R C-R

Just to add a tiny bit to what MBd already said for newcomers here: if you have used other software makers' support sites for help with their products, prepare to be blown away by how much better the support you can get here from the Affinity team is than anything else you likely have seen from anybody else.
 
Here, you won't find any of those annoying scripted "boilerplate" answers that are not relevant to whatever you ask about & make you wonder about the support person's reading comprehension skills.
 
This is support done right!

The forum's search feature leaves a lot to be desired, even for four or more character searches. I almost never use it, instead using Google or Bing. To restrict their results to this site, just add "site:affinity.serif.com" to your queries, for example like this:
 
RAW site:affinity.serif.com
 
But if you do that, you will see why 4 or more characters are required. Using Google, RAW generates about 3400 hits. HDR generates about 950, & NIK about 575.

Also take note of the button in the context toolbar that looks like a lock with two lines. Click that to lock the aspect ratio so if you move one handle the other automatically moves to maintain it.

Just to add a tiny bit to what MBd already said for newcomers here: if you have used other software makers' support sites for help with their products, prepare to be blown away by how much better the support you can get here from the Affinity team is than anything else you likely have seen from anybody else.
 
Here, you won't find any of those annoying scripted "boilerplate" answers that are not relevant to whatever you ask about & make you wonder about the support person's reading comprehension skills.
 
This is support done right!

So I guess you did not check out the new app unveiled yesterday on the App Store by the Scandinavian startup Sloof? They claim their Lirpa app will compete head to head with Affinity, Adobe, et al, mirroring all their functions in a low priced, all-in-one app. It is said to be backwards compatible with all previous file formats & its tiny file size is intended to help reverse the trend to ever more bloated apps.

Jip today things in IT are all very fast-moving, something you buy today is pretty fast outdated tomorrow, that's the way of cookie crumbles! - Having a good hardware & software system integration and ideally being optimally coordinated and stable with each other is mandantory for a halfway good and performant computer.
 
There isn't usually much difference between the Mac/Win systems here, at least not if you are going to buy something of (hopefully) better quality here. Look for example at Microsofts own Surface hardware line offerings here, what they offer is similar to the Apple stuff and is price wise also equally expensive here.
 
The good hardware in the Windows world is also expensive, though you have much more choices here and you can of course also build your own tailor-made computer of selected components you want to have specially inside. - In contrast to the Win world, OS and hardware related things are always easier for Apple to handle, since they only have to support their own dedicated hardware/software and not those thousends of foreign computers and components here too. - Finally all hardware vendors can only component wise place inside what the market and other vendors do actually offer and have on sell here. And the hardware generally only works as good as the software who finally drives and interoperates with it does permit this, if the software is buggy the best hardware can't shine and play out it's full potential (the same applies the other way round, if the hardware is crap the best software can't help)!

The Dust and Scratches filter is working fine for me in 1.5.2 running on El Capitan. Assuming you have a pixel layer selected, maybe this is a bug unique to Mavericks? 
 
The Curves tool "Picker" also works for me. But note that you have to click & drag on the image for it to do anything -- just clicking somewhere on the canvas won't set a node on the graph. The AP Curves adjustment help topic needs to be updated because it incorrectly says:
So basically, if you just click without at least dragging the pointer very slightly, you won't get a node.

@R C-R
 
Fair enough. A good discussion. A hard one though, you've made me think.
 
Ultimately it boils down to to the fact that if I want to use Afinity on my two computers it'll cost me twice as much.
 
If there were a dual-platform deal I would consider using Affinity.
 
Regards

Very cool! Yet another feature I never would have been aware of had it not been mentioned in the forum.  :)

If you bought Affinity Photo through the Mac App Store it should have downloaded & been installed in your Applications folder automatically. Since this will not delete or replace the trial version, you will end up with both versions on your Mac. You can drag the trial version to the trash & empty it.
 
