ashf

I'm interested in this too. Seems like a lot of effort has been put into background removal lately. Recent iPhone "pro" models even have a lidar scanner to collect depth information, primarily for background blurring and automatic dodge-and-burn shading or something. A bunch of "aWeSoMe AI" type services have popped up trying to do this too.
The most sophisticated services even charge quite a bit of money for just this https://www.remove.bg/pricing
Fotor seems to have problems with "complex" backgrounds (where the subject and background are too similar in color, or the subject has wispy thin hair etc) even though it's another sUpEr AI type service.
I'm also curious what the difference is in Affinity Photo between the background erase tool and the selection brush because while the background erase tool seems to work pretty well, sometimes you just want a mask not a destructive pixel layer edit.
By buying the three "flagship" Topaz applications I seem to have gotten a license for Topaz Mask AI (I can't figure out what's up with their licensing right now, they seem a little disorganized as to creating lots of apps and trying to sell them one-off without really explaining what they're thinking in licensing terms) but Mask AI seems a bit broken on my system at the moment.

I recently got a project to turn 25 pictures into black and white with colorful light flares passing around the worker model person with shattered particles around their bodies. The client send me the photoshop add-ons and brushes and specifically told me it got to be done in photoshop. 
 
I did it all in Affinity Publisher. Using all the apps in one give me the versatility and productivity I need to achieve this task and I didn’t use either the brushes or the add-ons he provided. One of the workflows to get the person out of the picture was super fun using the Affinity Share option on the Menu bar, basically I shared it to Apple’s Photo app and with a right click I copied the selection and pasted to the Affinity project like, instantly! 
 
I will try to use Keyboard Maestro to see if I can create a macro that can be helpful to this kind of workflow in the future. 

“**Everything**”….surely does, leftover or not.LOL😂

Steps to reproduce
create new CMYK document (print ready, DIN A4) Add pixel layer choose brush tool choose default black swatch (rich black) paint a big stroke choose rectangle shape choose default black swatch create rectangle that touches pixel strokes. see that both black do not match. Brush is K-only and lighter. Expected:
swatch should create identical colors for vector objects and pixel brushed
observed:
black does not match
 
relate to
 

That seemed to do it. Thanks!!

It could be related to the fallback font problem also.

Way back in V1, there was a bug, that PNG-export did not remember the area chosen (Whole document, Selection area, Selection only).
Neither when coming back to the dialog and neither in a preset!
I was told by a staff member, that this was indeed a bug and would be pushed to the top.
Now we are at V2 and this bug still exists, despite the all new dialog.
When will this finally be fixed?
It's a real pain, exporting a number of PNGs this way.
Reproduce:
Export a PNG with any given settings and use "Selection only". Make it a preset.
When you export your next image, all settings will be kept but the area.
This is possible true for the other apps as well, but I mostly use Designer.

Thank you!!
If turn off "Show sample", text style panel is working

Are any of those fonts what Apple calls "Document-support fonts" that they have apparently stopped including (so they hide them).
See the Document-support fonts included with macOS Ventura here:
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213266#document
"These fonts are available only to documents that already use the font, or to apps that request the font by name. Some are older fonts that were included with earlier versions of macOS or Apple apps."
I do not know what I am looking at in your screenshots.
Are any of the fonts listed in those text styles "Document Support fonts?"
Some other posts suggest that Affinity applications may be having issues with these fonts - even if the above conditions are met.

As I said we will do it for anyone who had registered V1 and gone on to buy V2. As the content will only be coming direct from us and will be free we don’t have to worry about how that could been made available on the App Store, and does not have any possibility of violating of App Store conditions.

5700XT and ryzen 9 5900X.
this is my gaming machine - workstation is running a threadripper 2920X and vega56 - so at least openCL works a bit better. but im quite fed up with radeons for work. davinci resolve doesnt run without stuttering either. capture one has started giving me artifacts with openCL acceleration again (thankfully not baked in when exporting, was a fun time in 2019), even had a gpu related system lockup while editing. time for team green, amd just doesnt care.
 
checked the gpu utilization and the card clocks to its full 3D clocks and draws more power, but the load duration in the benchmark is extremely short. gpu only is less than a second and combined is maybe 2 seconds of load.

