David Edge

+1 please - in my case I simply want to roughen the outline of text so simulate a typewriter. I was more than a little surprised that having converted the text to curves that I couldn't roughen the vectors. Maybe playing around with some sort of brush effect on the path will help, but currently in a hurry...

Vielen Dank, Joachim Garry, ah, yes, it's frame text. I just need this for block diagrams and room layouts, so what I was doing was probably near enough, but the 'constraints' tip helps enormously

All of the Affinity apps - I just glide between them. I know I won't get this in Photo persona; but will work in Designer or Publisher whichever will do it. And I just want a line border, solid or dashed If there's an easy way that does border but not fill that's fine. If the easy method does a fill as well that's a bonus.

While I've been using Affinity for years I've never found out how to add a border to a box containing text without creating a rectangle, a frame text, matching sizes and grouping them. It's a fuiter. Is there a direct method?

That's about it really! I export 46 Mpixel TIFFs out of Capture One, a dozen folders and 10-50 images per folders and would like to leave Capture One to stack them and just save the stacks overnight. Zerene Stacker does this for me for focus stacks, but here I'm looking for median stacking. Nothing sophisticated, I'd be happy with a .afphoto with the same name as the first stacked file in the source directory. Would anyone else find that useful?

Ah! Thanks Walt. Export persona isn't something I need so I'll see if anyone else points out a problem and change over. ta d.

I've told my Mac to open all Affinity files in Publisher so I can use studio link. That means every time I open a document with artboards - ie nearly all of them - it threatens to convert them to spreads. Is there any downside to letting it just do this? And if so perhaps being able to tell AP to to ask every time would be a plan.

Somebody - re the inadvertent turning off of undo - is going to be buying the most ENORMOUS round of drinks tonight :)

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.