ekeen4

Hi Peter,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
Use the Levels adjustment in Photo Persona (menu Layer ▸ New Adjustment Layer ▸ Levels) to adjust the white and black points (as well as gamma). You can also press and hold ⌥ (option/alt) while modifying them to get a clipping preview in realtime.

Hi Iggy, sorry for the wall of text, I got into it and kept writing..
A RAW file is just digitised information captured from the camera's sensor. When you load a RAW file into Photo, it performs all the usual operations—demosaicing, converting from the camera's colour space to a standardised colour space, tone mapping, etc—in an unbounded 32-bit pixel format, which means you achieve a lossless editing workspace.
This process is equivalent to developing a RAW file in any other software, and it all takes place in the Develop Persona. You mention the Canon RAW developer—not sure what you mean here, are you referring to how the RAW file is captured in camera, or Canon's own developing software? As long as you pass Affinity Photo the .CR2 file, you're working with what was captured in camera: no development has been done prior to that.
The reality is that the RAW data has to be interpolated into something meaningful in order for us to edit it. I'd recommend checking out my article "RAW, actually" on the Affinity Spotlight site if you're interested, as I believe it'll help explain why the RAW information has to be "developed": https://affinityspotlight.com/article/raw-actually/
 
If you use Canon's RAW converter, it should allow you to export in several formats such as JPEG and TIFF. A 16-bit TIFF in a wide colour space would be an appropriate high quality option here, which you could then open in Affinity Photo and edit. However, as I've said above, Affinity Photo's Develop stage is the equivalent to any other software's RAW development stage—so no, you won't be losing any more information if you simply choose to develop your RAW files in Affinity Photo.
When you actually click the blue Develop button, that's when things change. By default, you go from the unbounded 32-bit environment with a wide colour space to an integer 16-bit format with whatever your working colour space is set to—usually sRGB, which is a much more limited gamut. This is basically the same process as when you export from your RAW development software to a raster format like TIFF or JPEG. You can of course change both these default options if you wish to continue working in 32-bit (not recommended for the majority of users) and in a wider colour space (you can set the output profile to something like ROMM RGB which is a version of ProPhoto that ships with the app).
As regards quality loss—technically, there will always be a loss, but it is exactly the same loss you would experience when you export from any other RAW development software. As soon as you export to JPEG or TIFF, you're converting the bit depth and also the colour profile, both of which are typically lossy operations. In most use cases, however, this loss is negligible. The exception to this might be if you don't recover extreme highlight detail in the Develop Persona before developing—this detail is then clipped and lost. Similarly, if you have a scene with very intense colours and you convert to sRGB, you're potentially throwing away the most intense colour values because they can't be represented in sRGB's smaller gamut.
Here's a workflow I use for the majority of my images, and if you follow it I can pretty much promise you needn't worry about loss of quality:
1) Open RAW file in Develop Persona
2) Access the Develop Assistant and remove the default tone curve (see https://youtu.be/s3nCN4BZkzQ)
3) If required, pull the highlights slider back to recover extreme highlight detail (use the clipping indicators top right of the interface to determine this)
4) Check the Profiles option, and set the output profile to ROMM RGB (i.e. ProPhoto)
5) Add any other changes e.g. noise reduction, custom tone curve (I usually add a non-linear boost to the shadows and mid-tones)
6) Develop. This will now convert the image to 16-bit with a wide colour space
7) Edit further in the main Photo Persona. This is where I'll typically do the tonal work as well (instead of doing it in the Develop Persona) using Curves, Brightness/Contrast etc
8) Export! For sharing (e.g. if exporting to JPEG), don't forget to click the More button and set ICC Profile to sRGB—this will convert the output to sRGB and ensure it displays correctly under conditions that are not colour-managed.
Hope that helps.

