Doctez

Hi I'd like to see the ability to edit masks easily now is very hard to do it, it would be nice to be able to edit masks with levels or curves or something so

Hi Doctez,
As i said above the type of workflow you want is not currently possible in Affinity Photo. We are considering improving things here with the inclusion of non-destructive RAW (through a layer or other system) but it may still take a while until this gets added to the program.

Well, a tiny change in your working practice and you could do the same thing in Photo.
 
Rather than save the first edit back as RAW files, save them as Photo files. Then you can load and change them as normal. That seems more logical to me, unless you particularly like the raw format ?
 
All new software needs some learning and adapting to get the best from it. If not, there would never be any progress and we would still all be using MS DOS.

Once you edit the RAW file it is no longer a RAW file. If you save in the default .afphoto format, your corrections are preserved there. Unless you tell it otherwise, it also preserves the History. So, you have similar information as might be saved as an .xmp file, but in a different format.  If you want to save what you have done in develop, you can save these as a preset.

You can't mix tools from different Personas, if that is what you mean, but you can customize which tools appear in each Persona & how they are arranged in the Tools panel:
• From the View menu, select "Customize tools ..."
• In the window that opens you can choose how many columns the panel should have & drag & drop any of the tools onto or off of the panel, as well as dragging the ones in the panel to different positions.
• Note that some of the tool icons contain multiple tools but each individual tool also has an icon, so you can mix & match & arrange them in any way you want.

Hi Doctez,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
 
1. You can change the size and hardness of the brushes holding alt + right mouse button then pressing the left mouse button (keep alt+ right mouse button pressed all the time) and dragging horizontally (size) or vertically (hardness).You can also use the  [ and ] keys to increase/decrease the size of the brush (those last two can be customised in tthe Preferences, Keyboard Shortcust section).
 
2. No, currently that's not possible customise (group) the tools.
 
3. To use the Blemish Removal Tool, click and hold over the element you want to fix then drag to choose the source area you want to use to fix it. While you drag you should see a preview of how the fix will look where you first clicked.
 
4. This functionality is already implemented but the modifier keys are different: press and hold the right mouse button then press the left mouse button and drag (keep the right mouse button pressed all the time) to add to the selection; press and hold ALT and drag using just the left mouse button to subtract from the selection. We are aware this is not the most intuitive combo but since Windows only provides three modifier keys we had to pick these for now.
 
5. Regarding Develop Persona: these functions are common in digital management software (DAM) like Lightroom or Aperture. Affinity Photo is a RAW converter/developer and photo editing app more comparable to Adobe Camera RAW + Adobe Photoshop. It's not intended to be used to manage libraries, sync edits between photos of the same photoshoot, or save these edits as XMP sidecar files or to a database like most DAM software does. We do intend to develop a DAM software later. There's an HSL panel/adjustment in Photo Persona.
 
Currently we don't support any kind or scripting or provide any API to implement third party functionality. This may be considered for later.
 
Thank you for you feedback and support.