David Edge

When I select the Rounded Rectangle tool, Designer draws a rectangle. Hitting the node tool reveals no red dot. The clue is that the help text at the screen bottom also says "Drag to create a new rectangle shape" If I use a modifier like cmd or option it then starts behaving itself and when I then go back to use the tool unmodified, I get rounded rectangles. Which would be all right, but the rectangle tool now produces rounded rectangles. New with v2, but which release I'm not sure. Fully up-to-date software and OS on an M1 MacBook Air.

Thanks everyone Yes, the top rotate handle is the answer d.

I think those are instructions for rotating the canvas. I want to rotate an object - square, circle. I know how to do it, it's just that as soon as I click the rotate handle it turns into a resize handle.

I select the object in Designer, move the pointer until I get a rotate handle, press the trackpad and - BOOFT! - I have a resize handle. Now I'm old and a bit blind, but can't be the only person for whom this is a problem. I've tried turning down the trackpad gain and it doesn't help. Is there an accessible way of rotating an object? FWIW I'm using a MacBook Air M1 and the latest versions of Affinity and MacOS.

What are you trying to achieve? Changing the dpi doesn't downsample anything. To downsample you need to resize an image, not change the nominal dpi.

Well my system crashes when I try to print with every version of MacOS and Affinity Designer / Photographer / Publisher since February, maybe earlier. It's a 2019 iMac with 72GB RAM and it does it even with a newly-rasterised image. Preview and Capture One print fine. It's an Epson 3880. The OS, drivers and Affinity are kept up to the latest non-beta release.

+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...

Quick +1 for emoji support. I use a lot of both tables and emojis in designing forms so have abandoned Affinity which is poor at both (and for that matter still struggles with printing) for Apple Numbers which excels at all those things. Emojis are not just smileys - and indeed never were. They are more-or-less universal colour symbols.

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.

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?