stuck

Hate to be picky but I think what you actually mean there is that DxO products, like PhotoLab are good. DxO the company is not that good.

Why use an XP machine? I've got CS2 on my Win 10 box.

See here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/164377-information-about-the-legacy-plus-range/

Anybody remember FRACTINT? An amazing fractal generator for MS-DOS. I used to run it on a PC with a 10MHz Intel 80286 CPU, no maths co-processor, 1 MB RAM and two 1.44 MB floppy disc drives (i.e. no HDD). Even on that lowly device it would generate a Mandelbrot set in less than a minute. It last received any TLC in 2000 but you can still get it, from here: https://www.fractint.org/

A quick search for the specs of the OP's monitor suggests it is a basic model, with only a TN not and IPS panel. Given that it seems unlikely that it could handle the Adobe RGB colour space.

When you click 'Export', at the bottom of Affinity's Export Settings dialog the next thing that happens is that Affinity displays a regular File | Save dialog. Make sure you take note of what folder it is pointing at. Having done that, open Explorer and browse to that folder to find your file. Looking at your screen shot, both _MG_2623 and _MG_2623 (small) have been saved to: D:\Affinity Photo If your files are not in that folder, I've no idea where they are.

Look in the layers panel and ensure you have selected a pixel layer and not an adjustment layer or a mask before you try to switch to the Develop Persona.

Yes! Indeed, deep saturated colours are tricky. But I'm only a casual amateur, printing for my own pleasure. I don't claim that my prints are 'gallery ready'. Yup, been there, done that, got the t-shirt 😁 Only yesterday I printed a shot of some golden autumn leaves that does just that.

Forgot to add... If I have converted my .afphoto file to sRGB and then exported a sRGB JPEG, I don't resave the .afphoto file, because the .afphoto file is the master version of the finalised image.

My workflow is similar to yours except I'm still on DxO PL5 (still thinking about upgrading to PL7). Thus my RAW files are converted in PL5 / Adobe RGB and exported to TIFF with Adobe RGB and opened in Affinity Photo 2 working in Adobe RGB. Meanwhile my Dell monitor is hardware calibrate to its 'native' gamut, which if the X-Rite software is to be believed is a little bigger than Adobe RGB thus (I think) I can see all the colours that I've got in my TIFF. Once I've finalised an image I'll save it as a .afphoto file. If I'm going to print I'll usually do that direct from Photo 2 and what I get out of the printer is a good (enough for me) match to what I see on screen. Sometimes though I want greater control over the placing of an image on the paper so I export another TIFF with Adobe RGB and then open that new TIFF in an ancient version of PhotoShop with Adobe RGB as its working space and print from there. Again, what comes out the printer is acceptable. If I want to share an image then, starting from the finalised .afphoto file in Photo 2, I convert it to sRGB using Relative Colourimetric intent with black point compression. I rarely see any colour shifts as a result of that conversion. After the conversion, I'll export a JPEG with an embedded sRGB profile.

I'm not sure what you mean by this because DxO PhotoLab does not use ProPhoto as it's working colour space. It only offers the choice of either: 'legacy', which means Adobe RGB or: 'DxO Wide Gamut', which is a propriety colour space invented by DxO and which is close to, but not identical to, Rec. 2020 (see the last paragraph on the third link below) Once you have finalised your edits and are ready to export your file then PL does offer a variety of profiles, including ProPhoto thus I do understand your next step: There is more on DxO's Wide Gamut colour space here: https://support.dxo.com/hc/en-us/articles/6754299074077-What-color-space-does-DxO-PhotoLab-use- https://www.dxo.com/technology/wide-gamut/ https://www.dxo.com/news/white-paper-wide-gamut/

Can you not install the free trial?

@Digbydo 2 to get Walt's attention you need to precede his username with an @ sign, like this, @walt.farrell

Did you look at Hugin? It's free and has a Mac version: https://hugin.sourceforge.io/download/

On my Win 11 laptop I can increase the font size of the help file using a standard two finger 'zoom out' gesture on the trackpad. I guess that on my Win 10 desktop PC the view would zoom if I rolled the mouse wheel. I don't know for sure though as I've not tried it.