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Just to be clear about that, on Macs it is an OS level feature, appearing in the Mac OS System Preferences > General section. It applies to all apps that include an "Open Recent" item in their File menus, as well as where a choice of recent apps & servers is offered. It is not a feature of the Affinity preferences.

Yes it is, which is why I do not understand why you think you need confirmation from Serif that it applies specifically to Affinity. It seems fairly straightforward to me: since we know different processes will benefit more from higher performance in different parts of the system, & there will always be other processes running besides those initiated by any one app, it does not make much sense to try to build a system based only or even mostly on how any one app will perform a few processes in some theoretical 'best case' scenario that is unlikely to occur very often, if ever. Say for example, you got a very 'non-generic' detailed reply from one of the developers that said in part that for some but not all of the adjustments or filters, up to certain pixel dimensions the app could, under best case conditions, benefit more from fewer faster cores but otherwise would benefit more from more slower cores, but that varied depending on the installed RAM, the size of the file(s) open at the time, & other factors. What help would that be to anybody trying to decide what to spend their money on?

No, that is not an even remotely accurate or useful comparison. Affinity files can use any of seven different color formats at bit depths ranging from 8 to 32 bits (only three of which use the RGB color space), & can contain an unlimited number of layers, which support various kinds of blending & transparency ranging from 0 to 100%. They use only lossless compression & may include multiple bitmap (raster) images as well as vector & text objects, plus histories, snapshots, thumbnails, document level color palettes, & several other kinds of data. JPEGs are limited to single layer ("flat") bitmap image file. All the widely supported versions use lossy compression, an 8 bit RGB color space, & cannot support transparency.

Why do you keep talking about jpegs?

Unlocking the child layers does prevent them from being resized when the parent is resized, but I now see that is not really what you were trying to do. Glad you got it sorted out.

I am not sure that would be very practical, if for no other reason than Affinity's native file format would have to support whatever DAM features that Persona would provide. That means changing the file format for everybody. Otherwise, there would be different versions of the format that users who did not buy the Persona could not use.

Lock children.

If you need to develop a RAW file in two different ways to combine the results, in Affinity Photo you could open the RAW file twice in two different documents, develop each one separately & then add one of them to the other document. Perhaps not as convenient as with PS, but doable.

The Escape key is already programmed to deselect all layers (& has some special functions in text entry mode), so it can't be used to do anything else. (I don't know why the app allows setting a custom keyboard shortcut to the Escape key; that is probably a bug or oversight.)

Using what app?

Anything you save in the .afphoto file format does not become a jpeg, a tiff, a png, or whatever -- that only happens if you export the file to one of those formats. The only thing you lose is the settings used to develop the RAW image if they are different from any presets you have created. So for example, once you develop the RAW file in AP you can add adjustment layers, masks, live filter layers, crops, & such to the document (all of which are non-destructive), as well as destructive filters (which can be applied to duplicates or via snapshots in an "undoable" way), & so on. If you save your work in the .afphoto format, you can open the file at any time in the future & still have all the layers, adjustments, etc. in the file, ready to be edited/reedited/deleted as you see fit, & add any other edits you want.

What app are you using to view this with? I drag copied your uploaded Bitmap2.png.0a62a3e7602b5b8e950b448eeb141c2c.png file directly from this web page to the desktop on my Mac & opened it with Preview.app. It shows that the file does have a transparent background, exactly like in the second screenshot in my earlier post. Also, Finder's "Get Info" for the file shows that it has an alpha channel, a pretty good indication that it does include transparency:

I don't have any performance problems with it either, using a Mac running Sierra. The mystery deepens ....

There are many topics already started to discuss this. Just do a search for "Publisher" using the search box at the top right of the page to find them. I get 2000+ hits when I do that. Not all are about the release date but in the first few shown you should find plenty of posts that are.

Could you explain a bit more about where exactly you are seeing the delays? Also, are you also seeing CPU use spikes? I am just wondering why I can't reproduce this behavior on my iMac.

As I said, not all software apps display transparency. I do not use Windows so I can't say what the Win10 photo viewer does but it may simply be that it does not, so checking the exported file with another app that does may reveal that there really is nothing wrong with the export. All I can say for certain is that viewed in Apple's Preview app on my Mac, as my screenshot shows the transparency is preserved. Apple's Finder & the "Quick Look" function do not show transparency. This has caused more than one forum user to assume incorrectly that there is something wrong with Affinity's PNG export function, so it would not be too surprising if that was what was happening here.

