mur_phy

check to see if there is a mask that you might have active instead of the background layer as the inpainting tool needs to work on the actual pixel layer. Also, check to see if the pixel layer you want to work on is actually selected as it is easy to get working and not notice you have not selected the layer you want. Have done both of the above and have seen tutorial creators do the same. Easy just to get busy and not notice what layer you actually have highlighted.

Thanks silver for the link. I have saved it and as usual created a folder and will view the videos. I also have purchased the Affinity Photo Workbook but have not spent much time as I am involved in other stuff too. Trying to learn ON1 RAW 2018, Luminar 2018 and Aurora HDR 2018. While I find that HDR done in Aurora is the best with ON1 being second best as far as results are concerned, it is extremely slow compared to ON 1 load/process time. So far I have not had great success with Affinity HDR processing. I know folks have been looking for Affinity tutorials and yet I have seen no one mention those done by Carl Surry which are nicely done and he keeps finding new topics to discuss. He is involved in a FB group but all the tuts are also available on youtube.

No Joy!! Interestingly, in neither W10 startup in Task Manager nor in C Cleaner Startup is BD available which seems unusual but even when using End Task (another way to disable BD) while UAC activates, nothing further occurs.

thanks for the info but turning off BD did not change things but this time trying two ways, neither brought up the UAC. Will turn off BD in startup this time and reboot and report the result.

I get a message to update to 1.5.2.69 and have downloaded the .exe of 281 MB but having tried to run the executable have had no success. First tried the simple double click but the rotating circle went on and on and on. Rebooted the system. Tried to use "run as administrator" and after accepting the UAC warning for W 10 Pro ZERO occurs. Tried again to use the double click and after UAC the result is the same -- simply a blank background screen which is visible normally. Have tried a new d/l also and run as admin. Same result after approving UAC. Not sure what the issue may be but wonder if someone from AP can communicate directly with a solution. I have installed hundreds of programs over the past 21 1/2 years of computing experience and this is a first. TIA

just a suggestion -- like Real Estate -- location, location, location -- with computers it is Backup (BU), BU, BU. Now that you have the original files and 3 BU drives keep at least one BU off premises. Personally, I have a BU that happens continuously whenever any action is taken on the computer followed by 2 monthly BU's and one of those is kept off premises. I think that my last purchase was a 4 TB drive for about $200 Can. Someday I will have to adjust the other two but as they only have data and not the o/s/programs they don't have to be as large a capacity. Also, if you do take a trip for a few days or more, then secure the continuous BU drive after you have shutdown the system. HTH

ok, so after the effect of more exposure to the whole area except for the subject, then simply reduce the amount of exposure where the full amount is not required by painting with the paint brush tool making sure black is selected to remove the density as required by adjusting opacity and feathering? I opened your image in AP and selected the background but the paint brush tool only gives a + shape but the undo brush tool, giving a circle did change the background. To get exactly what is needed would require adjusting the opacity and feather so that there is a blending transition. By looking at the two layers, it seems that global adjustments were made to the whole image and then the copied selection layer with all but the subject transparent due to it being the upper layer shows the subject properly with the background layer as adjusted showing also. The order of doing the adjustments would seem to be to do the density first followed by the gaussian blur. Did you use the selection brush and select the subject and then invert and delete the background and then copy that selection to the adjusted background layer? I also imagine that this selection could be saved and if necessary at sometime be added to any background via paste or Place. Hopefully I am getting an understanding of the process and can remember but if I did understand the process, I will add this to my .rtf file I have to try to learn AP. Thanks Carl for the assistance. If I have messed up my thinking, please let me know one way or the other.

Not sure if anyone read my edits but I was able to just use the burn and blur tools to accomplish what was desired but was also looking for other alternatives and that is one idea Carl. Then I got to thinking -- if I can select the subject, then by inverting the background would be able to be adjusted separate from the subject. The only issue then would be that only part of the background needs to be affected. Your method seems to have done the trick although the selection was just a bit rough but not really visible in the final image. Thanks for the info. I just had thought that a gradient would work too but I just have to learn more about doing this so I can get it straight in my mind as to what is needed in any specific circumstance.

