barninga

my advice is to do color, exposure and noise adjustment in the develop persona, the develop the image an deal with the crop and perspective in the photo persona. you could for example use the clone tool or the inpainting brush to fake the low-right corner portion of the image, the distort it with the perspective tool so that it becomes rectangular, then crop the background. if you use the live perspective layer, you'll be able to tweak the settings without going through undo/redo cycles.

luts do work, but copying/pasting adjustment layers allows to tweak them once pasted.

yep, three main reasons.

i got it now. AP works that way with adjustments, you paint black/white directly on the adjustment layer to hide/show it but, as far as i know, a mask is needed to hide/show parts of an image (what in AP is called a pixel layer). you could suggest an implementation like that in the feature request forum.

well, not considering habits and personal preferences about tools usability, i am not sure -but i may be wrong- that the editing method you describe is actually non destructive. if you use the tool as an eraser, you erase parts of the images. then, you switch the tool mode (with a modifier key or whatever) and paint over the area you erased to make it reappear. i think that AP implements this as an undo brush, but this is not the point. let's say that you perform a different kind of editing on the same image, like applying adjustments, and so on. then, you realize that you'd need to paint back something you erased earlier. i'm not sure that the brush/eraser tool would work... i'd say you need a mask for this, and you paint over the mask, not over the image itself.

maybe i don't get the point. do you mean a brush tool that can alternatively paint or erase when used with certain combination of modifier keys? i came to affinity photo from a program that organized its tools in a similar way, having a brush that paints and another brush that erases. this is, i think, mostly a matter of habit. for me, it's harder to remember lots of modifier keys than selecting a different tool from a a toolbox. in these kind of tasks i don't think that photoshop can offer real advantages over affinity photo. the trick is to use non-destructive editing when possible, which means in most cases. coming from the gimp, that doesn't implement non-destructive editing -if not to a limited extent- it took me a little while to understand its benefits and how to take advantage of it, and now i use it all the times.

the afphoto format saves the state of your project, with layers, selections, adjustment settings. if you later reopen an afphoto file, you'll be able to start your editing work exactly where you left it. these are regular files, that are stored in the filesystem of your mac, wherever you decide to. jpeg is a good format for finished jobs, if you don't need full quality (jpeg is a lossy compressed format) but you need to save disk space (since jpeg compression is more effective than, for example, lzw compression or tiff files).

the eraser is destructive. you can bring back what you erased only through the undo command (or undo brush). my advice is that you use add a mask to the layer you want partially erase and paint with black on the mask (click on it to select, first) where you want to hide the layer. this way, you can paint on the mask with white at any time where you want your layer back.

you can resize the document (from the menu) using the non separable lanczos method. this should give the best result.

click on the adjustment/filter layers while holding down the cmd key, then press cmd-c. load the picture where you want to paste them, and press cmd-v.

in the low-right corner of the window, click on channels (if the channels panel is not there, make it visible from menu->view->studio), rightclick on the red channel and select "copy to mask layer".

i think that a good strategy would be watching the tutorials. at least, they will give you an idea of what the software can do, and how (at least, in general). you possibly have images that you edited with the gimp or ps and it will be easy to compare the available workflows. i came to ap from the gimp (no ps) and in a very short time i understood how to overcome the gimp's limits, and what new (for me) possibilities ap was offering. even if you should decide later that you feel more comfortable with hiring when it comes to graphic art and photo retouching, at least you'll have a fair knowledge of how things are done, so it won't be a blind job for you.

+1

the two main reasons for a tool not to work, is that you don't have any layer selected, or you are working on a layer different from the one you want to.

you can select the part you want to use to get rid of the people, copy it (ctrl-c) and paste it (ctrl-v). it will be pasted as a new layer. then select the new layer and the move tool to get it into place and resize as needed. you can apply a mask to it to adjust its borders, fade them, etc. lower its opacity to place it precisely over the background.

if you are trained in photo retouching and graphic design, 150 hours should be more than enough to get practiced with affinity software. if you know photoshop, you'll find that there are many similarities with AP. i think you are already aware that you are facing a make/buy alternative for this aspect of your business; it is not just a matter of learning a new program.

:) "macro" means macro-program for geeks, while it means macrophotography for photographers (and maybe digital artists). what about geek photographers? :) :) :)

Greg, i'm not sure i understand what you need to do. my guess is that you start from a shot where even the lightest areas have some details, but when you apply the effect and filters you need to make the image appear as you want to, all the detail in those areas get blown. if my guess is right, you could try selecting by tonal range/highlights (look at the menu). Then invert the selection, feather it and then apply the effects you want: this will keep the highlights intact. you may want to take a look at the tutorials about selections, look for section 4 here: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10119-in-house-affinity-photo-video-tutorials/

take a look at this tutorial: if you know how to import a lut into your video editing software it should work.

not sure of what you mean by "hide command"... anyway, selections marching ants cannot be hidden in ap (yet). cmd+h selects the move tool.

@conrad2k, yes, exporting a 3dlut produces a file that can be copied, moved, shared over the net just like any regular file. the limit with luts is that they are not tweakable (as far as i know), so they are mostly useful when you want to export a set of adjustments to a program that cannot read .afphoto files. however, if the goal is to share such adjustments among affinity photo users, imho it could be better to save only the adjustment layers as .afphoto files (after deleting any image and -probably- mask) and share these ones: anyone who uses them can tweak each single adjustment.

subzero_mb, maybe you just have to press cmd-1 to display the resized pic at 100% zoom. if i don't fail, ap sets the zoom level to the size of the workspace after resizing: if your resized image is 500px wide, it's likely that your ap windows is larger than that, and this will produce pixelation, but it's only a display effect.

a very simple method to add a border around the image (that is, outside the image) is to enlarge the canvas keeping the image layer centered, then add a fill layer, fill it with the color of choice, and move it below the image layer.

true. i was sure i used them in the develop persona, but i was in the photo persona instead. thank you for pointing it out.

ehm... what are the pink blobs? be sure to click (in the layer stack on the right of the image) on the layer you want to edit with the inpainting brush before using the brush. this is a destructive approach, anyway. if you want to inpaint non-destructively, add a new pixel layer just above the layer you want to edit, and change the source option of the inpainting brush to "current layer and below". then click on the new pixel layer and start inpainting. you might be intersted in these tutorials: