Roger C

You can also inpaint with a selection from (main menu at the top of the affinity app) Edit > Inpaint
With the inpainting brush you can have blur problems near high contrast areas, using the  > inpaint option can help mitigate that issue because by using refine selection you can feather parts of the selection and keep other area's sharp.
 

I've seen a whole lot of people saying Affinity Photo is a Photoshop alternative or a Photoshop killer but I've not seen serif tout Affinity software in such a way.
I think it would be foolish to brush off the gaming community and the professionals creating for it as not the target market, and it's obviously a huge market to tap into, but anyone with common-sense would be naive to think Affinity Photo is anywhere near the capabilities of Adobe Photoshop CC and a contender for it's crown. 
There are  some fundamental omissions from Affinity Photo and I would consider decent alpha channel editing to be one of them.
I respect Affinity for staying on mission and remaining focused on providing a good quality product for a very considerate price point, John Lydgate would say 
 

Well, I'm glad everyone is seeing the issue.
Unfortunately, I'm no longer getting the friendly connection when dragging ends together .
It's a very bad sign when a glitch has better functionality than the actual software .
I can offer a workaround that doesn't involve extra nodes though.
(that this is even necessary 5 years in is........ )
Oh, and hitting "Divide" to close something is... hilarious.

Another way to do this is to select all the artboards & use the Alignment options. If you use the "Space Horizontally" option with "Auto Distribute" disabled, you can adjust the horizontal spacing between artboards uniformly to whatever you want by adjusting the numeric spacing field next to the "Auto Distribute" checkbox.
If needed, you can also use one of the Align vertically options to line up all the artboards in a row.

By default, the Affinity apps (there are 3 of them) create text objects. Like vector objects they are not rasterized by default, but unlike vector objects text objects support a large number of additional typographic attributes in addition to the usual vector ones like stroke & fill color.
The Affinity apps support all the common ones (& many of the uncommon ones as well). With the appropriate settings you can control everything from the space between characters, words, & paragraphs to their alignments, indents, alternate character forms, & much more. Text in this form is often referred to as "editable text" because you can edit it in much the same way you could in a word processor.
If you convert it to vectors ("convert to curves" in Affinity-speak) you lose the ability to edit it as text, but it retains the usual properties of vector objects like scaling up without becoming pixelated or blurry. Note that this conversion will result in lots of individual vector objects (at least one per character & often more).
Rasterizing text converts it to a grid of pixels, with all the usual limitations of that format. Even if you do not do this explicitly in Affinity, this will occur automatically in any export file format that does not support vectors or text objects (like JPEG), or if you use certain Affinity features like effects, filters, etc. Also, as things are now (& most likely for years to come) exporting to the PSD file format will convert text to pixels.
Be aware that in Affinity Photo (but not in Affinity Designer or Affinity Publisher) text objects will always look pixelated with anti-aliased edges, but as long as it remains a text object it actually is not.

Well yes.....that remains a problem certainly.  Also I am finding organizing the brushes in the way dictated by AD is still sort of clunky at best.  At least for me it is.  I know there must be an easier way for the brushes to be sorted, categorized, and easily found, and I do hope at some point the developers will take another look at improving this system.  Anyway, thanks for your help.  My set up is a little better now.....still much work to be done but it will give me a project.  

With this procedure, the curvature of the two end nodes don't match the curvature of the others after the conversion to smooth nodes. For some uses, this isn't desirable, but a simple modification will fix that:

And here he is, posing with a chum in front of Affinity HQ.

 
 
 
 
 
 
But is he a good boy? He seems so innocent, yet maybe it's not such a good idea to sit too close...

 

And here he is, posing with a chum in front of Affinity HQ.

 
 
 
 
 
 
But is he a good boy? He seems so innocent, yet maybe it's not such a good idea to sit too close...

 

And here he is, posing with a chum in front of Affinity HQ.

 
 
 
 
 
 
But is he a good boy? He seems so innocent, yet maybe it's not such a good idea to sit too close...