If you cannot find the retail version in your Applications folder, sign into the Mac App Store with the same Apple ID you used when you bought the app & go to the "Purchased" section. You should see Affinity Photo listed there with a button next to it labeled "Download." Click that & the app should be automatically downloaded & installed.

Unfortunately, the only reference I can find to this feature in AP help is in the Preferences topic, which just says, "File recovery interval—choose the behavior of the application's autosave."
 
That needs to be updated & expanded into something more informative.

Would have known Petar would have been right on any thread talking about "all in one apps".
 
Anyway - our (well documented) reasons for having separate apps haven't changed in three years.
 
Have Ad0be released their "all in one app" yet?

It's a bit unrealistic to expect one application to "do it all", and risking that the various components are lacking in comparison to specialist software. Xara and PhotoLine combine both vector and bitmap editing, but those miss other things again. No tool is perfect.
 
I do not paint in Photo or Designer or Photoshop - I prefer Krita and Clipstudio, because their primary focus is digital painting and sketching, and they do it way better than those three. I prefer Cinema4d and Blender for 3d work and lettering: even with Photoshop's 3d functions, I find Photoshop's 3d to be way too limited for usability, features, and output quality. If I need to do publishing, I prefer InDesign (although I hate the subscription).
 
The problem is also knowing where to stop: some people need a super chart tool, others responsive web mockup tools, and yet others again require perspective projection tools with z-channel support, or animation/video timelines. Where does it stop? To combine all of this into one application would cause bloat, and from a developer's point of view it becomes a nightmare to maintain.
 
In my opinion the trouble is that so many different users from widely different backgrounds expect a tool that does "everything". That is an unrealistic expectation. So much quality specialist software out there - Affinity should not be trying to reinvent the wheel, but improve the carriage that carries its users instead. Nor should a designer expect any single software app to "do it all".
 
Instead, improve file exchange abilities between software. Ideally an open design format that supports seamless collaboration between widely varying apps would be the holy (utopian) grail.

Automatic save is not a feature of either Affinity app. Both apps have a File Recovery interval setting in preferences, but that is not the same thing as a traditional autosave feature -- it just sets the interval for saving temporary data for any currently open documents, which it will offer to use if the app crashes to try to restore the documents to their pre-crash state the next time you open the app.
 
But if you close a document normally, as Lee D says it will ask you if you want to save any changes you have made to an existing, previously saved file or if you want to save new work that has never been saved before. At that time, the temp version will be deleted -- otherwise there would be a constantly growing number of files cluttering up the hard drive in a location not normally accessible even if users choose the "Don't Save" option when closing a file normally.
 
So basically, if you click "Don't Save," the work will not be saved unless you have some other utility or OS feature that will do this independently of the app, like a versioning control feature.

For non-commercial use, the Mac App Store license terms for the Affinity apps are very generous. Affinity even allows Family Sharing, making it possible for other family members to download them using their own Apple ID.
 
I installed both apps on my wife's iMac via family sharing. Even though she is unlikely ever to use them, it is useful for me to have them installed there so I can use them as a reference point when there is some feature that seems to be misbehaving on my own iMac.

The little white icon with the red line through it is is the "None" color swatch button -- according to the Affinity Photo help topic Color panel (Photo Persona only), "Click the None swatch to make the color completely transparent (for the tool, fill or stroke)."
 
What it does in effect is to set the selected color swatch to 'no color.' 

I know that for one reason or another a lot of users will not read a READ THIS FIRST topic, even if it is pinned to the top of the forum. But one of the reasons I suggested it is then we could simply provide a link to it when someone asks something that it covers instead of having to repeat the same answers over & over.
 
For similar reasons, I would like to see online versions of the built-in help for each app & for each platform version. It would be much easier to provide links to the relevant help topics than to quote from or try to summarize their contents over & over in different topics. An added benefit would be that users of one platform could refer to the help for the other one to see if their replies are relevant to both. If all the different language versions were online, we could link to the appropriate one, at least for those who have included location info in their profiles or otherwise make that obvious.

