rvst

Why are you working in the develop persona for a jpeg? That's for RAW files. Do all your adjustments in the photo persona and then they're non-destructive, unless you paint directly on the layer or use one of the tools on the left toolbar

The drop down box on the top left of the luminosity mask window has three presets for shadows, midtones and highlights - which of course you can modify to create any of the variants. When it comes up, the box is unpopulated, so you have to drop it down to see the choices

duplicate - fumbled an edit

Fair enough. It does seem that this is a nuanced topic. Some may therefore be copyright and others perhaps not. Serif should probably put a pinned readme at the top of the relevant forum saying something along the lines of "by sharing your resource in this forum you are explicitly putting it into the public domain".

I'm not a lawyer by training, but I do deal extensively with legal issues, including issues of software copyright and patents, in my day job. I don't believe that copyright could even be asserted on these resources, so in my opinion the question is moot. Settings in a program, even if exportable to a file, are procedures or methods and are not copyrightable as far as I interpret it. https://www.carleton.edu/copyright/creator/protected/

You should treat them the same way you would any image posted on the internet. The content owner has copyright and posting the image, even publicly on this forum, doesn't put copyright into the public domain. From a legal standpoint, you'd be required to get explicit permission from the content owner for any commercial usage.

You should link this post in the Bug Report forum to signal a bug to Affinity staff. Don't make a repost, just copy the URL for this thread and link it there. https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/76-report-a-bug-in-affinity-photo-v2/

C:\Program Files\WindowsApps folders are not empty - just by default you will have no permissions to even read it. This is intended by Microsoft and part of the architecture of UWP apps - they live and run in a sandbox that is isolated from the rest of the system and cannot be directly executed. They need a "helper" app to be able to launch them from a 3rd party program. To send a file to lightroom, use the app linked here (it's attached to Mark Ingram's comment), aflauncher.exe If you've made alterations to ownership and permissions of the C:\Program Files\WindowsApp hierarchy, you may well have irretrievably broken Windows, in which case I'd suggest using the Windows installation ISO to repair your system as well.

Do not do this. You have probably subtly broken the UWP sandbox because you've taken control with a user that has less rights than the intended owner of C:\Program Files\WindowsApps

It's coming. Please search the forum. Dozens of threads on this topic.

This person found that the majority of UWP apps can't be moved to a different location, including most of those shipped with Windows https://www.ghacks.net/2020/08/17/microsoft-why-is-it-still-not-possible-to-move-all-windows-apps-to-another-location/

I've tried some of these automated tools and while they work for a good number of images, they don't work all that well on edge cases, which is often when we need them the most. There are quite a few different techniques one can use to manually mask out backgrounds depending on what it is you're trying to mask out. For difficult daylight sky removals, where there are trees or lots of details on the skyline, I generally use a luminosity mask. This requires multiple steps, so it's not a click and drag, but it gives superior results in my experience. In V2 I still do this manually as the new luminosity mask is a live mask and can't be painted on (there are workarounds for using the new luminosity mask, but it ends up no faster than the method below). Here's my workflow for this particular type of mask Select --> Tonal Range --> Select shadows Click on Channels panel. Right click on Pixel Selection and choose Create spare channel Now do the same and select midtones instead of shadows In the Channels panel, right click Spare channel and choose Add to pixel selection Now use the use selection brush in subtract mode to deselect areas inside your foreground (and vice-versa if anything in the background is incorrectly selected) Once you have your selection, choose Select --> Grow selection by 1 pixel and then feather selection 4 pixels or less. This will leave a slight halo around your edges if your sky you're masking out is much lighter than the replacement sky, but if you don't do this, then you're likely to get edges that are too sharp and lead to a blocky effect. I never grow by more than one pixel and sometimes feather by less than 4 pixels, never going above 4 (I feathered by 2 on the image below) With the selection still active, click on the mask icon to create a new mask layer from the selection Select the mask layer then alt-click on it to see the black and white mask In sections where the mask should be opaque, paint over it in white if you missed. Ditto for black. Be careful not to go near the edge. We'll deal with that soon. Now click off the layer then reselect the mask layer so you can see the image and not the B&W mask layer Reduce brush opacity to 50% and set brush blend mode to overlay (you can start with even lower opacity and just go over it more times) Zoom in on the border between sky and background and find any areas where there is haloing Now apply the brush (in black) over the edges to reduce the haloing. Make sure you're painting on the mask layer. You may need to increase or reduce brush opacity on the fly. The overlay blend mode is key to getting this step right. You can also apply a curves adjustment to the replacement sky (a U shape, either inverted or not depending on whether you want to reduce or increase the luminosity of the replacement sky - this also helps to eliminate the haloing by reducing the exposure difference between the edges of the foreground and the replacement sky) As a final step, and not always - it depends on the image, I might adjust the blend options for the layer, something like the following. It also helps in reducing the haloing and giving a more natural looking transition. This won't work if you have very strong highlights in the foreground part of the image (as it will then reveal a portion of the replacement image on those strong highlights. The exact shape of the curve would depend on the image. Needless to say, you should get your image looking right before swapping out the sky, as doing this post swap would likely just accentuate the transition border. Below is an example image where I used this technique to mask out the sky. First image is a crop from a 400% zoom to show the result, the second is the source image and the last is the final, processed version with the replacement sky added.

