Emerald

Well thank you for the welcome Allan but I suspect you have just confirmed my fears. Its all very well to ask one question if that's all you have but every project has hundreds of steps and there are hundreds of projects. You can't possibly do that by Forum. For example I tried again. Loaded a picture and thought of something "simple". Colour again. Lets change the colour of the car from red to blue (I assume that's possible). Where do you start? Look up "Changing object colour" in Help and a range of topics with "Colour" included appear. OK select the first "Selecting colour". It mentioned panels, swatches, context toolbars and suggested I select a foreground or background swatch at the top left of the panel. Yeah, right! I mean really!! Its hard enough trying to teach yourself the technicalities without even being able to find the "buttons" they're talking about! Take this from Help: To use the Colour Picker: Drag the Colour Picker icon to the colour you want to sample. Click the swatch selector you want to apply the colour to. Click the swatch next to the Colour Picker to apply the colour. I searched help for colour picker icon and didn't get anything. Swatches wasn't any better apart from descriptions. Nor could I put the instructions in context with an action. I'm sounding really stupid here and its embarrassing but remember I admitted to being a NOVICE/NEWBIE and you assured me this is not an issue. As I can't see myself spending 90% of my time on the forum asking step after step AND not getting answers in Help that actually tell you HOW to do it AND not having a manual AND not receiving any links from an experienced user to sites that will help, I remain bitterly disappointed and resigned to the conclusion this is not friendly for users who aren't at least user-friendly with mid level photo editing. Please prove me wrong but unfortunately I suspect what I am asking for in directions is too much. Cant get a refund can I? Peter

I've been waiting for a Mac Photoshop equivalent for a while and homed in on this when I saw it last night. The review looked excellent so I downloaded it. I am however fearing that I have bitten off too much. The truth is I am a TOTAL novice; my editing prowess being limited to the usual basics of cropping, contrast, brightness etc as you find in Photos. So I've watched numerous tutorial videos which are of course very interesting but I get the overwhelming impression that a moderate knowledge of editing as one may have learnt using programs such as Photoshop is a PREREQUISITE to using this? Or maybe I'm just thick? LOL. My usual learning style is to read the manual first. I gather there isn't one. I then migrate to help which didn't help thicko here because it tells you what to do but not necessarily how. In Mac speak a help command directing you to Paste for example usually shows you the Edit menu and where the Paste is located. In the absence of a manual I selected a topic at random namely adding some text to a photo (successfully) and then spent the next hour (unsuccessfully) trying to change the colour from default black to anything else. Easy in Pages or Word but totally eludes me in Affinity. Help didn't help nor did tutorials nor did a Forum search. So in short is there a section a Basics that slowly and simply defines each section of the palate/layout in "first time user" terms? Is there a manual? Are there some references you can link NOVICES to that will teach them the software slowly and simply from the beginning (like a child or an old twit like me) or have I jumped the gun and simply purchased something that a newbie will struggle to understand? Incidentally the demonstrations of what this is cable of are very, very impressive. I hope i can use it. Well done!