KenDavis

How to remove or change the background in Affinity Photo with refine the selection. 
 

I'm interested in this too. Seems like a lot of effort has been put into background removal lately. Recent iPhone "pro" models even have a lidar scanner to collect depth information, primarily for background blurring and automatic dodge-and-burn shading or something. A bunch of "aWeSoMe AI" type services have popped up trying to do this too.
The most sophisticated services even charge quite a bit of money for just this https://www.remove.bg/pricing
Fotor seems to have problems with "complex" backgrounds (where the subject and background are too similar in color, or the subject has wispy thin hair etc) even though it's another sUpEr AI type service.
I'm also curious what the difference is in Affinity Photo between the background erase tool and the selection brush because while the background erase tool seems to work pretty well, sometimes you just want a mask not a destructive pixel layer edit.
By buying the three "flagship" Topaz applications I seem to have gotten a license for Topaz Mask AI (I can't figure out what's up with their licensing right now, they seem a little disorganized as to creating lots of apps and trying to sell them one-off without really explaining what they're thinking in licensing terms) but Mask AI seems a bit broken on my system at the moment.

In Apple's Preview app and in Keynote app you can remove background with a click or click and drag like instantly. Recently a friend show me how he removes a background with Pixelmator Pro, literally one click and everything around the object is gone. Knowing that Afinity Photo 2 is a powerful image editor and is marketing for the Pros, I need to know if there's a similar way to extract an object or delete a background with it. In the latest iOS update, I can touch an image on any photo on the iPad and copy just the person without the background instantly. That's how I'm doing as part of the workflow with Affinity Photo 2 on iPad, but today I was trying to do a fast edit on a picture and didn't find a way to achieve this. I literally Airdrop the pic to the iPad and copy the image with one touch and paste it on Affinity Photo, but it has to be a faster way on the desktop version, right? Well I learned you can do the same thing using certain apps on macOS like Preview and Photos and so on... Why I can't find a way to do it inside Affinity Photo? Pixelmator is using the Apple's API, obviously! Am I doing something wrong? Is because Affinity runs in Windows too and can't take advantage of macOS capabilities? Any idea of how to remove a background with a click or click and drag will be appreciated.
Video:
https://d.pr/v/KF44b1

Instead of removing a strip, try the Rectangular Marquee Tool to select an area including one of them, duplicate the selection and use the Move Tool to move it over.

How about not cutting out the middle, but copying a desired half of the image onto a separate layer and moving this towards the other half as wanted, then reduce the canvas width accordingly.

I think you are probably doing the easiest method.
Selecting a strip and deleting it will not make the image close that space, you would still have to do that manually. If the earrings are generally in the same place you could make a macro to automate the process, although the macro facility is a bit limited in it capabilities, it could probably reduce the amount of keystrokes and mouse clicks.
https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/pages/Macros_Batch/macros.html