We don't know that for certain, we only have Serifs records to hand. Other purchases may have been made on other Apple or Microsoft stores, but we have No Record of any of those, which is my point about being unable to be fair to offer differential prices to ALL existing customers without making thousands of mistakes and upsetting everyone. A single offer price is pretty much the only easy way to do this launch and I'm sorry that each person who thinks they should have been offered something else cannot see that all other solutions present different problems 

Reference for the paid upgrade problem at the App Store
https://9to5mac.com/2022/03/17/mac-developers-complain-about-app-store-bundles-and-the-lack-of-paid-upgrades/

The thread I started on the payment problems with Affinity 2 products has been closed, and that is the right decision,
I am  lucky in that I eventually found a payment method that worked. But that  does not help a lot of people.
Having followed this thread I have concluded that 
1: The banks have had to tighten up on security
2: Affinity/ Serif  have done all within their powers to resolve the difficulties.
3: There have been problems with Serif/Affinity contractors that they are still trying to resolve
4: Serif/Affinity have practical and legal difficulties in disclosing the problems they are experiencing with those contractors
5: Despite assurances from others, Serif/Affinity have not realised the reputational damage that they may/will suffer as a result of failing to look after a small, but significant, number of clients or potential clients who have experienced serious stress,
6: Too many people are passing the buck, but Affinity is not the bigest problem.
Sad though it may be, we all need to calm down and allow Serif/Affinity some room to address the individual problems and lean hard, very hard, on their contractors to sort out this mess. 
I have known this company for 20 years. They do care, they do look after their customers, and I am sure that, in the end, they will do so this time. Without being able to prove it, I believe they have been badly let down by others, and i hope and trust they will be able to negotiate their way out of this mess. The argiument that the number of failed transactions is normal will not wash. Serif will, I am sure, take this seriously and endeavour to make sure that everyone who wants their V2 range can have it at a very competitive price.
I congratulate the forum mediators who have been slammed by this problem over the weekend for dealing with the issues with a degree of patience. However, I think Serif/Affinity should think a little harder about what this problem looks like from a customer point of view, The situation  has not looked good, and I just hope it improves.

Hi All,
Well, it’s been a pretty crazy week since the launch of V2!
This has been a real labour of love for us over the last year or so, and I can’t even begin to describe how hard the development team have worked on it. Not only getting the V2 apps launched, but also of course finally bringing Publisher to iPad. 
With this being our first paid-for upgrade there has understandably been a lot of feedback / questions around future updates and our pricing policies. I thought it was worth addressing / clarifying our position on some of these personally...
Updates to V2 moving forward
Buying V2 not only gets you all the new features you have seen, but we have various updates planned – including many more new features and improvements – which you will get for free. This will continue until such a time that V3 is released. We’re not sure exactly when V3 will be, but I can confirm we are not going to move to anything as regular as an annual upgrade cycle as has been speculated.
It’s worth saying too that V2 does include many under-the-hood changes to our underlying technology, and we have also been investing in several new areas of research recently. Some of these haven’t manifested themselves into new features yet, but overall V2 does give us a better platform to develop on moving forward and I’m sure you will be pleased with the updates V2 will receive.
Updates to V1 moving forward
While we did say on the FAQ that V1 would no longer receive any updates, I want to clarify that was about new feature updates. We will be updating V1 to fix any critical problems caused by operating system updates in the future. So if the next version of macOS breaks V1 we will endeavour to fix it. There will be a point in time when continuing to maintain V1 in this way will not be tenable, but certainly for the foreseeable future we will continue to patch. In fact, we have an update to V1 queued up for release very shortly with some fixes for Ventura and issues caused by a recent Windows security / quality update. 
We will update our FAQ shortly to make that clearer for everyone.
Offer period
In case you didn’t see, I’m pleased to confirm we have decided to run this initial launch offer until 14th December to give everyone the best chance possible to get it if they wish / have a decent amount of time to trial it. 
Upgrade pricing
It’s been really hard to see some of the comments about us not looking after our existing customers – we’re pretty devasted that anyone feels like that to be honest. But the fact is we felt our hands were tied somewhat with being able to offer upgrade pricing in a fair way. The main reason for this was App Store customers (which make up around 35% of our userbase). The problems with that are two-fold: firstly, we didn’t have a way from within V1 to validate an App Store purchase receipt to reliably ensure customers who were entitled to an upgrade could get one; and secondly, we could not find a good way for people to get that discount via the App Store. Us pushing upgrade customers to go exclusively via our own site (including customers who were previously acquired via the app stores) may also have put us in violation of App Store Ts & Cs which we were obviously concerned about.
I’m not saying that these issues were completely insurmountable, but any solutions we came up with would be messy, and most importantly could have resulted in some bona fide V1 customers struggling to get validated and claim their discount. We certainly don’t have the support resource here if we ended up needing to manually validate tens of thousands of receipts for example.
The only option we felt was safe to move forward with was a general launch offer, which would guarantee that every V1 customer could get the discount, whether they purchased directly through us or the App Stores. We knew a side effect of that would mean some new customers would end up receiving that same discount – but we felt that was a better option than V1 customers missing out. It’s also worth saying that while there has been some good press about V2, all our main marketing has been via email and through social media to our followers. In other words, we felt ok about it because we knew the vast majority of people who would find out about it or take advantage of the offer would be existing customers. I would be surprised if over the offer period customers upgrading from V1 didn’t make up more than 90% of our sales.
Overall I do believe us giving a 40% discount, along with the addition of the new Universal Licence of course, is offering fantastic value for money for those who want to upgrade. 
However, taking on board some of the feedback there is something extra we can do – we will offer a new free bundle of content exclusively for V1 customers upgrading to V2 as an extra thank you for your support. I’ve seen this suggested by a number of customers and it’s a great idea as it does remove the App Store conflict entirely. 
We’ll need a little time to put something together, but all customers who previously registered or purchased V1 and have since upgraded to V2 will receive a voucher code for this via email as soon as we can.
A comment on no subscription
I do want to say that some of the points above are exactly the reason why software companies move to subscription. Whatever you do with upgrade pricing, you still have the issue of customers who bought the previous version 3 months ago vs. those who have had it 2+ years. Offering perpetual licences also gives the additional overhead of needing to maintain the previous version longer than you would if everyone was on subscription / generally always on the latest version.
We are a small team so some of these complications are not ideal — all we really want to do is focus on developing our latest codebase, push out regular updates and continue with our mission to make great creative software accessible to everyone. 
But it does need to be funded somehow. We know you love our no-subscription model, but there also needs to be a level of appreciation that the alternative is having paid-for upgrades from time to time. That unfortunately comes with its own problems.
All of that said, I have to say we have been blown away with the response to V2 - around 3 times as many people have upgraded in the last week than we expected - and we really can't thank you enough for the support you have shown. More than anything the success of this upgrade puts us in a great place to continue investing heavily in development which is ultimately what it's all about, and we’re super excited to crack on with some great updates coming next year!
All the best,
Ash

