toltec

As Sima indicated, you have the opacity of the inpainting brush, in the brush context bar, set to 0%. Third row of tools, second option from the left. Set it to 100% and all should be well.

I was trying to select sampled colour but you can't mask out an area to select from, like in Photoshop. Affinity samples the whole photo, de-selecting any selection. Some tasks obviously do allow you to work on just a selected area (HSL, Colour balance etc) but not sampling. Dunno why. I used to use that sort of thing all the time as it was very handy to tweak colours in a localised area.

Something strange about presets. An undocumented feature. As I understand it, you make your adjustments to (in this case) white balance then save your preset to load in and apply to other photos? Obviously useful if several pictures are all shot in fluorescent light. However, whenever I try to do that, I adjust the balance, I click preset, give it a meaningful name and click OK ............ nothing! Or I can't find it anywhere. Funny thing is, I did manage to do that very thing when I was "playing" a while back but am either doing something wrong now or maybe the upgrade to 1.52 stopped it working. Any help? Someone? Anyone?

Hi, I'm Tony Spent 30 years in the printing pre-press and graphic arts trade. Using all sorts of stuff like Photoshop (started with version 3) and loads of plugins over the years. Retired now but like to keep my hand in. I am very impressed with Affinity Photo although the lack of decent documentation is (or was) a big minus. It was initially very difficult to migrate from Photoshop because I was admittedly a bit stuck in my ways and Affinity does thing differently or calls things by different names making the help file search option useless. Having to spend hours watching videos or looking for non-existent help in the help files is such a waste of time. I watched just about every video, read through the help files but still only learned a fraction of what I could easily do in Photoshop. I then spent hours going through the menus and basically just playing until I figured most of it out. I could not have, and would not have done that in a professional environment. Time is money! Funny thing is, Affinity Photo does many things so much better, but you have to look really hard for the necessary techniques or approach things in different ways. I hope Affinity Photo is a success. It had an incredible range of features without suffering the Adobe bloat, or the Adobe cost.

It sounds like you really need a "tracing" program, or at least a vector program with a tracing facility. I used to regularly use such software years ago to recreate logos and still do trace stuff from time to time. I have found that "Inkscape" (on my PC) is not only a first class vector drawing program but actually has a surprisingly good tracing feature. It worked better for my needs than the built in feature in Xara Designer. Inkscape is free software and available on Mac, PC and Linux. Inkscape is also useful as a complimentary program to Affinity, because it works in SVG format, you can export files and load them into AP and use them as paths to cut out objects. Funnily enough, I did that this morning.