Paul Mudditt

Check that Affinity has permission to access your photos.

Personally I prefer to use the inpainting brush with a small hard brush 100% hardness, 100% opacity and 100% flow but I tend to repair old photos and the like.

@spb_61 Don’t use the “Open” command, instead search for “open file”. Added screen recording on how to create a suitable shortcut from scratch, hope you can follow it. IMG_2825.MOV

M1 iPad Air or Pro if you can afford it. Use iCloud or if you must Dropbox or one of the others but iCloud is far superior. Put all your work in the cloud and download as required so that you don’t overspend on hardware. I agree 256GB is more than sufficient so long as seldom-used files/images are only held in the cloud until you need to edit them.

More than 6 years, not really a contract you can cancel anytime you want to.

Nope, only exchange rates have forced changes in UK, possibly expected soon since someone just tanked the GBP.

Unclear what you are trying to do but maybe using merge layers or create a new vector layer and nest them that way. IMG_2794.MOV IMG_2795.MOV IMG_2796.MOV

If you have created multiple curves/shapes around the objects you want to cut out, simply select all the curve layers, then do Geometry -> Add. Now you can select the Pen tool and convert to a selection. Quick and dirty demo. IMG_2792.MOV

Apple photos stores your original often raw photos. You can edit them to your hearts content using the Apple Photo editor or any other photo editor on your iDevice. But, your original photo is STILL present in Apple Photo. You can revert to original or export unmodified original at any time. So yes, within Apple photos, all edits even crops WILL increase the size. If you however store images in a cloud folder, iCloud, Dropbox, Onedrive or whatever all edits you do will permanently overwrite your original so a cropped image would shrink. I use 2TB iCloud storage which works out much cheaper for me considering how much I had previously spent on external drives on my Mac’s, PC’s over the years. To get the best experience of Apple devices, use iCloud for everything. I can lose / damage / wipe any of my devices iPhone, iPad, Macbook, Mac Mini and I won’t lose single image or important document or information. I recommend it after 40+ years in the PC world, far superior.

Perhaps I am not understanding what you need but here goes. Don’t use export persona. Use Document -> Export -> PNG -> (share to photo album or save to cloud area) by turning off all layers and enabling them one by one. Quick example, all are transparent PNG files. IMG_2760.MOV

Yes but it is still desktop class in my opinion. There are a few features missing which I wish they would add such as the ability to record macros on the iPad and import swatches but >90% of the functionality is there. Best used with an Apple Pencil. I have them all, PC,MAC and iPad versions and >95% of time use the iPad for ease of use, anywhere anytime.

Maybe this will help https://360rumors.com/facebook-360-photo-not-working-2021/

It is, just think of the Affinity Home screen/sandbox as open tabs on a desktop. NOT somewhere to EVER leave anything important. Save menu item does not appear unless you have done an "open from cloud" so that the file is linked to an absolute file location. If save is not visible you are working on the sandbox version even though you might have cloud version of the file, they are not linked and agreed risk getting confused. So 1. "save" not visible = document is not linked to an external file 2. "Save" visible = document is linked to external file....press save to overwrite linked file.

When you save to files area you should close the sandbox version. This is especially important if you want to edit the file on another system, MAC or PC or another iPad. If you do not have another system then it is likely the sandbox one is the “newest” version so save again and close each one as you go. To open again use “open from cloud:. Now whenever you press “save” the cloud version will be saved over directly.

Simply do an "import from cloud", not "open from cloud" and check the file for yourself. Then close both files.

iPadOS 15 changed the way memory is handled and introduced several problems, so far on iPadOS 16.1 beta these defects in iPadOS appear to have been fixed.

To avoid the transparent sections, designed to handle hair and fur, on the refinement tool make sure the border is set to zero. If you use the matte black then adjust the border you can see the transparency sneaking in.

The Refine tool is designed to hunt out fine details for hair and fur as the help section shows, https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/pages/Selections/selections_refine.html I would never use it for straight edges. Using the pen tool method would be time consuming for hair and fur but once you get some practice it can be very quick indeed, fewer nodes is better, don’t try to be too accurate as nodes can be adjusted easily. A rectangular shape only needs 4 nodes with sharp corners. You can even use a shape like the rectangle, position and size it more accurately than you can the rectangular selection tool and then tap pen tool to change to a selection.

If you want to create a selection with many straight edges, do not use the selection tools. Instead use the pen tool set in smart mode and dab dab dab around the object then double tap on the first node to complete a closed curve. Use the node tool to reposition the nodes adjusting any curves or sharp corners using the node tools. Delete any unnecessary nodes. Once you have created a good sharp outline around the object, select the pen tool again and then convert to selection on the toolbar.

The export bug was in certain versions of iPadOS 15, if you have just updated then that may have fixed it, as does the current iPadOS 16.1 beta which also fixes the problem. Serif could not fix it as it was caused by a virtual memory bug in the operating system.

I don’t get it upside down but sometimes when I go split screen Photo and Designer, Photo appears rotated 90 degrees. Still works though.

I discovered and reported the initial export problem because I used iPadOS15 beta, so no surprise that I also spotted that the problem was fixed because I was using iPadOS16 beta. The developers will be using primarily the released versions of each OS to avoid chasing bugs in the OS betas, so likely were unaware of the initial problem or that it was fixed. I do not know if Apple have admitted there were problems introduced when they made major changes in how RAM and virtual memory is managed, starting in iPadOS15 and continuing into iPadOS16 but the Serif developers were on a hiding to none. Very difficult to debug your own code without having to debug major bugs Apple engineers introduced. I’m sure the Serif guys have been tearing the hair out when base code for file handling which has been working 100% well since the very first released versions of the Apps suddenly starts misbehaving. Normally when a bug is introduced, the guys just have to wind the clock back in their configuration management system to find where the bug first occurred and compare the code to see what has changed. In this case my bet is that since no code had changes then they wouldn’t have clue how to fix it. In a nutshell, I BLAME APPLE not SERIF for the majority of these long standing issues.

When you open a multi-page document in Designer, look under the Document menu for the additional menu item that appears “Pages”. Example here:- IMG_2627.MOV

Sounds like you are working on a very detailed refinement, perhaps of an inanimate object with many straight lines and curves? If so, do not use the selection tools, instead use the pen tool in smart mode and dab dab dab around the object you are trying to select, double tap on the first node to complete the curve. Then use the node tool to add and remove nodes, match curves and straight lines with as few nodes as possible. Once complete, re-select the pen tool then convert to selection.

1. Make sure you do not have “touch for gestures only turned on’. I don’t think you have but that is one way I could repeat your problem. 2. You aren’t using a Apple Smart Keyboard or bluetooth external keyboard are you or similar as that was the second way I could simulate this behaviour. I am also on the iPadOS16.1 beta and do not see this problem otherwise. Perhaps try closing all open apps and perform a Forced Restart might help.