R C-R

At least for me, the only significant difference between using a touchpad & a physical mouse for things like this is it is too easy to move one's 'touch' finger slightly during the 'mouse down' action of what is intended to be a simple click, producing a click & drag by accident instead. This can result in nodes with elongated control handles so short they go unnoticed until later when it is realized that the curve is not perfectly straight.

By default, the Affinity apps (there are 3 of them) create text objects. Like vector objects they are not rasterized by default, but unlike vector objects text objects support a large number of additional typographic attributes in addition to the usual vector ones like stroke & fill color. The Affinity apps support all the common ones (& many of the uncommon ones as well). With the appropriate settings you can control everything from the space between characters, words, & paragraphs to their alignments, indents, alternate character forms, & much more. Text in this form is often referred to as "editable text" because you can edit it in much the same way you could in a word processor. If you convert it to vectors ("convert to curves" in Affinity-speak) you lose the ability to edit it as text, but it retains the usual properties of vector objects like scaling up without becoming pixelated or blurry. Note that this conversion will result in lots of individual vector objects (at least one per character & often more). Rasterizing text converts it to a grid of pixels, with all the usual limitations of that format. Even if you do not do this explicitly in Affinity, this will occur automatically in any export file format that does not support vectors or text objects (like JPEG), or if you use certain Affinity features like effects, filters, etc. Also, as things are now (& most likely for years to come) exporting to the PSD file format will convert text to pixels. Be aware that in Affinity Photo (but not in Affinity Designer or Affinity Publisher) text objects will always look pixelated with anti-aliased edges, but as long as it remains a text object it actually is not.

@American, I think maybe more than anything else you need a brief refresher course on some mouse fundamentals. For example, you may think of a "click" as a single step, action, or event. But it is really two separate & distinctly different events: the first is to press the mouse button (the "mouse down" event) & the second is to release the button (the "mouse up" event). Similarly, a "click & drag" is three separate events: pressing the mouse button down, followed by dragging the mouse, followed by releasing the mouse button. Keeping that difference in mind when you read somebody's step-by-step instructions should help avoid some of your confusion.

So ... resistance is futile?

I have very little firsthand experience with this kind of work but from the suggestions I have read by other forum users, one thing that can help to get cleaner selections is to make a duplicate of the photo, apply various adjustments & filters to it that increase contrast, & use that to make the selections that are then applied to the original. So for example, sometimes experimenting with the color sliders of a Black & White adjustment can create a lot of contrast so a selection applied to that with the Flood Select Tool can much more easily create cleaner selections which can then be used on the original layer.

I have not seen that video but from the screenshot it looks like the double circle is being created by the screen recording software to indicate where on the curve he clicked. IOW, it is not a function of the Affinity app, just something added by the software used to create the tutorial.

Adding or editing photo metadata is not yet available in the retail version of Affinity Photo (other than the Description field), but it is available in the latest not yet ready for production work beta version. You can download the beta here if you want to test this new feature but keep in mind that documents edited in the beta will not open in the retail version.

Another way to do this is to select all the artboards & use the Alignment options. If you use the "Space Horizontally" option with "Auto Distribute" disabled, you can adjust the horizontal spacing between artboards uniformly to whatever you want by adjusting the numeric spacing field next to the "Auto Distribute" checkbox. If needed, you can also use one of the Align vertically options to line up all the artboards in a row.

@Rolbrecht, have you tried using the AP Haze Removal filter on low contrast photos? It is no panacea but sometimes it works reasonably well, or at least can provide a starting point for further retouching.

To add a bit to that, you must have a start or end node of an open curve selected to add a new node to it with the Pen Tool. To make this easier, with the Pen Tool selected, you can temporarily switch to the Node Tool by holding down a modifier key (CMD on Macs, I assume CTRL on Windows) to reselect the curve (if necessary) & then to select a start or end node. Also, this works whether or not the "Add New Curve To Selected Curves Object" option (the button with the two overlapping circles in the context toolbar) is enabled. The difference is that option adds a new, unconnected curve to the "(Curve)" layer (as Garry's GIF shows) when the existing selected curve does not have any of its nodes preselected. In effect, this 'Add New Curve' option is somewhat like using the "Add" boolean on several open curve layers to get a "(Curves)" layer, but (hooray for this!) does so without the not-always-so-helpful side effect of automatically closing the open curves when boolean added to make the "(Curves)" layer. Maybe a bit weirdly, if you select two or more open curves not part of the same layer & use the Layer > Geometry > Merge Curves menu item, this also produces a single "(Curves)" layer, but that does not close the open curves like the boolean add does.

Just curious but how does Apple mess up your photos?

FWIW, you can also right-click on that layer in the Channels panel & delete it.

There is a long discussion about that here. As I mentioned in this post, creating an "automatic" procedure for all but the simplest documents would be problematic.

Check the setting of the "Move Tool Aspect Constrain" option in Affinity Designer > Preferences > Tools. There are 3 possible settings: Automatic (based on selection) -- constrains only objects that have a 'natural' aspect ratio (like Image layers) Constrain by default -- constrains unless the Shift key is held down Do not constrain by default -- constrains only if the Shift key is held down So basically, if the aspect ratio is not being constrained when you drag a corner with the shift key held down, try it without holding down the shift key, or choose the option above that you prefer.

As @walt.farrell said, the AD zoom level has no effect on what a web page would display in an exported version.