Hi IR Ok, I can give before and after. The image was taken by another retired pro and he did work on it himself but there were things I thought could be improved. We do this sort of thing all the time and are in constant conversation as we have known one another for over 30 years. I may work on the image again as there is a highlight area that I would like to adjust. While I did figure out my issue with the burn and blur which I use a lot I am still hoping to find alternatives that might work more quickly and I know I will have to do reviews of some of the video links I have saved and probably make some notes. Anyway I am attaching the two images and my adjustments have been renamed to "edited" before the rest of the file name. TIA just watched another video and it looks like there are quite a few steps I had forgotten. With the video from the Affinity producer it would have been good to know why certain choices were made. Relating to the image edited above, the initial photographer liked what was done. he had done some facial retouching prior to sending the file to me be we did discuss some of the highlights being a bit strong and the fact that the direction of light left the facial features a bit flat. Personally, I usually would light the subject with a cross light and be sure to turn the head toward the light and tilt toward the high shoulder.

I seem to be still having a difficult time with making adjustments with AP. I have viewed every tutorial I can find but must be either forgetting things or not finding things in the program that are supposed to be there. Often I like to tone down and/or blur a background and just when I think I have things figured out, time between the last editing I do and current workflow, I must be forgetting the steps to follow. I thought a burn/blur tool would do the trick and while it worked with some backgrounds I have used for other projects, the current project of the outdoor portrait is not doing the same result. "Well, it does work better if I had not for some reason forgotten that I had changed the opacity of the brush" -- at least that issue is solved but the others are still a bother. Next I thought, a gradient would possibly be the method. Tried the tool but not successful there either as the exposure adjustment still covered more area that desired. Quick Mask was not effective either or I just don't know what to do as I found the whole area turned red whereas I thought until I painted, there would be no mask. I have watched some videos and tried using overlays or gradients in Develop but was unable to control the gradient to just cover the area I wanted to work on. The overlay did nothing at all. There has to be something that is straight forward and simple to accomplish the task at hand but so far I have been unable to solve the issue. Perhaps someone will have info and I will try to add it to my notes for the future. Oh, all attempts have been to adjust the background layer although the image has been straightened, cropped, and some basic adjustments done to levels, exposure and brightness. TIA MW

Maybe complete instructions could be done regarding what Chris has said about creating the file in the first place as I find that Document>transparent background does not create anything and File > New provides a dialogue box but not sure what items need to be changed if any from the default settings. I have saved the other info so just clarification as to how to get to the point of saving the signature file would be good. Also, not sure what a .svg is but if that is the file type to be used, that is fine. Just was curious.

It would be nice to have a transcript of the video and I have mentioned this to other video creators. I like the idea of the arrow to where the instructor is placing the mouse. In addition, a pause in speaking allowing the student to find the spot and then be able to follow further would be most helpful. Sometimes when instructors have done things so many times themselves, it is easy to either miss a step in the instructions or move along so quickly, the student is not able to follow.

Not an answer but I too wish the icons were bigger and I also wish I could re-arrange then as some I use more often than others and can't always remember the Keyboard shortcut although I have a sticky note with most of the ones I use. I just don't do enough editing being retired etc to keep the CRS at bay.

V & RCR -- I will put this info into my files later on but I have a lot of other stuff to do at the moment. One is to check out the Fuji X T20 and drop into a couple places tomorrow/today to see if they have stock. However, I was able to complete the project and will attach the completed photo. One thing that did happen strangely was that after I attempted to work on an area of the last part which was the knife on the stand and I had used a filter mask to remove the background (oh, this was not an easy one -- wish AP had the device that ON 1 has to prevent the mask from running into an adjacent area) and then I noticed that the butt area of the knife could look better with a bit of the use of the sharpening tool. I selected what I thought was correct -- little icon next to the mask and clicked on it and got a message to the effect that the Assistant had rastorized the image and then I could not get anything to do with the mask as even when choosing the paint brush I did not get a circle but just cross hairs. There as also a bit of a mistake in the area that I thought I had cleaned up originally but upon looking at the result in Faststone Image Viewer it was apparent. What I did discover that I could use the in-painting tool and also the clone stamp tool and accomplished most of what I needed to do. I just don't know exactly what caused this situation nor how to avoid it in the future. Thanks so much for the replies and I will try to spend some time by creating another set of images as a test to see if I can get the color picker to do what I want. The method I used was not bad but not as easy nor as accurate as I might like on other occasions.

hi V -- as mentioned in my earlier response, I did discover the Outline and that does exactly the job I needed done. It just was not something obvious and I was looking for the word "border" in the list which is not there. I have used color picker with another program (DIP 2006) and simply by clicking on the eyedropper, the mouse pointer would change to a dropper and one could select the color from any source but when I tried that with AP, that did not occur so not sure of the technique with this program. Any ideas related to this would also be useful. Thanks for the ideas. MW

Dwarf -- maybe I am missing something either in understanding or it is just not there. I look at Effects (between Layers and Styles) and here is what I see -- Gausian Blur, 2 shadows, 2 Glow, Outline, 3D, Bevel/Emboss, Color Overlay and Gradient Overlay. Now here is the kicker -- thanks for pointing me in the right direction. I first looked at Bevel/Emboss and I might use that in the future but for now I decided to try Outline and with the color wheel I was able to put the color on the two insets reasonably correctly. For some reason, I could not get the color picker to do anything but may have to try it again unless there is a trick I have not found. I guess even when trying to use the help files, when the terminology is not exactly what is needed for the desired effect, one can't find exactly what is needed to be done. Hopefully, if anyone else is reading this thread, he/she will see what to do. In that vein, I also found that by doing a grouping, I could also darken and blur the background of the inset if desired. This program is quite different from others I have used so I am having a more difficult time in just learning how all the techniques actually work. So thanks again for the pointer to Effects. Now while I did not find Border listed, if there is a section that you had in mind, let me know. Once again, I am attaching an image of the technique I used and likely tomorrow I will try to finish the project. Then it will be a matter of adjusting my .rtf to have all the items in one concise place so I have a source to job my memory as I don't do as many images now as I used to. MW took a look and saw that I needed to adjust the opacity of the handle border as a bit too much of the background was showing through.

I am trying to put a border around an image that has been "place" or copy/pasted into another image but have not been able to add a border because after doing a resize of the canvas, and yes, the layer being affected is selected in the stack. Rather than developing and then using the Affinity Persona at this stage, I like to do all the basic work on the various individual layers to be used first just in case I totally mess things up. BU BU BU lol. So once I have the images done, I can then use the Marquee selection tool which is generally going to be the Elliptical and I have found that while it is not intuitive, someone in one of the videos may have mentioned or someone like Simon etc may have advised me to use the Q key for a quick mask so that the shape of the Marquee can be moved and adjusted to get the image selection desired. At this point the problem comes to the forefront. I have tried both copy/paste and place but no luck in making a border around the image that now resides as a layer above the base image layer. Any info on the correct procedure would be great. With DIgital Image Pro 10 it is very simple but I am trying to learn to do all things in Affinity Photo. I am going to try to review some videos but generally the border is for the base image and not an image within another image. One would think it would be simple but so far not so much. I am attaching a beginning .jpg but have saved all files also as .afphoto so the idea is visible but there are still one more item to have a border attached and one item what will be blended to the base background. Just wanted to solve one issue regarding the borders at this time and will add the instructions that work to my .rtf for doing composites so I have a workflow that will work for me at all times. TIA MW

not sure what was meant by "button" However, what would be nice if one could add tools and one good one would be Place. I looked at Edit>Preferences>Tools but did not see a means to add whereas adding to the Keyboard shortcut is fine as long as one can remember the shortcut lol. I have a good memory -- just short -- like my hair!

It would seem to me that if you need to choose "current layer & below" and the inpainting only is actually affecting the layer containing the actual image pixel data, then would not the method to be chosen to just do the inpainting on this layer and not have any blank layer above as the inpainting does not affect the blank layer anyway? If not, perhaps some other explanation can be made. Me too, RW, I am just trying to learn to use AP.

I suspect what you are speaking of is a program such as Lightroom or ON1 which have similar but different means of organizing images and doing ratings. Personally, I have never bothered spending time rating images. One, I don't take dozens and dozens of images, hoping or perhaps being able to choose what is best. I have to retrain myself to do this as for 33 years, I worked with a film camera and every time I turned the crank of the Hasselblad I had to say to myself -- $1. That was the cost of that frame of film and its processing and was not re-usable. Today we use image capture cards that are re-usable for years. ON1 and Affinity are similar but somewhat currently different but I think soon Affinity will be adding a built in Browser. Both then will simply point the location on your own HDD where you put the images that you capture via your Camera/phone. Just like any file that you create, you will simply make a folder and store images therein. I don't use MAC but let me explain further. On a Windows O/S there is part of the O/S a pre-created default folder called Pictures. Of course if you use a secondary data drive then simply again, create a folder and name it Pictures or whatever you like. Next when you do some photos, open Pictures and maybe create a folder called New and when you move the images from your image capture card put them into this destination folder. Now unless the only images on the card are from a specific photo expedition --eg, you go to Niagara Falls and spend the day doing photos or you do you Aunt's 90th birthday etc. this is a start. If it is specific, create a folder called Niagara Falls if that is what you have captured. However, lets say that on the card you have, pictures of your garden, a walk in the park with husband or dog, a birthday party etc. Now is the time to create new folders for each event and drag/drop or however you choose to move files into their appropriate folders. Sometimes you may wish to rename or add the date of the birthday in the name now is a good time to do that also. Expand this idea. New baby -- photos go into that folder with a date of birth. Each year you will do more photos so another folder could be created. First birthday -- make a sub folder inside the latest folder of that year. Proceed in the same way. Also, then rather than having a scattering of these folder, create a Folder called My Family and then have one for each child and others for various family events such as XMAS etc. Have a folder for photos of yourself, husband etc. Same thing for any other type of image making you do. Now of course over the years things get more complicated as your whole Picture folder fills up with more and more images with more folders -- which again makes it necessary to think about how you want to store things and in what folders. Your search on your computer becomes very important as the number of files increase. I just did a look at Properties of my Picture Folder. 645 GB, 2514 Folders, 80912 files (or images) I no longer work as a professional photographer so just imagine what a pro's storage must look like? Some wedding photographers do up to 6000 images on a job (crazy, I know). In 1974 I personally photographed 174 weddings so you can imagine what that would be like today as far as numbers of photos and storage space required. Still less than all the bags of negatives at that time however. I don't know if you have ever heard of a program called Search Everything but it is freeware and is a great program for finding this that you may not remember under which folder you have placed a file if you need it in the future. I am not sure if posting of links is approved on this forum but a quick internet search using your default of favorite search engine will locate it. Now whether it works on a MAC I don't know. What Affinity will do when they come out with their browser is to point to your Pictures folder and then allow you to browse your files from directly in their program rather than having to use the Open command which simply takes you to your own HDD where you now browse to the folder in which you have stored and image that you wish to work on. HTH

Where you store images is strictly up to the user. Under most circumstances, a user will save to a local hard drive on the computer. As I mentioned above, it is a good idea, if you plan to do a lot of photography and image editing to have a secondary HDD to store your data which will include images. Then BU BU BU. Now if you are going to be operating as a business, I would also recommend using a computer and BU drives that NEVER are connected to the internet and I would not even network those computers to a computer that is connected to the internet. If you are planning to send images to social media, clients etc. then transfer images via an SD card or thumb drive. Personally, if I was still operating a business, I would also format those devices after each usage or at least run a scan on each drive with my AV and Anti malware software. Nothing worse than losing important personal or business images. Over the 17 years as an admin in PC Tech in Paltalk I have lost count of the number of times I have seen users come to the room in tears over having lost images from their system which have been important family or vacation images with no BU of those files. Remember Murphy's Law -- If it is going to happen, it probably will. Also, it is not IF an HDD will fail, but WHEN! Of course, also, if you want make use of Cloud storage but don't rely on that as your only source of BU. BU where you have control. Also be sure to have one BU off premises or at least how you can get it off premises very quickly. HTH

Melanie -- I can understand your frustration. I too have viewed almost every video available and have posted to the forums with questions and still have issues with some of the questions that I have not found solutions to. Some progress has been made but not enough to make full solution. One thing you might want to do is to create a folder Affinity Photo -- (current version) and then sub folders with the .exe, a text file with documentation of your key etc and then one called videos. Inside the Videos folder create more sub folders into which you can drag the links to various videos you view and find useful into the appropriate folder. As you view more videos, the number of folders will increase. Some videos you may not need to look at currently and others you may not find either useful, understandable or enjoy (eg. I don't like videos with no voice but just someone doing clicks and raucous background music) Sometimes I will drag a link into more than one folder as that info may be of value in different ways. I have and suggest reading the help menu either directly from Help or from the .pdf that one Forum user created. However, sometimes I wish that more info on the why's and when to do certain tasks would be available. When you find info about a task that you think you may use frequently, perhaps create a text document (Wordpad in W10 -- don't know MAC) and slowly go through the video and pause it and type up your own tutorial which can always be added too at a future time depending upon different info provided by different video creators. It is a lot easier to read a topic (CTRL + F) than go through a video all over again when you wish to accomplish a specific task. I hope I can learn this program because it seems to offer the most functionality of things I wish to do but there are some things I just have not found out how to accomplish so time will tell. Previously due to some lack of functionality I have had to combine more than one program to accomplish a task and hope this is not the case in the future. For many of us this is a grand adventure. Heck, I spent 33 years as a professional photographer and after retiring at the beginning of 2000 I embarked into the realm of digital photography and still have lots of things to try to learn so just be sure to be patient and ask questions as usually there are folks in this Forum that will be willing to help. Then be sure to subscribe to the youtube channels that you like and continually check to see what is new as the many guys doing tutorials are adding things almost daily. Most importantly is to have fun with both your camera and Affinity Photo. Best of luck to you.

In addition to the problem I still have in adjusting a mistake (beyond where CTRL + Z is practical) using the Eraser Tool, I have not found another issue. When doing copy/paste of a document into another document to create a composite, I decided that maybe the elliptical selection tool would get me tighter to the image itself that I want to copy/paste. So, I tried it and then selected the Move tool and was able to adjust and move and change the angle of the selection quite nicely. Next came the refinement and that worked quite well as particularly with fine edges the selection worked will and by tidying up some of the area near any shadows that I wanted to keep the result cut down on a lot of Eraser Tool usage. The problem came when I looked at the result and what the original image was and I found that I had selected too much of an area that looked like a shadow but was part of the image to be kept. Got back to the Elliptical Selection Tool and read what I could find in the Help files and tried a couple things but have been unable to adjust the selection so it does not select from the image what I don't want it to select. In other words, I would like to move the marching ants away from the image a bit but so far nothing seems to work. Anyone with ideas regarding this issue which seems to be very much like the inability to make the Undo Brush work properly on a pasted layer although in this case I have not actually pasted the layer yet but can't make the necessary adjustment to the pre-copy of the selection. TIA

Thanks for that info Alfred. I am going to attach the last start at a composite. This is of the photos mentioned in my previous post and I have not place the image where it will find its final resting ground as I wanted anyone to be able to see when I have removed background of the pasted image to show both the blade and the background of the base image which is another camera created image. I could have started with either image as the base image in this case but this shows the concept. If someone is able to put back that which has been removed into the pasted image, keeping in mind that I did two Erasures please post the exact steps taken and then I will try to recreate what is done. I really appreciate the efforts everyone has done to try to assist me in this endeavor. TIA burkehunterDSCN2476.afphoto

RCR -- as far as I can tell I have the correct layer selected as it is the same layer as I would be working on to Erase and when I look at the stack, it is the correct layer in blue (background as I have not renamed it at the moment just for testing purposes). I tried what you suggested with just a single image and both Erase and Undo work fine. Erase gives an invisible background and the Undo replaces what was removed. However, when I paste a second image onto the first image and then want to have the original background show through I have been trying to do this with the Erase Tool as someone else suggested. The Erase works fine but if by chance I make a small error and Erase something I don't want to erase then it simply does not allow me to do so. Next, I again tried the suggestion and making sure that the correct layer was selected (blue) and as you said be sure to click on the camera icon which then turns from being grayed to white on one of the Erase steps and UB did nothing once more and so I selected a second Erase (I had done two as I did not go as far as I wanted to with the first erase) and the same result after clicking the camera icon and using UB. I tried this multiple times and of course in history I get a line showing the use of Unbrush Tool but nothing changed on the image and I made sure that it was quite clear what image I was working on by turning the image before doing any work and making sure the pasted image covered both the blade of the knife and some of the base background of the camera created image upon which the second image was pasted. Even trying a double click makes no difference. I also have tried this concept with different images from the camera on different knives and get the same result. Now I don't know if an .afphoto image can be opened by forum readers but if you or someone can let me know I could save the current image as .afphoto and attach it and someone or yourself might be able to look at the image to get an idea of what I have in mind. BTW -- I want to put back after the mistake exactly what was removed accidentally and not try to clone from elsewhere if that is the concept behind "undo source". TIA