@MrArtist
 
Again, there is no way for Serif/Affinity to know who has bought the Mac versions, so how could they possibly offer a cross-platform deal? They don't sell the Mac versions directly, only through the MAS. If they ever decide to sell them directly, they would have to sell a different version, one that replaced the Apple ID based method of licensing & distribution with something else, meaning there would be three different versions of each app they had to support -- which in turn means customers would have to pay for the additional cost of doing that.
 
There is quite obviously an extra cost for single platform users because they would be defraying part of the development, account maintenance, distribution, etc. costs for the other platform. Why should single platform users be forced to pay extra for that?
 
As for "these more enlightened and perhaps platform agnostic times" Adobe's "enlightened" form of that is the subscription model, wherein users never buy the software, just rent it. If that is more to your liking, Adobe will be happy to take your money, month after month, but for a great many of us, the 'buy it once, own it forever' model Affinity has chosen is the more 'enlightened' one.

1. It is not really the "same" software, any more than Adobe's or Microsoft's software use the same code for their Mac & Windows products. The Affinity team has made the two versions as functionally identical as possible, but "under the hood" they are quite different.
 
2. As has been explained many, many times in this forum, the Mac versions, like all apps sold through the Mac App Store (MAS for short), are keyed to the purchaser's Apple ID, & for security & privacy reasons Apple does not share individual purchaser data with MAS developers, so there is no way for Serif/Affinity (or any other MAS developer) to know if you bought the MAS version.
 
3. Also mentioned many times, when they were deciding what the apps should cost before they ever went to market, the separate license model was chosen because it meant they could offer them at a substantially lower price, so users who only work on one or the other platform would not have to pay more for something they could not use.

Thanks MEB! Actually none of my computers are for commercial use, unless you consider being retired to be a business. I'd say it's the best job I've ever had! :-)

Hi d.payne! Just a suggestion but to minimize spam you might want to change your forum name to something not so obviously an e mail address.

I have to say that from a marketing standpoint, putting the link to the trials at the bottom of these pages seems (to put it as kindly as I can) less than optimal when combined with their trendy "Web 2.0" scrolling effects. Not only does it require a lot of scrolling to get to the bottom where these tiny little links are, for those with a keyboard with an "End" key the browser may not even get to the bottom of the page if that key is pressed, or may scroll down to the end & then immediately back up to some intermediate part of the page.
 
It seems much more sensible to me to include these links immediately below the 'Buy' links at both the top & bottom of the page.

I agree. Every image is different. What works fine for one may work very poorly for another.

No, no! :ph34r:  It is (off course) neither "top, both or bottom", nor (how I see) the transparency and (also) nor rectangular vs. selection brush or magic wand.
It's always the image itself and his own composition, contrasts and characteristic attributes.
 
As regards transparency: The transparency "has been considered" in all my tests. My two following results are similar. Similar good. And, in my opinion, on the left side middle and bottom similar bad.
The source are the square at the centre. With and without transparency. Selection tool was magic wand:
 

 
As regards position: The images above have their "dirty corners" on the left side, this one at the top right (painting within the selection, then invert selection and fill):
 

 
In both sketches are "dirty corners" depending on the composition and on the acute angle with strong contrast. In another images we will have another problems. My reason for the "dirty corner" in example1.jpg involves two steps. (further refinement as a intermediate step on the bottom would be required):
 

 
It means: Different pictures need different selection-areas. We need a kind of intuition and the intuition need time and some tests. Btw. and ..
 
as regards rectangular: All my selections are rectangle :P

They won't join because you can only join a pair of open curves & the pink layer is a Curves object consisting of two closed curves & one open one. You can use the Divide boolean on the pink layer to separate it into 3 curves, but that will (annoyingly) close the open curve you are trying to join with the green curve.
 
Fix that by breaking the now closed pink curve at the two nodes connecting the straight line segment, deleting the straight line, selecting the remaining pink curve & the green curve & joining them.