DianeF

Lacerto, I think you described very neatly all the issues with the new interface. So many options are grayed out until you start to manipulate them. I think that's the most confusing part of this change.

OK, thanks. When I get home and connect the laptop to the monitor, I'll see if it persists.  And, thanks for telling me how to solve it if it does.

I think the additional section got added when I added pages. I noticed it when I saw that the page numbers had a restarted to 1 on the next page that I had added.
If it happens again, I will use the History panel to record the steps though I don't know how to record a video sing that panel. But I can list all the steps.

HI Hangman,
I"m glad too. I'll report any new crashes if any occur, but hopefully they will not. At least I now know how to look for extraneous things within a master.
Thank you again for your help.

Hi Hangman,
Thanks for the suggestion. I did as you suggested and things worked out pretty well. i ended up having the copy the text from the previous file into the new file, but I didn't get any crashes when I made changes. So I now have a file that appears to work--fingers crossed!
Thanks to everyone for the help with this.

That would be wonderful. Thank you! I'll test it and let you know if it works okay.

Thanks, Hangman.
Actually, I didn't change the Raw engine in the develop assist settings. It is set for Serif Labs, and I left it at that. What I did do was close Hernandez's resource file and then reopen it. When I did that, the three options appeared.
In any case, I'm glad it's sorted out now. And, for the time being, the issue is irrelevant to me since I have an Iphone 12 which doesn't allow saving photos in raw format. So, this will become useful to me the next time I upgrade my phone.

Thanks, Hangman.
Actually, I didn't change the Raw engine in the develop assist settings. It is set for Serif Labs, and I left it at that. What I did do was close Hernandez's resource file and then reopen it. When I did that, the three options appeared.
In any case, I'm glad it's sorted out now. And, for the time being, the issue is irrelevant to me since I have an Iphone 12 which doesn't allow saving photos in raw format. So, this will become useful to me the next time I upgrade my phone.

After reading through these replies again, I opened a fresh copy of the downloaded file which contained the color image. Without doing any work on the file, I clicked on the drop down box for output. This time, the other options were available. So, maybe something I did in the previous file caused these options not to be available. So, now it's clear that this is not a bug. Thanks for all the suggestions for solving this issue.

OK, thanks for the clarification.
I tried it in Designer and it's a great feature for artists who want to view their work in grayscale.

I'm using Firefox as the browser and OS Monterey 12.1. I can try this with Safari though I usually don't have any trouble with Firefox.
Just tried with Safari and was able to download the betas.
 

I have noticed a sizeable difference in color quality when printing the same photo using Affinity Photo vs. Photoshop, on the same printer, with the same settings. The colors I get from printing from Photoshop are truer to the original photos than the colors I get when printing from Affinity Photo. This is especially true of the blues. PS prints a wider range of blues than does AP. I recently printed a photo that had a lot of dark blue gray in it, and the print from AP was almost complete gray with little blue.
 
Part of the issue seems to be there there are more color settings available in PS than in AP. In PS, you can indicate a rendering intent and check black point compensation. As far as I could tell, these settings were not available in AP.
 
At the moment, I have both programs on my desktop computer but only AP on my laptop. At some point, I will no longer have PS available to me as it won't be compatible with further Mac OS upgrades. At that point, if I wanted to use PS for printing, I would have to purchase a subscription to PS which is something I don't want to do and the reason that I purchased AP.
 
So, my questions are:
 
1. Does AP have any plans to improve its color management tool to get better color output?
2. Are there already color management tools in AP that allow for more fine tuning of color output, tools that I'm missing or unaware of?
3. Has anyone else noticed these differences and found a way to compensate for them, such as increasing the amount of blue in a photo with an HSL adjustment layer? This seems like a very hit or miss strategy, however.
 
Thanks

Thanks so much, Alfred. Another new thing to learn and explore.

I did this in Designer.
 

 
If you create a rectangle, leave it selected and press fx in the layers panel to open the  Layer Effects panel.
 

 
Tick Gradient Overlay (click on it too) and then click on the Gradient swatch. That will apply a gradient.
 

 
When you select a gradient control handle, change the colour by clicking on the swatch in the panel.
 

 
And there we are.  

 
Use the various controls such as Angle, Scale or Offset to adjust things to suit.
 

 
 

Wow, this seems so esoteric. How would a lay person have any idea what equations to use or how to create them?
 
Do you think the programs will have have a more intuitive method of shaping text along a curve? If not, I wonder if the help files could have some sample equations or some explanation of how to create equations that do certain kinds of distortions.

To crop to a selection you can also do this...
1. Make your selection
2. Invert the selection
3. Hit delete key
4. Use Document > Clip Canvas to get rid of the excess canvas space
Steps 2,3 & 4 can be recorded in a macro
 

I think what you have is an assets category named "Snowflakes" with a sub-category with the default name "Assets." You can change the name of the sub-category by clicking on the sub-category's menu & choosing "Rename..." from the popup menu. 
 
As far as I know, you can't add items to a category, only to a sub-category, but on a Mac you should be able to drag & drop an item into the sub-category as long as it is opened. To do that, make sure its disclosure triangle is pointing downward.

Hi Tom,
 
I can answer the last part of your question If you're on a Mac, use Finder to find a .psd file. Right click on the file and choose "Get Info".  In the Info dialog box, you will see the option "Open With". Choose Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo. Once you've chosen that option, also click on the Change All button. That will change the default option from Photoshop to Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo.
 
If you're using Windows, someone else will hopefully respond.
 
I don't believe that AP or AD can open InDesign files. But they can open .psd files.
 
Diane

Is this what you're trying to do?
 
If so, here's how I did it:
 
1. Using the pen tool, I created a shape. It shows up as a curve in its own layer
2. Using the Place command, I brought in a poster image that I had. It was a rectangular image. When I brought it in it was in its own layer above the curve shape.
3. I dragged the poster image over the curve shape layer (not over the mask icron ono the layer), and what I got is what you see in the screen shot. Essentially the poster image was clipped to fit the shape of the curve.
 
The same process works if you create your first image using one of the shape tools in the left menu bar. Just be sure to drag your image over the words in the layer rather than over the mask icon.