But many popular apps are installed separately for each version.

These coexists on the PC.
Photoshop CC 2021
Photoshop CC 2022
CorelDraw 2020
CorelDraw 2021
The new version does not override the old version.

Because the new version often has bugs for a while. people tend to keep the old version.
Same goes for Affinity.
I'll keep V1 for a while.
 

Both in Designer and Publisher. both in V1 and V2.
 

Even if it's possible to turn it on in V2, it's not recommended yet.
Users reported that it has very slow performance and not usable.
Read recent posts in the topic Walt linked.

Also what Walt said is right. in order to make OpenCL work, both the driver and Affinity need to be modified.
Actually Blender ditched OpenCL already because of AMD.

I did not tell any lies. And I certainly never said I did not want to fix it. I pointed to the statement from Serif that they had made a restriction due to an AMD problem (And in any case, I'm a customer, and what I want to do doesn't matter).
Version 1 had its requirements, and restrictions, and I pointed to Serif's statement of the restrictions.
True, it is working now in Version 2, but that does not make my earlier statement a lie. It merely means that things change:
AMD has shipped new drivers with better performance. Version 2 has been developed, and allows those AMD cards now The restriction is still in place in Version 1. I do not know if Serif developed additional code in V2, or if they simply listened to the users who asked them to let them enable it, and decide for themselves if it worked well enough.
But there were no lies from me, nor from Serif as far as I know.

Yes, it does, as a name of the used GPU in benchmark screenshot suggest. If there will be no utilization instead of number (GPU name) you would have N/A
 
Some future probably, but yes HIP and Metal is a better way to go these days if you have people/resources/time who know how to deal with low level stuff. NGL I was hoping for HIP and Metal in V2 affinity apps, but yea

OpenCL's hardware acceleration in V2 works ok in Vega 56 as expected (bit lower, it should be closer to GF1070ti but ok), still better than in 5XXX/6XXX series cards. I'm curious how 7XXX series cards will do...

VTracer is better in my experience.

OK, it's nice to have the DEVELOP Persona, but exiting it should be easier and less confusing than it is.
If you make a minor (or major) change in this, and then select another persona directly, the dialog box shown below pops up. Now clearly what it's trying to do is get the user to press either the DEVELOP or CANCEL button in the top left corner. However, why not just have those options - DEVELOP or CANCEL - in the dialog box itself? Then it's not a matter of double handling, the user commits or cancels and goes directly to the other persona.

Thanks @ashf.
I've updated/bumped the report to bring it up to devs attention again.

Those fonts are what Apple calls "Document-support fonts" that they have apparently stopped including - so they hide them.
See:
Fonts included with macOS Monterey
https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT212587#document
Fonts included with macOS Ventura
https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT213266#document
"These fonts are available only to documents that already use the font, or to apps that request the font by name. Some are older fonts that were included with earlier versions of macOS or Apple apps."
We ran into this earlier here in the forum with the Seravek font (a few times).
There are some work-arounds here:
 
I would extract the files from the TTC and then rename the fonts using something like TransType.