Asha

David, are you having problems with other programs causing crashes too? I guess what I'm getting at is that maybe there is still a hardware problem that is glitching during use.

I can see why you would think that tho ;)

Strange--I was able to feather much more than that. I have a 3600px x 4800px file, created a selection rectangle, and then selected "Feather" from the Select menu. The slider went up to 1024px for me. However, when I selected "Refine" from the top bar of the rectangular selection tool, the feather slider only went to 100.

After much more editing in AD and with the help of all of your comments, I have shed my Illustrator habits and become better adjusted to how to do what I want to do in AD.
 
1. In AD changing the position of a text box while editing within its text (including moving it to a totally new position) is simply done by revealing the needed hidden "tool," which becomes visible via a cursor move.
 
2. Actually changing from the Frame Text tool to the Move tool can be done either by pushing ESC a couple times and then choosing the desired shortcut key for a new tool, OR simply by clicking once (outside of the text box---which does not change the Frame Text tool icon on the screen but which allows one to choose the desired shortcut key for a different tool.
 
My former problem was that I had not noticed that I was in the Artistic Text tool (which does not work this way) rather than in the Frame Text tool. I wish that one could use the "click outside the text" method with the Artistic Text tool as is possible with the Frame Text tool.
 
Thanks for your patience!

Really? AP does just a bang up job this is how it rendered a simple 11x14 crop took into PS, no issues. We can defend AP or try to justify it,  but as a commercial photographer, someone that has been using PS and RAW processors for many years it simply doesn't work!! If someone want to do a screen share and show me how this fabulous feature works, I'll be happy to go through the process. Beyond that, this discussion is an exercise in futility! I don't care if you duplicate LightRoom, Capture One, DXO or PS, all I know is they work logically, AP is an over engineered crop tool that takes hours of wasted time to justify! I'm done with this discussion and will be waiting for a fix, or can no longer recommend it!
 

Perhaps it is a back-door way to resize canvas, lol.

Quarki, sounds like you came up with a workable solution. For future, CMYK is for printing--colors for screen viewing should always be in the RGB space.

Quarki, sounds like you came up with a workable solution. For future, CMYK is for printing--colors for screen viewing should always be in the RGB space.

Great review!

Hello,
 
I followed your tip I created a document 6 in. x 4.5 in. at 300dpi. I opened the resize dialog window changed the dpi to 150 with resample unchecked, the pixel/inch dimensions where grey and didn't change, I clicked the resize button. Once finished I reopened the resize document window and it now showed a 12 in. x 9 in. document at 150 dpi. This is what I was asking about in the first place.  
 
That what I was expecting to happen, but because it wasn't updated while I was making the initial changes I didn't think/realize it was going to happen. The fact that I could not see the change in the dialog window prior to clicking "resize" is what caused the confusion so I didn't continue. It would be nice to see the change happen in the first window and not have to reopen a second window to know it had resized dimensionally. 
 
I think you can understand my confusion when "However Affinity doesn't calculate or show this for you and the dimensions in the input box remain the same (even after you change them to a physical dimension). This again doesn't help much. " Because I never saw a change in the dialog window I was under the impression nothing was going to happen or change.
 
Maybe this is something that could be dealt with in future updates.

I would like this in AP as well

yes it's the way the colour replace brush works too.
in my case the background is not pure white, it is (very) light grey.
zooming in and comparing results of the three methods (independent pixel layer set to hue and duplicate mask; child layer set to hue; child layer set to darken) i found that the duplicate layer blended to hue and the child layer blended to darken give the best results, while the child layer blended to hue yields a barely visible result: so, it's not compl.tely true what i wrote in my previous post: also the child mode blended to hue works, with much subtler results.
thanks to both of you for the suggestions, i learned something.

i was a linux user. i started using linux way back in the years, when audio editing was done with command line tools  :blink:
the Gimp has been my image editing program of choice from the start, since i had been using it on windows already. it is free as in "beer", but also as in "speech", which is a big plus. more than one time i found myself editing the sources and recompiling the program to change defaults and other (simple!) things.
ironically, the gimp was one of the reasons that pulled me to switch to osx and the mac world, when i found that i was tired to build my tools with my hands and wanted to be a "user", not a sysadmin anymore.
 
around the gimp there is a galaxy of plugins. many of them are distributed as source code. in linux, it is easy and almost natural to compile them and get the executable object, since the tools one needs for the task are native parts of the system. they are mostly part of osx too, since it is based upon bsd unix, a sibling of linux. however, the graphical interface and the tricks Apple invented to prevent users from putting their hands on the core system components and configurations isolate from the underlying architectural implementation and discourage hacking pulses.
 
so the first limitation i felt as an osx gimp user was the inability to get all the plugins i wanted.
later, i started to find very annoying some performance problems it shows in several tasks (a couple of minutes to generate a linear gradient for a 20 mpx layer on a quadcore i5 imac with 16gb ram???).
plus, and this is maybe the only limitation that one cannot circumvent, but a big limitation indeed: it does not support (yet) non destructive editing, apart what can be done using masks and duplicating layers.
 
so i started searching for a replacement. photoshop was out of discussion, due to its licensing price and (mainly) policy. some googling lead me to affinity photo and i think i will stay here for good.
 
sorry for the long post, folks...
 
