RichardMH

8gb of RAM isn't a lot. Maybe adjust the RAM usage limit in settings.

AP has Resize Document in the Document menu. Its old school, non AI. You probably need to experiment with the Resample options to see what suits. Topaz Gigapixel AI is good. Might be worth running the free trial. Gigapixel at 4X and 400%.

What Develop Assistant settings do you have? Do you apply a tone curve? Different programs apply different processing when you load an image and jpg's have processing applied to them. Maybe post a raw file for us to look at?

XnView is a popular viewer and sees .afphoto files.

It will be saved as a .afphoto file. Click on Open Recent and it should be there. I don't have a Mac so don't know if Photos.app can see .afphoto files. When you hit Save it should give you a window where you can choose where to save it. If you want a tiff or jpeg use Export. Workflow depends on how you've set things up in your file system.

A few things you can try. First make sure your graphics driver is up to date. If you hold control when you start up Photo you get to a screen where you can clear user defaults. If that doesn't help do it again and disable hardware acceleration.

Bump. I was at a camera club meeting where they were toying with making content credentials compulsory for competitions. This might be only a small part of Affinity's market but those of us using it won't be amused if have to get Adobe for competitions.

I have a pair of glasses I only use for the computer. Readers with a fairly high magnification, suggested by my optometrist. And I have a biggish screen, 24". I'm 69.

Does Nik run standalone?

Probably help them if you can post some crash reports

Mac or Windows? I run older version of Nik OK on a Windows PC.

Rather than complicate things more I'll just say its good you have found a workable solution. If you use the Develop Persona for raw files there is a RGB curve there and you can set tones there. I think some of us were trying to make your levels approach work.

In the olden days we had Blend Options which are like the luminosity masks.

We also have Live Luminosity Range Masks that do what you are trying to do but with more control.

Try dragging a copy of the image to the layer. But drag it over the layer name, not the thumbnail.

Note that using blend modes with the gradient map gives a lot of flexibility. Pretty common to use Soft Light.

Maybe try the flood select tool on the background colour. Tick contiguous so iot doesn't get the face. It has Add and Subtract to tidy up, plus Refine as usual. A really quick try.

Might help to post the image or something similar. With tricky masks some of us just do stuff until it looks right. (And live in hope that Photo will get AI masks)

What sort of mask are you using? Luminosity? And are you using Refine Mask?

Photo doesn't do this well. DxO View Point plug in is probably what you want. Its not cheap though. It has a free trial. I use Capture One a bit and it has some keystoning etc that's a bit better than Photo. PS There are lense corrections in the Photo Develop Persona that may also help.

If you hold down control when you click on the icon to open it, does it go to the reset menu? Other thing to try is to disable hardware acceleration

What can sometimes help is to blur then sharpen the image. The Liquify Persona can help straighten things.

They should. They monitor the forum. Think its still the weekend where they are so you might have to wait a bit.

Best thing to do is post a crash report.

The last big update to V2 was mainly under the hood things with the promise that would enable new features. So we wait and see. Scripting is being actively developed.