John Rostron

Do you mean Designer? Or should you have said Photo? I understood that Designer does not support plug-ins of anysort. John

Or could it be the other way round? I notice that in the Affinity histogram, there is a green spike at the RHS, not present in the Nikon histogram. This presumably corresponds to the white on the sign. Have you tried adjusting the levels to get rid of this spike? John

No, my guess is that this will scale them both proportionally (maintain the aspect ratio). N.B. I think that the increment in each case should be 20 (10 each side, centred). John

I have not tried this, but the obvious route is: Document > Resize Canvas Clik on the centre of the nine squares (to indicate you wish to centre your old document within the new). In the width box enter w+20 In the height box, enter h+20 Press Enter This should do what you want. You should be able to record it as a macro. John

In Photoshop I could open the file, and then Save As with another name. That new name then becomes the working name of the file in use (when you Save). In Photo, if you Save As, it saves as a .afphoto file. If you Export to a new name, the working name is still the same. The only way to get the true duplicate is to do it in the Operating System before opening. John

I have AP, Zerene Stacker and Helicon Focus (not HeliconCapture). For a Focus Merge, I start off with Affinity for a 'quick and dirty' run, then examine the result. If it satisfies me, I stick with it, otherwise I try Zerene or Helicon. I find that AP suits about half the time. The Focus Stacking on AP could be improved, in particular it should offer a choice of algorithms. I find that, for a given stack, the different algorithms can result in different appearances of the backgrond and the prevalence of halos. You can encourage Affinity to improve the process by posting a request in the Feature Request forum. If you do I will add my support. John

ACDSee will recognize .afphoto files and will also display the embedded thumbnail. John

I have placed a description on Creating a Seamless Tiled Background Image (in Photo) in the Tutorials Section. This method is not of universal application, but it may work for @MaryLou. It has the advantage of not needing the healing brush (unless you want to). John

A recent post in the Questions forum asked about seamless tiling. There are also video tutorials available, such as the one on Seamless Textures. I describe here how I created a seamless tile to form a repeatable background to the pages on one of my web site. The website was for a wood, so the starting point for the background image was a photo of the autumn woodland floor covered in leaf litter: This image will not tile seamlessly. The first step is to apply the Affine transformation (Filters > Distort > Affine) with an offset of 50% in each of the x and y axes. This gives: The left and right edges of this would now tile seamlessly (as would the top and bottom. But there is the mismatch along the central axes. To get rid of these I placed images of single leaves onto these axes. The leaves were scanned on a flatbed scanner; the individual images edited to remove the white background and they were then saved as .png images. The leaves were placed onto my background using File > Place, and then resized to some extent to get the right scale, and they were randomly rotated. This has now masked all the non-seamless axes. The Affine transform is now reversed, using the same procedure as before ( (Filters > Distort > Affine) with an offset of 50% in each of the x and y axes) This has now created a seamless tile. However, in this example, The placed leaves are conspicuously around the edges, so I added some more at random points over the rest of the image: I could have added more, but I chose to stop there. This image now forms a seamless tile. To demonstrate the effect, I placed four copies of the image together to show how they tile seamlessly (or they would do if I get my placing more precise). In this example, I started off with a background of leaf litter on the woodland floor. I could have started with a blank image and placed leaf images all over it to hide any background. Then I would begin the procedure as above. This would probably have been better since there would be no distinction between the the various leaf images; they would blend in better. However, for my purposes, I liked the original woodland floor image. For a background page for a website, I faded the image above to as not to be too intrusive. I used this technique for the Friends of Coombe Wood web pages. (Apologies for not updating it. I have been unable to visit for the last few months.) John

@MaryLou, I used something like this to create a seamless image of leaf litter for the Friends of Coombe Wood website. I started with a square image of the woodland floor with full leaf cover. I then applied the Affine transform, with 50% shift. I then placed single leaves onto the main image covering the joins. Finally I reversed the Affine transform. The image was then faded to produce the final background image. The single leaf images were done by scanning the leaves on a flatbed scanner then removing the white background. Apologies for not updating this site, but I have not been able to get to the woods in recent months. John

Thanks, @v_kyr. I looked in various menus, but never thought to look in Assistant. I have never used it to date, but have read about it in these forums. The capability of Affinity (and the forum members) never ceases to amaze me. But you do need to know where to look! John

@carl123's suggestions worked, even without deleting the background layer as @v_kyr said. However I have now run into what is probably an unsurmountable problem. The procedure later continues with adding a live USM layer. This gets added to the current layer, but I need to move it. I am told by a pop-up that the macro recorder cannot record moves. I have looked to see if there are menu items that would help, but no luck there. I think that if I want to implement this edge mask - unsharp mask process, I shall have to do it manually. I was actually getting quite slick at it! John

Thanks to @carl123, @v_kyr and @R C-R. I shall work my way through this advice and let you know how it goes. Just to confirm, by 'opaque', I meant 'opaque to my understanding'. Once I had @R C-R's explanations it all became pellucid! John

I first duplicate the Background layer, then convert this new layer using Filter > Detect > Edges. I then add two adjustment layers, HSL to reduce the saturation to zero, then Levels to set the black and white points to 10% and 55%. This image is of the layers panel at this point: I then shift-click to select the top three layers: I then merge the three layers with Ctrl-Shift-E: Repeating this process with Macro Recording on, the first step looks the same: But when I try and select one of the other layers, I get: Depending on which layer is already selected, one of these options may not be greyed-out. As I said before, these options are opaque to me (whether greyed-out or not)! John

When I get back to my desktop, I will see if I can take some screenshots both with and withour macro recording. John

I understand that Smart Sharpen in PS is a form of the deconvolution algorithm. Are there any plans to add deconvolution to Affinity's arsenal? John

Lightroom also has this feature. I would support it John

I support @JayH's request. John Edit: I would now withdraw my support for this proposal.

I would support @JayH's request. I also find this re-sizing annoying. John

I was trying to follow the tutorial from @MikaG on How to: Sharpening with Edge Masks from January 14th, 2016. This worked OK on a couple of trial images. I then tried to record his procedureas a macro. This involved merging three layers, the modified background layer and two adjustment layers. This worked fine in my macro-free trial, but would not work when recording as a macro. The message I get when trying to select one of these layers is quite opaque. I get the same message with each of the layers I seek to merge. Is selecting a layer in such circumstances a proscribed operation when recording macros? I note that @MikaG comments that: "Once the function of Actions is added to Affinity Photo it will become a task even faster". John

The expression (w-x)*x/w/w should be zero at each end, rising to a maximum of 0.25 in the middle. Thus the arch should rise up a quarter of the current position above the x-axis (h-y). The a parameter at the default of 1 would have no effect. As a decreases, the value of the expression should rise in inverse proportion. It should do so strictly monotonically. It is not doing this on my Windows 10 PC. Note the 2* is just a fudge factor to make it behave as expected. (Note that strictly monotonic means that the rise should always be positive and non-zero.) John

I take it that you mean that other software will not read the .afphoto format. As @Fixx says you need to export in a format such as .png, .tiff or .jpg. John

Thanks, @stokergI will live in hope. John

I believe that Affinity uses the IE engine to display some of its output. So, even if you do not use it, Affinity does. John

This is an impressive image, worthy of showing off in the Share your Work Forum. However, if you are asking about using Photo, this should really be posted in the Questions Forum.