jdiamond

Thanks.

I'd be happy to - well worth it for this kind of help. Could you give me a link?

Wow! This is pure gold! And double clicking and enter are things I can try with every single tool to see what it does!

Anyway, thanks *SO* much, The Computer Lab. No one from Affinity was able to tell me that, and now I can crop things. And now I know that there are things in Affinity Photo that cannot be done without key strokes, so I'll start looking for how keys are defined.

WOW! It works! I've been trying to figure that one out for almost 2 years and countless posts! Gee - maybe a manual WOULD be a valuable investment? So it's fair to say then that Infinity Photo there are some things that cannot be done without the keyboard? I would not have guessed that, because in Photoshop, key strokes are simply short cuts for things you could also do with the mouse. (Wish it could be done with a normal selection box, so I don't have to start resizing the crop rectangle, but at least it's possible.) So for readers who missed it, to ENACT the crop, you hit the ENTER key.

It's really not the shape itself that's causing me the problem - it's very easy for me to select a rectangle. But once done, the rectangle is just sitting there. There's no crop action I can see anywhere. So now I have an image with a selection rectangle on part of it. How would I crop to that rectangle? How would I change the canvas extent to match that rectangle? The icon looks like a crop icon, but if it crops, I don't know how.

Yep - that's the one I saw, too. Just wondering if they might sell an electronic version for the convenience of it. Or if there's a virtual equivalent via all the tutorial videos in these forums. Or if Affinity has created the manual yet.

The easiest way to define it is I want to do the "crop" command in photoshop. (The one under edit.) I don't want to resize the image - I just want to provide a rectangle of interest within the image and then crop to that rectangle, making the rest of the image (and canvas) disappear, such that my selected rectangle now represents all the pixels in the image. This might be like changing the "canvas" size with visual feedback (vs changing the "image" size), where in photoshop the image size is its logical size while the canvas size is the pixel dimensions of the entire stack of layers. Humorously, when I search for crop in the help, the word is not even mentioned. To give a more concrete example, in your tutorial you were going to export a png in which you'd masked out the background of your photo. But that exported photo is still the size of the original, with the object of interest offset within it. I'd want to export a png containing JUST the foreground image extent. I haven't cracked this idea in Affinity Photo yet,

One other question: I saw there's now an Affinity book for understanding Affinity. I have no problem paying for the book, but is there an electronic version? It's just so much handier sometimes. Also, I know you make great Tutorials - is there any kind of manual yet, or an organization of all of the tutorials? Thanks so much - I feel like Affinity Designer got a manual fairly early and I'm still waiting for the manual for Photo...

Thanks again for the great tutorials and examples. There's still one very common operation that I just can't figure out how to do: a simple, rectangular crop. This is one of the single most common operations in my workflow. In Infinity, I can click on the crop icon and create a rectangular area, but how do I crop the image to that selection? I've seen your tutorials where you mask an image to a complex shape, but that just sets the outside to transparent (and is overkill for a crop). I want to actually change the size of the canvas, redefine its size with the crop locations. I've also seen your tutorials where you drag an image into Affinity photo and then adjust its size and positioning to determine which part of it appears in the final image. This is like cropping, except I need to first set the base image to the target size, which may not be known, and second, this approach is very impractical if you want to crop to a tiny part of the image. Any thoughts? Thanks so much, - Jeff

I cannot get a copy soon enough. My migration to Affinity Photo is severely hampered by having little to no overview of what features are there and how to use them. I know this software can do a lot, but it's done so differently than in Photoshop that I fight to do the most basic things. I find the tutorials helpful, but they are more like a reference manual - there's no large scale overview that gains insight into the way AP designers think. (Reminds me of the jokes about source revision systems, where people say "just type in this line and you'll get the latest version.) I think it would be awesome if someone could make a book partially targeting Photoshop users to say how similar things are done in Affinity Photo, and partially to give a high level overview of the high level way AP works. One hangup is there seems to be a lot of modes and contexts in AP, and if you're not in the right state, you can't do basic things that you could do a minute before.

I work with png files with transparency. Currently, the only way I know to make an image with transparent edges is to select part of a non-transparent image, cut it out, and paste it in a new image. But once it's there, I cannot make more parts of it transparent. Is there a way to use normal drawing tools to edit the alpha channel of an image? (This is not the same as drawing with transparency, as that only affects the SOURCE alpha, not the destination (background) alpha). What I'd like to do is be able to directly change the background's alpha layer and paint "transparency" onto an image. I've tried drawing with only the alpha channel visible, but it didn't work. Any advice is appreciated. Great job on Affinity Photo - I love the updates. - Jeff

One side question: I've constantly been fighting with Affinity Photo because the version of the picture I save isn't the current picture, but a prior version before I edited it. What steps do you need to take to make sure that when you export an image, you will get in the file what you see on the screen? Thanks so much for the help, - Jeff P. S. I just love the distort tools. :) My experience so far is that in Affinity, the impossible is easy and the easy is impossible. ;)

Sorry to revisit this topic, but I haven't gotten as far as the other people. I've drawn a rectangular selection area and I want to crop to the selection. I couldn't find *any* way to do this other than to go into Document->Document Size and manually choose the pixels I want to slice off each side. The most shocking thing is that when I type "crop" into the help menu in Affiniti Photo, nothing shows up! I saw hints of the more elaborate approaches in the above discussion, but I don't know how to get to any of them. I tried the "Quick Reference", but couldn't find anything there. Any help is appreciated - I just spent all morning trying to clip out a rectangle from an image. Thanks, - Jeff

James, are you saying the solution they gave me doesn't work for an isolated layer? (My trial just expired or I'd try it.) The 2 key pieces of info are (1) you have to right click on the layer and choose "rasterize", and (2) perspective transform is misfiled - instead of being under transforms, it's under "filters".