I've recently started making tutorial videos for Affinity Photo, putting them up on YouTube. The channel is 'InAffinity'. There's already nine videos there.
The focus is mostly on short, specific 'how to's, including 'How to do X in N different ways'. Mostly because that's what I like. I'm an old engineer, photographer and educator, and have a tendency to seek detail and then share it. Once I get going, I'm usually pretty persistent. My 'other site' is ChangingMinds.org, which I've been writing for over 15 years.
For the technically curious, I'm using Camtasia as a recording/editing system, capturing at 1920 HD.

Hi ekeen4
AFAIK, the only way to do this is to mask each layer respectively, so you will need to mask the dodge/burn layer in the areas that you have inpainted, provided your layers stay in this order. With the top copy pixel layer masked in the correct places, the edits from the layer below will show through, allowing you to independently apply these adjustments.
A quick example of this:

I always save the Affinity Photo files. What I discard are the TIFF files. Without getting into too many specifics, I end up with. three folders when I’m done with each batch: 1) a folder of Culled RAW files; 2) a folder of Affinity Folder files, with all the edits; and 3) a folder of JPG files, exported from Affinity Photo.
The files I trash are the RAW files that I chose not to edit, and the TIFF files that only served as an intermediate, lossless file to go from DxO to AP.

Hi, it's more of a preference based on how I prefer to work, but it also plays to Photo's strengths—the real flexibility comes from working with a flat "base" image using a wide colour profile and making use of all the non-destructive features like adjustment layers, live filter layers, pixel layers with blend modes/ranges for painting and retouching, etc. It's a case of experimenting and finding out what works best for you—tweaking sliders in the Develop persona is a more straightforward approach but I would only ever use it as a starting point. Others, however, will do 90% of their work in this persona and then maybe do a couple of edits in the Photo persona.
As far as functionality, the Shadows/Highlights sliders in Develop are similar to the filter version of Shadows/Highlights in the Photo persona—the adjustment version simply compresses the tonal ranges and is more used for tonal effect rather than recovery. Clarity also behaves differently (I prefer its Develop version), and the noise reduction is also slightly different—in Develop, it works off a base scale that is calculated individually for each image when you load it. Saturation is also more conservative in Develop, so if you want to seriously saturate colours then you'll want to do that in the Photo persona. Think that's about it though!
Hope that helps.

Hi alecspra,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
RAW files are comprised by the "raw" data captured by the camera's sensor that need to be converted/processed into an image. Since all information captured by the sensor is available, it's the most flexible format to work with since it gives more flexibility in post production. The Develop Persona is where you can control that conversion and develop your image. As soon as you finish it (press Apply) the image then moves to Photo Persona where you can perform/apply further global adjustments, filters etc and local edits.
 
Most modern cameras are also able to save JPG's along with the RAW files or without them. Those are images that were already converted and processed by the camera using specific parameters defined by the camera's manufacturer and saved using a lossy compression algorithm. As such they are more limited in range and tonal detail and less flexible to work with when fixing exposure issues etc.
 
By default all RAW files open in Develop Persona for conversion/processing, however if you are in Photo Persona - no matter the file format you have opened (JPG, TIFF etc) - and need to use some tools from Develop Persona on a layer you can change to Develop Persona clicking on its icon on the top left of the interface. Just make sure you have a Pixel layer selected, and not an Image layer. Image layers are considered object layer types (like text or shapes) and can only be transformed globally (scale, rotate, skew etc). To work on a pixel level you must convert them to Pixel layers right-clicking on them in the Layers panel and selecting Rasterize....
You can identify the type of layer you are working with looking at the label in parenthesis after the layer's name in the Layers panel.
 
Regarding your questions:
Does that mean that I can also use the Develop Persona in Affinity to work on JPEG or TIFF files? If so, is there be any advantage in doing that?
Yes, select a Pixel layer and click on the Develop Persona icon on the top left of the interface. The advantage is that you can access Develop Persona specific features/tools.
 
If you are working on a RAW file in Affinity, do you necessarily need to edit the photo first in the Develop Persona before you can edit it in the Photo Persona?
Yes, since RAW files are just "raw" data you have to convert/process them first before you can edit them in Photo Persona.