 

I often do forget and also have a hard time to find again resources that others or I have contributed over time here in the forum. In former times I've often oriented on MEB's Affinity resources page, which sadly nowadays isn't up to date any longer (probably it's too much work and too time consuming to keep that up to date). - Here are some links to my own resources section contributions, so I have and keep myself sort of an overview for these.
Assets:
A few Paper Effect Assets AI chip logo icon assets Cat-Silhouette assets Common callout assets Hairstyle Assets Halloween I + II Assets Fall assets & styles set I'am Groot - Vector assets Numbering assets OS X El Capitan UI Kit assets Protractors back to school assets  new Ruler back to school assets Some BW arrow assets Some Easter Assets Some Firework assets Some Fruit Assets Some Nicholas/Santa Claus assets Some plain + vintage Badge Assets Some Snowmen vector assets Star Wars - Mandalorian assets Washi Tape assets Xmas cutout assets & sample Xmas silhouettes Xmas cookies/gingerbread Xmas trees vector assets Macros:
B&W play macros Matte Color Macro Rusty Boost Macro Styles:
Div Metal Styles Fabric styles Fall assets & styles set Fire Styles Fur styles 1+2 Knock on Wood Styles Rust Styles Some Metal Styles Valentine texture styles Wild animal texture styles Xmas texture styles 1+2 Tools:
A few Forum Helper Tools (various Python3 scripts) updated afthumbs - Extracting PNG Thumbnails from .afphoto and .afdesign files Affinity Designer Shortcut Mapper  Affinity OpenCL Disabler (Windows tool) A visual shortcuts explorer for Affinity Tools  Delineate - A Raster/Bitmap to SVG Converter Thinning multi architecture Affinity apps under MacOS via Python to reclaim disk space whatFileType - Detects file signatures and tells what sort of file it is Various:
2024 Months Calendar Template & Assets in EN new Calendar day as Affinity template/assets & a daily showup SVG file new Christmas Photo Storyboard Chalk brushes Daily Planner DE/EN localized - Letter (ANSI A) print template Daily Log DE/EN localized - Letter (ANSI A) print template Desk Calendar for 2019 Desk Calendar DE/EN/GR for 2022 Desk Calendar DE/EN/GR for 2023 Prism Desk Calendar 2024 DE/EN/GR new Fall Photo Storyboard Halloween Polaroid Photo Storyboard OS X El Capitan UI Kit Pocketcalendar 2019 Reusing filmstrips as photo borders updated Round Calendar Reminder Stickers Xmas Card & Envelope Xmas cutout assets & sample Xmas FB Cover Xmas mug mockup Xmas Trees And most importantly ...
Quick Tips: for finding Affinity content with Google Search
List of some third party calendar generator tools new
List of some third party vectorization & tracing tools

And here he is, posing with a chum in front of Affinity HQ.

 
 
 
 
 
 
But is he a good boy? He seems so innocent, yet maybe it's not such a good idea to sit too close...

 

You can save selections as spare channels and intersect and subtract from there.
Make a selection Save selection as a spare channel
Make a second selection and do the same, you can now load selections and subtract and intersect them.

Hi @ijustwantthiss**ttowork
OK, so my suspicion is that the blade.icc profile is deficient—out of curiosity, is this the Razor Blade laptop? Can I ask where you got the blade.icc profile from, did you download it from a website or did it come preinstalled with the laptop?
 
So if you switch the colour profile to the sRGB device profile, everything looks fine inside Affinity Photo? No issues, and when you export to JPEG/TIFF etc with an sRGB document profile everything looks good with an external image viewer etc?
 
This is expected, as Affinity Photo needs to restart to colour manage with the newly chosen profile if you change it on the fly.
 
Definitely don't do this! The reason it looks OK if you use blade.icc as your document profile is because you're matching the document profile with the display profile, negating colour management entirely—the document numbers are being sent to the display with no alteration. It might look OK for you, but it won't for anyone else.
 
Colour managed applications are supposed to use the display profile to translate the colour values in the document as they're sent to the display. This is especially important for wide colour profiles beyond the scope of sRGB.
 
The thing that seriously isn't working has to be the blade.icc profile—not sure where you got it from but it's defective as regards compatibility with colour management. We've seen this a lot with various monitors that people are using, Windows Update seems to push specific display profiles that just don't work with colour management solutions at all—in the article that was linked above you'll see I invited people to search for "whites are yellow" in relation to apps like Photoshop because it's not just Affinity Photo that is affected.
Have you got access to a colorimeter, e.g. i1Display Pro, Spyder, ColorMunki etc? If so, I would download either the manufacturer's profiling software or DisplayCal and use that to profile your own monitor—any profile created by the software will be valid and work correctly with Affinity Photo.
If you can't profile the display by yourself, the best solution is simply to use the sRGB display profile rather than this factory-calibrated blade profile—when you say factory calibrated, that instantly makes me sound very skeptical.
 
