IanSG

Under <your user folder>\AppData\Roaming\Affinity\Photo there's a folder called "1.0" - it seems to contain all the settings you'd need as various .xml files.

An audition for "Call the Midwife", perhaps?

Excellent news! Will there be cake?

How did you take / process that picture? The black background is pure black and the stars are individual pixels! Even the unlit part of the Moon, which should have some Earthshine, is showing mostly pure black.

In my case, that owes a lot to Jackson Pollock!

Use the Activity Monitor - the View menu allows you to show whether or not a process is running in the sandbox.

Damn - I'd completely forgotten about that! Thanks for that! It's amazing how quickly I forget these things!

That's the exact opposite of what I get! How are you testing this?

I found this problem when I first started using AP. My solution was to cut out the subject, clone a few pixels from the outside edge into the inside edge of the cutout area, apply the blur and then paste the subject back in. The fundamental problem is that AP selects pixels outside the selected area to include in the blur - replacing them with pixels from the background means there's no halo.

Not exactly - it's only if I don't close the filter dialog before typing "G".

I can duplicate something like this by starting with an open Gaussian blur dialog and then repeated Gs - AP toggles between flood fill and displaying the Gaussian Blur dialog / creating another filter layer. This behavior happens with all the filters.

AP's pretty frugal with memory - 24GB should be more than enough (assuming that nothing else is competing for resources). I'm a Windows user, but the performance issues I've had were all caused by having lots of adjustment layers that had to be reapplied whenever an image was moved or zoomed. If your workflow allows it you could try merging adjustments as you make them or you could try merging the visible layers and working with that. As with any performance problem, it's a good idea to use your performance monitoring tools and see what they're telling you.

Have a look at this tutorial. As ever, there are lots of different ways of doing this sort of thing - putting "affinity photo sky replacement" into google returns more than 200K hits.

Without going into too much detail, I'm curious as to how sophisticated your steganographic techniques need to be for this sort of thing - are clients actively looking for hidden watermarks or do you just need something they're unlikely to stumble upon by accident?

The problem is that "painting over" is a misleading way of thinking about it. If you paint over something, the original is still there but it's been hidden. What's happening here is more like tearing bits out of a book, destroying them, and then replacing them with something completely different. If it's only a few letters that have been replaced you might be able to work it out e.g. cn y rd ths? - if entire pages have been replaced there's no way of working out what was there originally.

Data protection policy anybody? (just in case!)

You could have a play with the perspective tool too - it wasn't until I tried adding a swing to the picture that I realised how distorted it is

It's easy! The Hunspell dictionaries are provided as 2 files named something like aa_AA.aff and aa_AA.dic. These files are placed in a folder called aa_AA which is under the additional dictionaries folder. "aa_AA" is just an example - the actual filenames will depend on which language you're using. Some of the dictionaries are supplied as .xpi files - these are Thunderbird addons. In reality they're just zip files, so you just need to rename the file extension to .zip and then unpack them. You can find a load of dictionaries here and here.

Even if you can't get the truly dark skies you want, start practicing using your camera in the dark before you go - it's amazing how difficult even the simplest things can be when you can't see properly!

Trust me, you won't be bored! Here's a thought for you - half the things that are visible to an experienced observer are within 0.5 Mag of the limiting magnitude of the 'scope - you've barely started! Enjoy!

There's a straighten option in Develop's crop tool, so I think the mystery's still unsolved

I was fortunate enough to see the night sky from Alice Springs a few weeks back - being able to see M31 is a poor substitute for the kind of skies you get in Australia .

What are those images of - it's not the milky way! You may do better by using AP with a stacking tool like Registax.

It's there, under "View". If you rotate the image first the crop tool aligns itself to the rotated image.

You can download a Hunspell Welsh spell checker dictionary and install it in the additional dictionaries folder.