@Asha: yes, sometimes we keep on doing things the old safe way... even if the scenario has changed. sometimes i am still thinking in terms of gimp-how-to and i am slowly changing to a more suitable affinity-photo-how-to  :)
 
@R-C-R: you got the point. who cares if ap will be a photshop killer or not. the important thing is that ap can have the market share and good luck it deserves; competition will be good for both.

I may have used Photoshop a bit back in the middle 1990's but I don't remember if it was a trial version, something that came with a scanner, or what. Back then, I was using a variety of PPC apps running on Mac OS 7 or OS 8. A few of you may remember the original ColorIt! app, a fairly serviceable bitmap editor; or Deneba Canvas, billed as the "Swiss Army Knife" of graphics apps. I eventually replaced Canvas with Freehand, which ran OK in OS X PPC emulation mode (Rosetta) until Apple dropped support for that; & grudgingly bought Photoshop Elements for bitmapped work in OS X, which required buying a new version just about every time Apple updated OS X.
 
With the exception of ColorIt! every one of these apps cost several times the price of either Affinity app, not to mention paying for pricy upgrades & replacements to keep using them as OS X evolved & Adobe killed off its competitors one by one. The worst part about it was the apps were not really getting much better, & in some ways were worse than what they replaced.
 
So with all that in mind, I don't really care if AP ever becomes a Photoshop "killer;" the only thing that matters to me is if Adobe can kill Affinity like it has done to so many other apps. As things stand now, I don't think there is a chance of that happening.

I fully sympathize with the issues of a "broken" CS6 and extortionate subscription for CC. However, I think the iPad has such a gaping hole with respect to professional illustration and photo tools, that it is very sound reasoning to try to get there ASAP.

The layer clipping mask (aka alpha lock) can be approximated by using the same mask on a new pixel layer. You would paint around the edge of the hair on the pixel layer, not the mask, and then change the layer blending mode. I have tried it in PS on a green-screen photo. I used the Hue blending mode, with paint color picked up from one of the darker hair colors, and it worked pretty well to eliminate the halo.

I was watching this video on YouTube for Lightroom.
https://youtu.be/OAVXV4ngEmU
 
Thought I would try it in Affinity Photo.  And Bang, it works in Affinity Photo too.  Goodbye Adobe.  

I don't understand why PNG doesn't work for you to preserve transparency. I routinely use it for that & it works fine for me.

I should have said: the aim of the vid is to create a gradient fade to transparency... while maintaining gradient editability.
 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m1Ztfe5wmHQ

The UI really should scale automatically based on device. Imagine with the upcoming port to iPad--there has to be a way to fit things on a screen in a useful way, regardless of size and proportion.

My first clue about how to use the Adjustment brush came from this YouTube video that I stumbled on by accident. (It is a little out of date so you can ignore the comments about it being a beta & lacking the brush size adjustments.)
 
Until I saw that I did not even realize that I could paint with the brush on the workspace to selectively refine the selection. Once I understood that, some experimentation showed me the basics, & searching Affinity Help on "selection brush" eventually led me to the "Refining pixel selection edges" help topic that explained the purpose of the matte, foreground, etc. brush settings.
 
Guided by that, more experimentation followed (which I'm still doing) to get a better feel for which settings work best for different photos. It isn't a "one size fits all" sort of thing, so don't be discouraged if you don't get the results you want on the first try or if you still have to use other tools to clean up a few areas that the refinement algorithms can't cope with.

Hi Asha... there is already a flow slider. But having to constantly tweak it slows down the act of painting tremendously. I know other painters that feel as strongly about being able to control the transparency rate with numbers keys. This is something that AP already has. 
 
In PS the default is that number keys control transparency. When the 'build up' button is activated in brush settings, the number keys then control the flow. 
 
Broadly I would say that Illustrators prefer the transparency setting, whilst matte painters (i.e. photo real) prefer the flow setting. 

Tool Tips

My first choice would be to check the channels to see if there is one that will enable you to make a good selection. If you create a new grayscale layer from one of the channels, you can use the threshold adjustment to clear out parts you don't want, then make a selection from what's left. Then you can refine selection, or make a mask or whatever.
 
There is also the background eraser tool. I think that is really only good for quick checks, because I find the effect to be a bit harsh. Anyway, all you do is use the eye dropper to select foreground and background colors, then use the background eraser on the background near the edge of your subject. You may need to uncheck contiguous if there is hair or something where the green color shows through. You will need to play with the tolerance too, to avoid leaving green areas behind.

+1 for ability to change the origin, and quickly reset back to default!