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As others have pointed out, switching off Metal is overkill. The problem is related to unsupported color profiles - see this topic

Hi Cbestopher You can turn Metal back on, I have found that this flicker only happens if your image color profile is Apple Wide Color Sharing Profile. If so, just change profiles and the flicker stops.

I just came here to look for this bug and see if other's have seen it. It just popped up for the first time for me. Affinity 2.0.4. M2 MacBook Air. BenQ SW270C as primary monitor. Both displays are running at default resolution (i.e. the BenQ is at 2560x1440). Possibly also relevant is that I have "Displays have separate Spaces" on under Mission Control. Dragging the HSL dialog to the built-in display and back to the external display fixes the dialog box for me, too.

See also :

I just found this topic. I've been having the same problem, see the topic at Whole image flickers on M2 Macbook Air Apple Wide Color Sharing Profile seems to the the problem. It's possible that there's some software problem that's only become apparent with the new M2.

Well, this is getting a little weird! From what I can tell, the flickering only happens on photos that were exported from the Apple Photos desktop app (I haven't tried exporting from the iOS Photos app). If I export a photo to the file system, then open with AP, the flickering happens. If I choose to export it as an unmodified original and then open with AP, there is no flickering. So far I've only been dealing with JPEG photos. If I then open one of the "bad" photos in AP and export it to TIFF, then open that TIFF in AP, it flickers. This suggests that there's some kind of metadata cause to the instability. Sure enough, if I use exiftool (https://exiftool.org) and strip all the metadata like this exiftool -all:all= IMG_3025.jpeg -o IMG_3025-noexif.jpeg and open it, there's no flickering. Maybe it's related to the color profile. The photos that flicker all have Color Profile: Apple Wide Color Sharing Profile

Thanks NotMyFault. I already had the auto brightness off. Also, only the image panel is experiencing the flashes, none of the rest of the panels are affected. That seems more like an issue with the image when the panel gets updated. I'm curious if there are any M2 Macbook Air users who are or are not having this problem.

The fix is to not set Display: Metal in the AP Preferences Performance panel. Software, OpenGL (Basic) and OpenGL all work fine.

On my M2 Macbook Air [macOS 12.6 (21G115), 24GB RAM], I get flickering on Affinity Photo 1.10.5 as seen. Anytime the mouse focus changes or some other screen event happens, the image flickers to a washed-out look, then comes back to normal. This does not happen with Affinity Designer 1.10.5 on the same setup. I rebooted the system to no avail. I also tried using the built-in screen on the Macbook but the same thing happens. Here's a video of the effect: