MikeFromMesa

I tried to run the new Luminar Flex plugin from AP today and it failed. I got the Plugin Started dialog but Flex never actually opened. This post is not about not being able to run the plugin - who knows what that issue might be - but rather is to ask if there is any way out of this situation. That is, if a plugin is called, the Plugin Started dialog opens and nothing happens, is there any way to get back to the edit state without closing AP and starting all over again? Starting the "Force Quit" on my MacBook Pro does not help since the plugin runs in the program space of AP and so I can not close it without also closing AP. I would rather not lose all of my work but don't see any way out of this condition. Of course in the future the best policy would be to save the intermediate state before calling a new plugin but once there is there any way out of that situation? This question is about the Mac platform but I also wonder if the same situation exists on Windows.

Yes. I am not seeing this anymore with the latest release.

Yes. I think I see that now. I was looking for something unambiguous, like the words "Photo Persona" written somewhere on the display clearly enough for even me to not miss it, but I think I do see the graphic indication you are referring to. Thank you.

@walt.farrell Yes. You are right. I had changed to the Photo Persona, not the Develop Persona. Thanks for posting and making me figure out what I was actually doing ...

Exactly how does someone determine what the current Persona is? I can find no visible indication of the current Persona state. The only thing I have been able to find is that clicking on the Affinity Photo command usually displays 4 Persona links and that the one that is missing is the one I am in, but that does not always work since sometimes there are no change links displayed. What is the easiest way to determine what the current Persona is? And yes, I generally remember what I changed to, but that does not help if I got called away from editing and return 30 minutes later, and it does not help when an image is originally opened. UPDATE: Never mind. Got it figured out.

It is interesting that you posted this question since I have been trying to determine for myself the exact same thing. The problem seems to be that there is no visual indication of what Persona the current editing state is in. The only way I have been able to determine what my current Persona is seems to be to click on the Affinity Photo command and look to see what Persona is missing from the "change to" list, and that does not always work. I am suffering a bit from not having used AP for perhaps 6 months, so some things are no longer as clear to me as they used to be. I need to re-do the sequence to see if you are right about the Persona, but first need to find out exactly how to determine what Persona I am currently in.

I loaded a raw image into APB (build 124) that contained gps location information. The location information was properly displayed in the Location Panel: I then changed to the Develop Persona to do some InPainting and duplicated the layer. After that was done I returned to the Photo Personal and the location information was gone. That is, the map no longer displayed the proper gps information:

I have seen this as well, although I do not have a recipe to reproduce it.

> With Affinity Photo Beta in the foreground, select Preferences from the Affinity Photo Beta menu. Ah. Well, that explains my problem. I was looking in the MacBook Pro Preferences thinking it was a system setting. I found it in the APB Preferences and turned it off, but it did not make any difference. I still saw the same crash. Turned it back on again.

> It is in Preferences Performance panel Thanks. I will give it a try. UPDATE: Well, I would give it a try if I could find it. I do not find a Performance panel in Preferences on my MBP. Could you be a bit more specific as to its location? There are 33 sub-panels on my system, including some add-ons like NTFS For Mac, but nothing marked Performance and nothing that looks like it should contain a Performance panel. Since the MBP does not have any option for replacing the graphics card could it be that it is just not there on my machine?

I'll give it a try. Where is that setting?

I downloaded and installed Affinity Photo 1.7.0.124 and checked to see if this version fixed the issue with AP crashing when changing from the Photo to the Develop personal. That problem was fixed, but when the user switches Photo -> Develop, then Develop -> Photo, then Photo -> Develop and again Develop -> Photo AP crashes. It does not matter if any changes were made or not. I have tried this now 3 times and have gotten 3 crashes. For me it made no difference if I made changes or not.

I have been off this forum for quite some time so I guess I missed any earlier report of this issue.

I downloaded the latest beta (1.7.0.123), loaded a jpg and clicked on the Develop Mode button. AP crashed, and has crashed every time I have repeated this sequence.

OK. That worked. So there were multiple problems. I needed to duplicate the layer and I needed to Merge the B&W image. Thank you for clearing that up.

Did that. It did not do what I expected, and I did not get a mask. I am sure your instructions are correct, and that it works properly, but perhaps there is some intermediate step or setting that is wrong on my machine because it does not create a mask for me, but only creates a grouped image. The icon, which should show a mask, instead shows a B&W adjustment layer.

@MEB I have sent you a video of the steps that I took to try to create a mask from the B&W image via a PM.

When I did the Google search for an answer to this question I found your response to the same question from 2015, and I tried it. It did not give me a mask. It only gave me a b&w image grouped with the original image, and nothing I could do actually gave me a mask. I will do a screen video to show you what is happening and send it to you via a PM. I am sure I am doing something wrong, but I could not get your response to the old question to work.

I have been playing around with some luminosity masking tools and the way they worked made me a bit curious as to why much of this could not be done easily with B&W images. That is, I assume I should be able to take a color image, create a black and white image from it using the B&W layer adjustment, refine that to include what I want and convert that directly to a mask for the original image. That process works with Photoshop but I can not get it to work with Affinity Photo. I did some searching looking for phrases like "Affinity Photo convert B&W to mask" and other similar phrases, and found several links, but none of the instructions actually seemed to do what I wanted. One, on this forum, said I should create the B&W image, rasterize it to a mask and drag the layer to the original image layer until a vertical blue line appeared, but I could never get the vertical blue line and always ended up with the B&W image grouped with the original image, and never got a mask. I am completely sure I am just doing this wrong. The tutorials talked about creating masks from selections, but I wanted to create the mask directly from a B&W image. Can anyone tell me how to do that? Thanks.

Thank you for the information. That worked for me.

I have been processing a series of HDR landscape sequences that I shot during a recent trip. I have done this before using AP without any issue but these photos were taken with a fisheye lens and so that distortion needed to be corrected. That can not be done within AP so, after adjusting the resulting HDR image, I tried to call a plugin (PTLensEdit) to fix the distortion, but it did not show as being enabled. In fact none of the plugin links were enabled. I had to save the image to disk and then reload it before I could get the plugins to enable, so I wanted to know if this was a bug or if it was by design. I understand that there is no name for the resulting HDR until it is saved, but even doing that (saving it) did not enable the plugins and the saved image had to be reloaded before I was able to call a plugin.

Well, then I guess I did not miss something after all, at least concerning Affinity Photo. Why June 4th in particular?

I am pretty sure I must have missed something in the last month or 2. The beta I was using expired perhaps 6 or 8 weeks ago and I have been waiting for the new beta to be released, but have seen nothing. Is there a new beta? If so, where is the link? If not, will there be a new beta?

Well, of course. I do not understand why I did not think about that before posting the question. Easy as pie. Thank you for reminding me.

I recently purchased an inexpensive fisheye lens to use for panorama photos. When the images are "de-fished" they give a decent panorama, better than most stitched panoramas that I have processed, but the image tends to be a bit compressed vertically due to the "de-fishing" distortion. I loaded some of these images into AP to "stretch" them vertically, but could find no such native functionality. I ended up using the Perspective Tool and stretching both the top left and top right handles, but I thought there might actually be a "compression" tool that I could use to stretch an image either horizontally or vertically. Is there such a tool in AP?