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John
Thanks to your help I am now trialling Topaz Infocus for a month. It seems to do something additional to and different from my normal High Pass sharpening in Affinity Photo. It also seems to do some of the same kind of sharpening and detail enhancement
I am still trying to understand the best adjustment to workflow.It would seem to be sensible to do the following:
1 Develop RAW as normal in AP
2 Use Topaz Infocus for deconvolution sharpening and very modest sharpening and detail enhancement
3 Finish off at end of layer process with very gentle High pass sharpening if more required.
Does this make sense?

John
Thanks this very speedy response. I visited Cambridge in Colour and read your post there. Astra is PC only and I have a Mac but I have downloaded RAW Therapee and will have a look at that. Thanks for pointing me in the right direction.
Glad you like the Cheetah. I wasn't pleased to be told the image needed improvement but if it can I will have a go.
Best wishes

First congratulations on the standard of the video tutorials.
 
As a former PS CS4 and CS6 user, I was happy until Adobe introduced their CC rental model and I vowed late in 2014 to start migrating away from PS if I could.  I was therefore an enthusiastic AP beta tester from early 2015 and purchased on launch.
 
The important point is that I am already a far more skilful AP user(around masks, blend modes, layers, sharpening to name but four) than I was a PS user. There is an appallingly steep learning curve in PS but AP is much more focussed, accessible and easier to learn. Part of this is due to it being aimed squarely at Photographers only and partly because your videos are a great help to get going.
 
I measure success in terms of the quality of images I have produced and been successful with in my local club competitions and salon "acceptances"and 2015 has been a lot better than 2014. I attribute some good part of this to AP and the ease of learning which your tutorials have given.
 
I have to remain with Adobe until end November 2015 but can't wait to cancel my subscription. I haven't saved a .psd file for three months now.
 
No gripes,
 
Thanks a million!

First congratulations on the standard of the video tutorials.
 
As a former PS CS4 and CS6 user, I was happy until Adobe introduced their CC rental model and I vowed late in 2014 to start migrating away from PS if I could.  I was therefore an enthusiastic AP beta tester from early 2015 and purchased on launch.
 
The important point is that I am already a far more skilful AP user(around masks, blend modes, layers, sharpening to name but four) than I was a PS user. There is an appallingly steep learning curve in PS but AP is much more focussed, accessible and easier to learn. Part of this is due to it being aimed squarely at Photographers only and partly because your videos are a great help to get going.
 
I measure success in terms of the quality of images I have produced and been successful with in my local club competitions and salon "acceptances"and 2015 has been a lot better than 2014. I attribute some good part of this to AP and the ease of learning which your tutorials have given.
 
I have to remain with Adobe until end November 2015 but can't wait to cancel my subscription. I haven't saved a .psd file for three months now.
 
No gripes,
 
Thanks a million!

First congratulations on the standard of the video tutorials.
 
As a former PS CS4 and CS6 user, I was happy until Adobe introduced their CC rental model and I vowed late in 2014 to start migrating away from PS if I could.  I was therefore an enthusiastic AP beta tester from early 2015 and purchased on launch.
 
The important point is that I am already a far more skilful AP user(around masks, blend modes, layers, sharpening to name but four) than I was a PS user. There is an appallingly steep learning curve in PS but AP is much more focussed, accessible and easier to learn. Part of this is due to it being aimed squarely at Photographers only and partly because your videos are a great help to get going.
 
I measure success in terms of the quality of images I have produced and been successful with in my local club competitions and salon "acceptances"and 2015 has been a lot better than 2014. I attribute some good part of this to AP and the ease of learning which your tutorials have given.
 
I have to remain with Adobe until end November 2015 but can't wait to cancel my subscription. I haven't saved a .psd file for three months now.
 
No gripes,
 
Thanks a million!

This method works as I mentioned above but only for small areas of halo. it's limitation is the need to constantly change colours since even a seemingly uniform blue sky exhibits a subtle gradient towards/away from the light source.
 
I have found a better solution on the internet called "Removing halos using Photoshop" which is a YouTube clip by Dan Hughes. This method merely requires making a simple Lasso selection of the halo plus surrounding area, then CMD J to put selection on a new layer, then blend mode to Darker Colour, then Black to foreground colour, then V to select Move tool, then use arrow keys to move whole selection a few pixels.
This completely removes the halo and can cope with large lengths of halo (one side of mountain for example). Obviously the other side of the mountain has to be a separate selection.
 
 
Hope this helps others facing the same problem
 
Best wishes
 
Bail

Coranda,
 
Success! Brilliant advice. I can now enter competitions starting in just over a month without using Photoshop.
Your instructions are now printed out and ready for use on my desk.
Thanks again,
 
Bail

Just a heartfelt thank you to Paul Bravery and MelG for their patient help in enabling me  at last to resize images correctly. Much appreciated.
 
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Paul,
 
Thank you for your help but I am still unable to achieve the results I need. Sorry to be dim  :)
 
I am happy with adding a pixel layer and filling with black but can't succeed in getting 1400 pixels wide by 1050 high images for both Landscape and Portrait.
 
Incidentally, I don't use keyboard shortcuts which is why I framed my original request in menu commands from Photoshop. By working backwards from Photoshop menu commands I do see you are of course right that the same keyboard shortcuts in Photoshop open the Resize Document and Resize Canvas dialogue boxes but finding them wasn't my problem.
 
What I want to know is the precise order of every step needed to achieve what I want. Each step means really which sizes to enter in each dialogue box for both formats of image as well as use of the lock. Please can you try again?
 
Once again apologies but this is a real showstopper presumably because I am just not appreciating something you take for granted?
 
Thanks in advance
 
Bail
 
For help, I am attaching a Landscape and a Portrait example of what I want
 

 
 
 

Affinity Photo is excellent ( the InPainting brush is better than excellent) and I am close to leaving Photoshop CC in November when my contract expires.
 
One thing I am having trouble with in Affinity is resizing images. For my photo society I need to end up with images 1400 wide and 1050 pixels high, both landscape and portrait format. I have tried time after time to achieve this in Affinity. Clearly I am being slow here but really need help!
 
In Photoshop current easy procedure is:
 
Landscape: Image:            Image Size, Check the resample and constrain boxes and reduce image width to 1400 pixels.
 
                                           Image, Canvas Size, uncheck relative box, select the canvas colour to black, and set the height to 1050 pixels
 
 
Portrait Image:                   Image, Image size, Check the resample and constrain proportions boxes and reduce the image height to 1050 pixels
 
                                           Image, Canvas size, uncheck the Relative box, select the canvas colour to black, and set the width to 1400 pixels
 
 
I would be very grateful if someone could provide me with the steps I need to do in Affinity Photo to replicate this end result?                
 
 
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