you tried clearing user data? Hold control when you start it up (I think a mac is the same as windows for this) . Never know, you might get lucky. Easier than uninstalling and re installing.

Its probably something most of us don't use. There are instructions on the Focus Magic web site. Don't those work? Have you tried the usual procedure through Preferences?

Its not that hard a mask with the Selection brush then Refine. I suggest you try HSL and use the color picker to select the blue and desaturate it a bit. Then mask that as there's bits of blue on the sheep.

Is this still an issue? Might need some more details to understand what you are doing. A video would be good, or at least a few screen shots. Are you on Windows?