h_d

The Basic tab in the Brushes panel (Window-Brushes in Photo v2) includes a number of 'feathered' or soft-edge brushes: And hiding under the unobtrusive Edit Brush button is a plethora of settings:

There's a camera setting for the E-M1 MkII that switches between AdobeRGB and sRGB. As far as I can tell, the only way you can check the setting in Affinity Photo's Develop persona is via Window-Metadata-Raw Data and then scroll through hunting for the ICC Profile: (This is from a Panasonic .rw2 file.) But I have to confess I'm clutching at straws offering that as a solution. It may also be something in your RAW conversion settings. If you could zip and upload the original .orf files someone might be able to double-check.

One option would be to omit the outlying exposures (P2030016 and P2030019) and leave de-ghosting turned off when you do the HDR merge. This will avoid introducing the blurred whisker in the long-exposure image: (Out of focus? Camera shake? Cat shake?) With the following settings: I get a tone mapped image like this: You can then make further destructive tweaks in the Tone Mapping persona or non-destructive adjustments in the Photo persona. Not sure about the reasons for colour cast, but it might also be worth trying with the original out-of-camera images, and checking the camera's Color Space settings. The files you uploaded have an sRGB profile but if the originals were shot using AdobeRGB the conversion may have caused issues.

You could install the free 30-day trials and test things out. You have nothing to lose. To say 'I visit here and see bugs, so everything must be wrong' is like saying 'I visit a hospital and see sick people, so everyone must be ill.'

You can get a 30-day free unlimited trial of Publisher (all functionality) if you scroll to the bottom of this page.

That's mainly because it's not hyphenated, and I haven't made any adjustments to word or letter spacing. Here it is with Auto-Hyphenation on (no other changes): Turning on hyphenation in my Pages example has a less dramatic effect because the frame is much wider and the spacing can be more evenly distributed:

You might want to clarify 'Football' too ⚽ / 🏈 / 🏉 😉

What I meant was that the original shape (in Pages) and the new shape (in Publisher) don't have to be the same width: justified text copies and pastes from one to the other without any spacing issues. Original text in a Pages text frame: The text from Pages copied and pasted into Publisher:

I think it depends on compatibility between Publisher and the source application, and possibly on the OS too. For example, pasting styled text from Apple Pages into Publisher seems to work pretty much perfectly - justification, indentation, leading etc are replicated exactly. Spaces between words are accounted for in the justification engine - the shapes of the source and target frames don't come into play. I agree though that in many cases

What happens if you Place the pdf into an existing Publisher document? I get all sorts of crud if I Open, but this if I Place test.pdf: (Publisher is not a pdf editor...)

No worries, hope my first suggestion makes your workflow easier.

Or what's not on the screen...

Press the Tab key. Alternatively, go to Window - Studio - and choose Show Left Studio:

Good evening, Personally I wouldn't rely on accurate conversion of pre-formatted text from Word. I would paste the text into a plain-text editor, remove any and all formatting, copy and paste into Affinity and apply all the character and paragraph styles there. That way you know you're getting what you want. (I'd also use Publisher rather than Designer for a newsletter, but that's up to you...)

Deselect to remove the pixel selection, then click on the HSL Shift Adjustment layer and paint on it in black or white. (It's a mask.)