This tip has really helped me a lot! :) Is it a fair analogy to say that the right click->rasterize command for a layer is analogous to clicking on the check mark in Photoshop after doing an edit? Thanks again. - Jeff P. S. The other big tip that I came across was that the perspective transform is actually a "filter", which is why it was hard to find.

This is a whole aspect of Affinity photo that I need to understand better. I will dig in some more. Thanks again for your assistance. :) I admit it's been a frustrating experience trying to figure all this out.

Thank you so much for the reply. :) I wonder if in the general documentation if there is a way to highlight these subtleties of basic Affinity use? Like a basic tutorial to explain how Affinity thinks about basic operations? Anything to make it easier for new users to assess the features of the program. For example, there are many people waiting on my word as to what features Affiinity Photo has, and it hasn't been easy for me to determine that in a practical way.

It's worth pointing out that so far, there have been two operations in Affinity Photo that seem as seamless and simple as I could ask for: (1) Adding text. (2) Once you have an existing multilayer image, free transforming one of the layers. That's even easier than in Photoshop. If everything were this easy, like magic wand, or select from color, I'd switch over in a heart beat.

Quick update: I found this tutorial on how to do what I'm describing. It shows that cut and paste SHOULD work: So either I missed one little trick along the way, or my version of Affinity Photo isn't functioning. I find this has been a common experience in exploring Affiinity Photo - that my version doesn't work like the one in the videos. Basically, you end up trying to follow along, but then when you try to do the operation, nothing happens. However, I'm using the trial, not the beta, so this is the version that should be ready for sale.

I'm an Adobe Photoshop user, and I couldn't figure out any way to cut and paste a simple selection. In Photoshop, once you have a selection, you can just do command+C, then command+V where you want to drop it, and you can free transform it on the way. I've been struggling to do this most basic of things in Affinity. I'll add that the description above of how to do this in Affinity Photo is so complex I can't even follow it. I'll add that if I cannot figure out how to do the most basic simple operations within the 10 day trial period, I'm not likely to buy/invest in this product. It really makes me wonder what the designers of Affinity view as operations that need to be made simple tasks. I realized in trying to again decipher the above description that I have no idea what's even being accomplished. Here's what I need to do: Imagine I have image 1 -> I select part of image one. I wish to then cut out just that selection as an independent object with an alpha channel that I can free transform. Then, going to image 2, I want to be able to drop that image into the new image as its own layer, thus compositing the cut out with the new image. I do this operation a LOT. I cannot figure out how this is done in Affinity Photo. Help is appreciated. For context, since Adobe Creative Suite 6 is not compatible with El Capitan, I'm currently running Photoshop CS6 in VMWare while desperately trying to move my data flow to a new product. I am deciding between Affinity and Pixelmator. Affinity shows great promise for doing more things at a professional level than Pixelmator, but so much in Affinity is incomprehensible, with so little support available, that it may just not be tenable for a couple more years of development. However, I do very much appreciate that they are going after the market of all the Photoshop users jettisoned by Adobe when they went to a subscription model. BTW, I'll second the observation that I am able to do all these basic tasks in virtually every piece of software I've tried without outside help. So there's two possibilities: 1) Affinity just isn't done enough yet, so these operations just aren't implemented yet. 2) The designers of Affinity have very different workflows - or this is really more of an Aperture product and less of a Photoshop kind of product, despite the obvious marketing towards Photoshop.

My issues go deeper - even when I use the selection brush to tediously select an image (the only selection tool that seems to function in the beta), once I've completed the selection, I can't seem to actually cut and paste the object. How in Affinity Photo does one clip out part of one photo and deposit it in another photo? That would be a great tutorial. Also would be good to "feather" the selection, i.e., make the alpha transparency gradually fall off. Any help would be appreciated. I really which flood select worked. That would make my life much easier.

I was also hoping there would be some way to select based on a color range, but the closest match would seem to be "select-> colour range", but that only gives me three color planes, and like so many other things in Affinity Photo, I can't make it actually do anything, like it's a menu item that hasn't been implemented yet.

I was wondering if you could help me figure out what I'm doing wrong. I'm using the beta, and I have a test image with a foreground object on a pure white background. I want to copy just the foreground object, so I thought flood select was my best approach. But when I try to use the flood select tool and I click on the image, nothing happens - nothign gets selected. I've tried every permutation I think of, but it just doesn't seem to work.