R C-R

I am not entirely sure of what you mean by this but if you mean switching back to the Develop Persona after a RAW file has been developed in that Persona, which automatically switches to the Photo Persona when you click the "Develop" button in the Context toolbar, that is easily done simply by clicking on the Develop Persona icon in the main toolbar. The only limitation for this is you must have an RGB pixel layer selected to reuse the Develop Persona tools. Developing a RAW file is destructive, but only in the sense that you cannot "undevelop" a RAW file once it has been developed in Affinity Photo (a completely non-destructive develop is on the roadmap but not yet implemented). However, the original RAW file is untouched & unaffected by anything you do in AP, which means you can open the RAW file as many times as you want & create new AP files to develop or otherwise edit as you see fit. The Crop Tool Straighten mode is accurate to the pixel dimensions of the photo. If you are having difficulty getting the adjustment you want, try zooming in so you can better see pixel patterns to use as a reference. If you prefer, you can use the Transform panel to enter precise rotational values, including those using mathematical expressions. The accuracy of this alternate method is limited only by the internal accuracy of the app, which is somewhere around 8-10 decimal points, making extremely fine adjustments invisible to the eye entirely possible. I don't know how or why that is happening for you, but the normal behavior after clicking the "Apply" button in the Crop Tool's Context toolbar is for the window to zoom to whatever level entirely fits the cropped document in the window's dimensions & centers it there. This applies even if you crop the document to larger than its original size. If you bought the app less than 24 hours ago, it would not hurt to devote more time to evaluating it before drawing any conclusions about its worth. It is not, nor is it intended to be, a Photoshop clone. If you bought it with that expectation, you will be disappointed. If you judge it based on its own merits, perhaps not.

By that do you mean that by unticking that or any other step in a macro it is possible to somehow use the remaining steps to create/record a new macro? If so, how is this done? If not, is there any point in unticking a step instead of just starting over with a new macro, as Mr. K suggests?

It also might be a bit less unintuitive if you consider why Affinity does not automatically create a new layer when you create a new document like many other apps do. One of the possible reasons for creating a new AP document is to place one or more image layers in it, using the File > Place menu item. These image layers (those identified by an "(Image)" suffix in the Layers panel) retain their pixel resolutions regardless of how they are resized on the canvas, which means you can resize, move, rotate, or even skew them non-destructively. This is because they are not resampled to the document's resolution (as determined by the document's DPI setting) unless/until you print or export the document to something other than the native Affinity filetype. This is perfect for laying out one page montages of photos, creating simple flyers with a few photos or illustrations, & similar uses. (I have created "lost dog" & "found dog" fliers for friends this way, combining one or two placed photos & a few text objects with relevant contact & descriptive info.) Automatically creating an empty pixel (or whatever) layer for this use case would be superfluous & perhaps annoying. To me it certainly would be -- I hate it when apps are programmed to assume something about my intent.

They are called modifier keys because they do nothing on their own -- they only modify other actions like regular (text) key presses or button clicks. So at best, the Refine buttons could only become highlighted when a user clicks somewhere on the canvas with one of the keys pressed to use the refine brush in that button's refinement mode. Any other behavior would conflict with other uses of the modifier keys, including those reserved for activating OS level functions.

1. You can say whatever you want but the fact remains that when you create objects they are placed on a layer. 2. By your own admission PS creates a Layer 1. 3. Please refer to the previously mentioned Adobe Layer Basics help page, where among other things it says "The Layers panel in Photoshop lists all layers, layer groups, and layer effects in an image." If it appears in the Layers panel, it is a layer, period. This includes "Background" layers, photo layers, adjustment layers, & so on.

As I understand it, that is because Microsoft did not provide as many easily programable modifier keys as did Apple. Ironically, that is because for many years Steve Jobs was adamantly opposed to the idea of a multi-button mouse, making it simple for the Control key, originally intended to be the substitute for a second mouse button to be repurposed as a general purpose modifier key.

The reality is that everything must be in a layer -- there is no "layerless state" for any object in a document to exist in; not in Affinity, not in Adobe, & not in any other app that uses a layer containment hierarchy as an organizational model. Whether they are identified as layers in the UI is immaterial; even for Adobe they are all referred to as layers in the documentation. That is why I am asking specifically for suggestions about how to refer to Affinity's "(Layer)" type layers in the least confusing way possible. I am not interested in adding to the confusion by talking about "layerless" states, objects that are not contained by layers, or anything else that does not help with that.

Works for me, even for basic brushes, but I still think this is a bug in the implementation of the donut shape. Otherwise, the behavior would be the same for the Cog shape, right?

For future reference, many apps do not work correctly if items they expect to be in a specific location are replaced with aliases to some other location. A few do not even when the replacements are symbolic links. There are several possible reasons for this, including all or some part of a file path being hard coded & permissions issues due to sandboxing or for other security considerations. The bottom line is never assume an alias or symlink will work without testing.

Just to make things that much more confusing, when I do the clipping with the donut shape in AD 1.5.5 on my Mac, the interior of the donut shape does not clip the other objects unless I change its total angle to less than 360° (producing a slit in the donut), & then it does: This does not happen when I use a cog with a hole in it instead of a donut as the clipping layer so I assume this is a bug in the implementation of the donut tool's logic. Edit: I just checked with the latest Mac 1.6.0 (Beta 7) AD version & the behavior is the same.

I don't understand what you mean by "it doesn't go" or by "my document work changes to a horizontal dotted red line." Where does this line appear? There is a bug, or at least an inconsistency, in AD 1.5.5 in that if you select an artboard in the Layers panel & choose "Delete" from the popup contextual menu (the one you get by right-clicking on the artboard layer), the artboard & all its contents are immediately deleted, while if you select the artboard & tap the delete key on the keyboard, you get this dialog box: So, either use the keyboard delete key & choose the "Keep objects" option, or drag the layers out of the artboard layer in the Layers panel before deleting the then empty artboard layer, if you want to keep all of them.

And yet you called them compound layers, just as you did for the adjustment layers & lower layers in your Adobe example. In both the Adobe & Affinity apps these items appear in the Layers panel. Nobody calls it the "Object panel,' which would be the logical choice if some of them where just objects & not also layers. They are all layers, whether identified as such or not.

Again, there is no "non-layer" to rasterize. You must create a layer & select it for there to be a layer for the Perlin Noise filter to affect.

Glad to hear that but I am a bit surprised the printer needed to be connected via USB for the missing color option to appear. For my old MP620, switching to its wireless network printer setting does not eliminate any of the options shown in my screenshot. I wonder if switching your printer back to a network connection would now include the other options. In my experience, the Canon printer software can be finicky that way, sometimes needing a direct connection to enable things that can't be enabled otherwise.

Actually, my post was inspired by the confusion over the different kinds of layers in Affinity, as well as in many other apps that simply don't call some kinds of layers by that name. See for example Adobe's https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/using/layer-basics.html page, where among things it says "Sometimes layers don’t contain any apparent content. For example, an adjustment layer holds color or tonal adjustments that affect the layers below it." It also refers to a Smart Object as "a special type of layer."