I understand that if it does not fit your needs you are not willing to buy two versions, but I have to wonder what you would consider to be a better fit. There are not a lot of choices in this price range that offer comparable features, even if you compare the price of both versions to the alternatives. Photoshop is the obvious alternative, but it is now available only on a subscription basis & only allows the app to run on two computers at a time without deactivating one of them to run it on another computer. PS is more mature & does offer more features, but it also requires a substantially higher performance computer to perform as well as Affinity Photo does on a less powerful one. All I am saying is that there are a number of things to consider when looking for the best fit besides the purchase price of the app. Regardless, I hope you find what is the best fit for you.

I am not sure what you mean about stopping the "KV" process, but the only way to be sure Kaspersky Internet Security is not restarting and/or running any "faceless" processes in the background is to uninstall it, using the uninstaller provided by Kaspersky for this purpose. Make sure you use the instructions for your version (18.0 if it is the most up-to-date one). This is necessary because Kaspersky intentionally makes it difficult to disable the software. This is a common practice for security software -- if it was easy to disable it, it would pose a security risk if for some reason malware that was clever enough to do this did infect your system. Also note that if you are running v16, there are known incompatibilities with other software, including Little Snitch. This is one of several reasons that if you feel it is necessary to run this kind of software on your Mac, it is important to use the most up-to-date version, not just of your primary security software but of every third party add-on you have decided to install. I would be remiss if I did not mention briefly that there are some legitimate concerns about the advisability of running any third party A-V software on Macs, & about Kaspersky specifically, but I assume you know about that already so I won't elaborate on that here.

What exactly do you mean by this? When you go to Affinity's web page for Affinity Photo, for instance the https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/ page for the US, you should see this or something very similar to it: Did the two separate Buy buttons, one specifying "Mac" & the other "Windows" not suggest anything to you about what you were buying? Even if it did not, if you are a Mac user you should be aware of the licensing terms for anything you can buy from the Mac App Store ("MAS"), including but not limited to Affinity Photo. The terms clearly specify that the application licenses you are buying are valid only for use on Apple branded computers. So if this is an ethical issue for you, it applies to tens of thousands of Mac apps, not just to Affinity's.

I am not sure about this but I think that depending on the filters & adjustments used, the only thing you need to be careful about is selecting RGB (16 bit) rather than RGB (8 bit) if you want to make sure there is no change to the appearance of the document. That is because Lab is inherently a 16 bit color format, so conversion to an 8 bit color format may eliminate subtle (or possibly not so subtle) color variations the filters & adjustments have added to the file.

Adding very slightly to what @toltec said, note that the Erase Brush Tool only has one 'mode' -- it erases pixels regardless of the brush color.

For that to work as intended, make sure "Current Layer" is chosen in the Context toolbar & not "Current Layer & Below." However, as mentioned above inpainting alone may not get the desired results, & excluding part of the image may make things worse. Experimentation (& when needed, liberal use of undo) is the key to getting the best possible results.

Hi @abject39 I am unclear about what exactly you are exporting to PNG, or why in your first screenshot there is a black background. When I export the whole document using the PNG-24 preset, I get the following, which preserves the transparent background: The transparency won't show here, but if you open it in an app that does show transparency (like Preview.app if you are using a Mac) the transparency will be obvious from the same checkered background that Affinity uses as a stand in for transparency: Exporting individual Artboards also works fine for me, preserving transparency for the Artboards that use it. The only bug I found, if it is indeed a bug, is that in the File > Export window when choosing what to export, there is only one item named "DB Meter" in the popup instead of one for each of the several artboards with that name. Giving each of them unique names like DB Meter 1, DB Meter 2, & so on fixes that, or alternately you can use the Layers panel in the Export Persona to create slices for each artboard & choose which one(s) to export from there.

Like I have said more than once now, no matter what I do with the downloaded file, I do not see CPU spikes, lags, or any other signs of the app using very many OS resources. I do not know how to make it any clearer than that.

Activity Monitor shows several other user processes running, one or more of which may be interacting with Affinity Photo and/or each other in unexpected ways. Possible candidates include Path Finder, Synology, Kaspersky, & Little Snitch. In fact, searching the web on "kav process OS X" (running with root access, no less) turns up at least one multiple complaints about it randomly pushing CPU usage to 100% or more or causing sluggish behavior. If this was something inherently wrong with AP, why don't I see something similar on my older & slower iMac? Why isn't this behavior widely reported in these forums by other Mac users? I don't run any 'helper' or 'enhancement' add-ons, in part because they can interact in undesirable ways & cause hard to diagnose & correct issues, including high CPU usage.