It was unclear where you got the msix from. It's only relevant if the msix you installed came from an unofficial source. It appears that the version you currently have installed is an official release probably signed with Microsoft's code-signing key and not Serif's one, since it's a Store app, which explains the difference in the package family name reflected in the folder name you noted above. And so this is eliminated as a possible cause of the error you're getting. Anyway, the permissions you screenshotted above show that the integrity of your Windows Apps subsystem is probably compromised and is a credible potential cause of your problems. You can either reinstall Windows and try again to install Affinity software on a cleanly installed/repaired system, or you can wait for the msi installer to be released, which Serif has already announced they're working on. It's just a matter of time. Given the compromised integrity of your Windows installation, it would be unfair to lay the blame for your installation problems entirely on Affinity software. Only if installation fails after you've ensured your OS is in a healthy state would it be reasonable to lay the blame on Affinity's doorstep. I don't think Serif is ignoring you as you claimed earlier in the thread. They're already addressing the issue for affected users like yourself by creating a msi installer. You just need to wait for the release. Because the msi version won't be running in a sandbox, the location it stores its own files in your %APPDATA% hierarchy will change and Serif need to test the msi installer before releasing it - it's not a trivial change that can just be put into the wild with minimal testing.

I'm at the edge of my knowledge when it comes to this particular explanation (it's not documented officially as far as I'm aware, so the knowledge comes from people who've looked at the code to understand how Microsoft generates this string). Those random looking characters are part of the Package Family Name and Package Full Name. To cut a long explanation short, my understanding is that any msix signed by the same code-signing certificate should have the same random-looking characters in its package names and thus in the folder name. "the string is the same for any package signed by the same certificate" See here for some details: https://www.tmurgent.com/TmBlog/?p=3270 That your folder location is different indicates a different code-signing certificate was used to create the msix you installed and that what you have installed does not look like it's the one currently available for download from the Affinity website. The current msix available for download on the affinity website has a package family name of SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto2_3cqzy0nppv2rt, which you can see below is different to the one you highlighted in yellow above. In the very first post you made in this thread, you added a screenshot of the error message and it had this package family name of SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto2_3cqzy0nppv2rt, which is different to the one you posted just above. So you must have uninstalled that one and installed a new version from a different msix between the first post in this thread and your most recent post. Did Affinity staff give you a new msix file to try?

I wanted to check two things: 1. Ownership of the folder 2. Execute permissions for the program So, comments: 1. Ownership: the owner should be SYSTEM, but it is the Administrators group instead. At some point, you or somebody else may have used an app or attempted to take direct control of C:\Program Files\WindowsApps (or something below this in the hierarchy). Apps that run from this location are sandboxed and having the wrong ownership will likely break things subtly. I'm not sure this is easily fixable without an OS reinstall if the take ownership was done at the level of C:\Program Files\WindowsApps 2. Execute permission: these appear to be correctly set (the first entry)

Having played with this a bit more, the OP is correct: rotated view rendering on Windows at certain Zoom levels and rotation angles produces a terrible result. I've enlarged a section of the image rotated at a 75% zoom level - you can see even the edges of the image are very ragged.

It's the overall stability that seems to be getting to the OP, not a dislike of features. It's the regressions. Things that worked in V1 but are now broken or bugged in V2. It's the new bugs. It's the stability. It feels like there was insufficient QA done on the V2 release. That's assuredly true. Serif is a highly profitable company. They're not lacking resources to put into development and testing and could afford to spend way more if they needed to.

I discovered another curious behaviour. If, instead of rotating the view, you actually transform the layer by rotating it, you'll find the rendering is superior Compare this one to the previous image - same zoom level, same image, except this one is transformed rather than having the view rotated.

I'm on Windows. At certain degrees of rotation and zoom I get similar behaviour (see the Universal Car Charger text on the right hand image). It looks like it might be an anti-aliasing issue?

Thank you for supporting my suggestion that it be a configurable option in the UI preferences

Yes, totally agreed. I'd decided yesterday I was going to make a comment on the forum about the sub-layer indentation being insufficient, but got distracted, so I'm glad you posted this. It needs at least double the indentation IMHO. It would be nice to have this as a configurable setting in the UI preferences.

Thanks for confirming you're launching by clicking the icon. You're correct. This should not happen. There appears to be a permission issue that is abnormal. Could you please navigate to the folder "C:\Program Files\WindowsApps\SerifEuropeLtd.AffinityPhoto2_2.0.0.1640_x64__3cqzy0nppv2rt\App". (Please note: you cannot access the two folders above it. This is normal. Do not change ownership. Copy/paste the entire folder path above into the input field of file explorer just below the ribbon). Find the file Photo.exe. Right click on it, choose "Properties". Click on the "security" tab. Click on "advanced". Screen shot the window that appears and post it in this thread.

It appears to be a Windows-platform only bug. I'd be happy to assist in resolving the issue by supplying any debug log output if you direct me appropriately.

You should file a bug report in the appropriate forum: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/78-photo-2-bugs-found-on-windows/