David Edge

Ah sorry Carl - I hadn't seen that you had attached a sample, that might very well be the answer for bulk editing and the book version, with the vector crop for the awkward ones or work on the wall. Bingo! d.

Yes, I agree that vector plus blur is quicker than messing about with selections when there's little contrast between object and background. You can come and see the final result from 6 March at The Small Print Company in Derby. Re Carl's suggestion, I'll give it a go although I note in the sample image the young lady is standing in front of a brick wall, my backgrounds are a bit more challenging. Thanks both d.

OK, I found this in a forum related to "the other lot" The term you are looking for is a "difference mask". Basically you align the two layers, set one to difference, and use the result to create a mask (you will have to tweak contrast, add some blur, etc.). However, it is a very bad method for masking. You will get quite crap/inaccurate results from doing it I'm afraid (image noise, shadows/etc. from the object, some pixels on the object being too similar to pixels in the original background, etc). Could be sufficient for just a garbage matte or just locating differences. This type of masking you typically only see in webcam applications where it tries to remove the background in realtime (quality not important, and works with any background as long as it's different enough from the object). I was thinking "difference" and missing the "mask" bit. So that would do what I was imagining, but in the view of the poster, not very well. And of course it will work in Affinity too.

The Gaussian blur's a good tip thanks. Vector outlines may not be the answer in the context of the project which involves a kilometre of high street and multiple remixes of each building tho'. Is anybody aware of a computational approach? Even using non-Serif software, shudder. d.

Well the version with nobody in it was produced by median stacking lots of images. So I now wish to subtract the background and just have the couple. Lots of alpha, two little people. (FWIW the building background will be replaced by a cyanotype and the people superimposed on clear acetate.)

Apols if it wasn't clear. See the attached example. I want to cut out the walking couple by subtracting the buildings by some method. There will be hundreds to do so I'm looking for a straightforward method although some manual retouching will be needed.

I'd like to mask / select a foreground object by blending a photo of the scene without the object and one with the object present. It seemed intuitively clear that some sort of blend mode like difference would do this, but difference doesn't give priority to the foreground object so you get a cocktail of the foreground object and what's behind it. Any bright ideas chaps? d.

Here you go Callum https://we.tl/t-ZK1J8QvKDx Your own uploader sat for two hours doing nothing so here it is via WeTransfer. cheers

My publisher files are in a folder called iCloud Drive > Affinity Publisher Beta I know this because I can find the tagged ones by tag and I can also open the folder by using "Show in Enclosing Folder". However unlike Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo the folder doesn't appear in iCloud Drive. I'd really like an Affinity Publisher folder and for it to be visible as my file management revolves around tags and iCloud Drive rather than folders. I uninstalled Publisher and reinstalled on my previous iMac to no effect. Now on a 2019 iMac running Catalina. Happy to play with Terminal to fix it.

I have Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo folders in Finder, but nothing any more for Publisher My files in this folder show up in searches by tag and I can reveal files in this folder by using Show in Enclosing Folder. But they don't appear in iCloud in finder. a search using terminal gives (extract) drwxr-xr-x 4 davidedge staff 128 17 Jun 07:27 iCloud~com~seriflabs~affinityphoto drwxr-xr-x 5 davidedge staff 160 4 Oct 12:42 iCloud~com~seriflabs~affinitypublisher drwxr-xr-x@ 3 davidedge staff 96 17 Jun 06:21 iCloud~com~seriflabs~affinitypublisher~beta I'm running Catalina and have a 2019 iMac Any ideas, UNIX gurus?

Hi Sean It might do, but almost everything I print is on a different size paper, aspect and scaling so easiest just to set as required. And now moved on to tearing my hair out with my imposition software! thanks d.

Thanks Sean I wonder if the following pieces of misbehaviour in printing have the same root cause: Orientation - Automatic - it gets this wrong. But if you go in and change it to automatic - ie just activate the control, it gets it right. Scale 100% - it gets this wrong, but it's fine if you activate the control and set it to 100% manually It's a pesky thing because you can't guess from looking at the screen what's going wrong. cheers d.

Hallo Hangman Apologies for not getting back to you earlier. The problem arises because of a couple things; all of the other problems stem I think from these: 1 - it always attempts to print the whole of a multi-artboard document - Affinity have confirmed this is a problem in a separate thread. You don't seem to have this problem, so it must be some other aspect pf my setup. Probably stemming from this: 2 - Orientation - Automatic - it gets this wrong. But if you go in and change it to automatic - ie just activate the control, it gets it right. 3 - Scale 100% - it gets this wrong, but it's fine if you activate the corneal and set it back to 100% So thanks for your offer o help; but it does seem that there is something that Affinity have now got onto best regards, David

Thanks Hangman Some of the problems are because I'm using dartboards and in some cases it will simply not allow me to print a single artboard. Hence even when you select Print selection or Print Artboard X it just reverts to print whole document and hence the red overlay because the whole project is bigger than A3. So the workaround is: - save the document, close and reopen - you can probably now select a single artboard - overtype the displayed 100% scale with 100% - set the document model to tiled not single That now does what it used to do. The uploaded file is a TIFF with Affinity layers for compatibility with my DAM (Capture One). Can't see a repeat upload being any more successfully. d.

Further investigation reveals that if I overtype the "100%" scaling default with "100%" it then does scale to 100%. However the image is now printed top left on the sheet instead of being centred as it was formerly, and I also need to fiddle with margins. Is there a way to centre it automatically?