Again, this all points to the blade profile being incompatible with colour management. Not many applications are actually colour managed—to be honest, I've lost track of whether Windows Photos/Photo Viewer/whatever it is in Windows 10 is colour managed or not. I think web browsers by and large should be colour managed by now, but there's no guarantee there. The fact that things look different in Affinity Photo is a clear sign that it's performing colour management based on your active display profile, but unfortunately if that display profile is incompatible then everything is going to look whacked.
As I just mentioned above, unless you can create your own accurate and compatible profile with a measuring device, I think your only solution here is to use the sRGB display profile. From your screen grabs, you haven't touched Affinity Photo's default document colour profiles (they're left on sRGB) which is good—just avoid using blade.icc as your document profile altogether and stick with standardised device profiles like sRGB, Adobe RGB, ProPhoto/ROMM RGB etc. If you do use a wide profile like Adobe RGB, don't forget to convert to sRGB on export if you're going to view it in other applications that aren't colour managed—the article explains how to achieve that.
Hope all the above helps!
 
[Edit]
From a bit of searching, I found someone had posted their Razer Blade 2019 profile that they had created with DisplayCal here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1l07D8CtFjXYVsDpeTAyLBEkZpELNomYo/view (from this Reddit discussion: https://www.reddit.com/r/razer/comments/ase96x/razer_blade_15_2019_color_profile/)
I definitely wouldn't recommend using it for professional/production work (I'd seriously advise getting a colorimeter and creating your own profile to the standards you require) but it's worth installing and switching to it just to see if it helps. It could go either way, since if that person's display is wildly different to yours it will still look terrible, but it could also produce a much better result than the blade.icc profile you're currently using..
 

The original request was for Publisher but, for extra information, this can also be done in Designer with just one “bounding box” by using more than one Stroke (each set to align to the Inside of the layer) in the Appearance Panel (Publisher doesn’t have an Appearance Panel, yet).
This makes it easier to change the corners of the box as required, see attached GIF.

I did this in Affinity Designer but the method is just the same in Affinity Publisher I just wanted to use Outline view mode for a visual explanation.
Publisher

Have not done too much, just a little more on the headlamps
 

In Adobe Photoshop CC that layer will open as another document that you can edit and then close, on closing that layer updates with your design. Affinity Photo doesn't know what a smart object is so it converts it to a pixel layer, when you double click on that layer in Affinity Photo you are effectively zooming in on that layers content hence the pixelation, you can see this if you set the zoom level in navigator to approx 80% and then double click the layer, it should now show 1684% or thereabouts.

because that graphic is so small trying to make any graphic match it will turn out pixelated, I suggest you use the guide layer as a reference for size which is under each colour.
Because of this any graphics would have to be overlaid manually, you can still use the design layer as a guide to the size and then export out as a PNG.
Note: I've requested that Merch Amazon either create templates for Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer or at least output instructions on how to modify the usage of the PSD files for use in Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer. If I hear back I'll post it here.
 

-

To make the placement a bit easier: Select the ellipse, tick "Insert inside the selection" (top toolbar or if not visible customize the toolbar) and place the image there.

This is because the image has been clipped & masked to the ellipse, rather than just clipped - hence the 'crop' icon that is showing for this image layer in your screenshot.
@Pyanepsion You need to make sure you're drag and dropping the image layer underneath the ellipse layer (as shown in the screenshot below) as drag and dropping onto the layer thumbnail will clip & mask the image, which is not desired here.
 (Correct)
 (Incorrect)
You can read more about clipping here - https://affinityspotlight.com/article/understanding-clipping-in-affinity-apps/

In Photo, you can toggle visibility of the selection by going to > View > Show Pixel Selection and unticking.

You can assign a shortcut key yourself by going to > Edit > Preferences > Keyboard Shortcuts.

All the legacy Photo videos (pre version 1.7) are here:
https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10119-legacy-official-affinity-photo-desktop-video-tutorials/
See > Split Toning and Selective Colour   https://player.vimeo.com/video/136106053
 
(Each time I try to paste these links into this post I get an error message for some reason.  But the above links do work if you copy and paste them into your browser.)
 
 

It will probably be difficult to get the exact same shape but this technique may also be useful.

Hi Henk Boeve, this is already possible. The link is for an older Tutorial from James Ritson. Hopefully this helps. Global Cloning