kaffeeundsalz

Doesn't look like a suitable brush tip. Note how faint the stroke appears in the preview. Please select a solid round brush fom the Brushes panel and try again. It should be something like this:

When you click on the "More" button in the context toolbar, what does the active brush for the tool look like?

Any chance this could be brought to the developers' attention again? The issue is still not fixed with the 1.8.4 updates. Here is a different description of the same problem:

Hi! The layer context menu from the Layers panel offers a row of colors at the bottom which can be used to assign color tags to layers. However, saving a layer composition with color tags applied as a snapshot and then restoring that snapshot will result in the removal of all color tags from the layers – either because these don't get saved with snapshots or because loading a snapshot deliberately resets all layer color tags for some reason. This is not a new problem with the 1.8.4 updates, I just didn't have time to create this topic earlier. Also, although I posted this in the Affinity Photo Bug forum, the problem is reproducible with Affinity Designer as well. I'm on Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer 1.8.4 under macOS 10.15.6 Catalina. I don't know if this has been reported before, but a quick forum search didn't bring up anything related. Cheers kaffeeundsalz

I get that this involves an extra step, but it's the easiest workaround I can think of as long as a) the OP needs quick mask mode with red overlay and b) Affinity Photo only offers this for selections.

Why don't you just load the layer mask to a selection with Cmd-clicking the layer and then use the Quick Mask feature by pressing Q? A selection can easily be turned back into a layer mask afterwards.

The above image has quite an HDR sense to it and may have been composed from multiple exposures of the same shot. Affinity can do that with the HDR Merge feature. If you have just one exposure, try to boost the Local Contrast setting in the Tone Mapping Persona (while keeping the Tone Compression all the way down). This works better with higher bit depths. Also, the harvester looks heavily retouched. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of brushwork involved in the shading of the vehicle's body.

The Affinity applications must have Screen Recording permissions from macOS in order to get the color picker working correctly. You can check this at System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Screen Recording. However, since permissions are really just an on or off setting in macOS, this doesn't explain the occasional malfunctions and seemingly random behavior you describe.

That's right, @james948 . Affinity Designer should ignore pixel aligment entirely when no rasterising is involved.

Affinity Designer does have a very prominent Force Pixel Alignment feature in the toolbar. If that is turned on, newly created artboards are automatically pixel aligned, even when the documents units are not set to pixels. It just doesn't affect artboards that already are in the document, and to be honest, I'd find it quite irritating if activating Force Pixel Alignment would alter the size and/or aspect ratio of existing artboards. The problem comes from the fact that depending on the document's resolution, dimensions in real-world units like millimeters or points can be quite close to the next whole pixel but also quite far away from it (a problem that intensifies with low resolutions). And what about maintaining the aspect ratio of an artboard or object? Even with the original dimensions of an object being perfectly represented by whole pixels, scaling it proportionally can easily result in a size where the pixel alignment is only possible for one dimension. That's why Affinity Designer does introduce decimal places when scaling objects even with Forced Pixel Alignment turned on: because it weights maintaining aspect ratio higher than forcing pixel alignment. The valid use cases where non-pixel-aligned Artboards are needed are all those where perfect pixel alignment isn't possible because the size and/or ratio of an artboard or object cannot be repesented by whole pixels. If you want to avoid this, click Force Pixel Alignment and refrain from proportional scaling.

Note that Affinity Designer is more of an Illustrator competitor than it is a Photoshop competitor.

Hybrid vector/raster illustrations are covered extensively in the Affinity Designer Workbook, for example in chapters 3 and 4.

It's not really clear what you mean. If you modify an image with Affinity Photo and then export it als JPEG or PNG, the exported image will only contain the final result of your editing process. This means that you will lose all your adjustment layers and live filter layers that you may have applied to your image as well as the entire undo history. If you want to keep these, you'll indeed have to save the image as an Affinity file. Note that the undo history is not part of an Affinity file by default unless you choose File > Save History With Document prior to saving the image.

You may want to take a look at the official help resources to familiarize yourself with the basics: https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/tutorials/photo/desktop/video/309301203/ https://affinity.help/photo/en-US.lproj/pages/Macros_Batch/macros.html

Are all images of the same size and orientation and is the black area the same size in all images? If so, that would ease things a lot because with Affinity Photo, you could then just record a very simple macro where you do the cropping once, for example with the Resize Canvas feature or with the Crop tool. If you then create a new Batch Job, it's possible to include the recorded macro into the processing chain. The option to save the images as JPEG, including quality settings, are also available there.