unni

Block the app with your firewall to test

It does indeed. It checks if an update is available
John

It may also check to see if there's anything new to show in the welcome page.

Good shot with details but composition could have had the full flower included.
Shooting at f8 will give more depth of field. It has to be compensated by reducing speed and therefore use of manual external flash with a soft diffuser.
Flash will have to be held with hand quite close to subject (about 6 inches to 12 inches approx). Flash will eliminate hand held related and subject motion blur completely.
The color noise in the background can be removed by layer based editing of a duplicate layer. Then use a black mask and brush in the noise removed section by painting
with a white brush on the mask. Similarly sharpen one layer and brush-in by painting on its mask only those portions where sharpened details are required. In the image, I would
brush-in only in-focus portion of the bee and junction between the flower and the base. That brown straw can be cloned away fully or atleast the easier part of it.
 

using old version NIK which is free. i shall check in more detail on whether its fine on return to AP, tomorrow. (its midnight in india now!). yes, if its okay on returning to AP, shift does not matter. viveza, i am yet to try. thank you for the immediate response. 

After returning back to AP, color is okay. It seems to be color management related, sure it will get addressed sometime in the future releases.

This is my first try on a panorama. The AP software is doing a wonderful job. One image is just after the stitching of 5 RAW images without any corrections. The other one is processed. I have used the warp tool to correct the distortion . After warp, went back to develop persona for lens distortion option for further correction. Then  inpainting to remove the central drum and house on the right side. Unsharp mask for sharpening and luminosity mask used for curves adjustment of some dark areas of the palace. Camera is Nikon D3100, 1/100 sec, f8, ISO 100, hand held, kit lens 18-55.
The palace is built sometime in 1750 and name Krishnapuram Palace, Ochira, Kerala, India. The pond extends into the middle of the palace from the underground. Wiki gives more details.
The image below is processed.

 
The image below is not processed. Only stitched.

Good luck with the video endeavours, I use Camtasia and Screenflow as the mood takes me. Screenflow is Mac only but Camastia is Windows and Mac. I used Camastia when I ran a windows system so I'm used to to but I think Screenflow is just as good. A good free app is OBS a bit clunky to use but its Free and Open Source. I like the Ability in ScreenFlow and Camtasia to show Key Presses and the option to speed up receptive or tedious tasks in a tutorial.

@ianrb
I have quickly tried blend ranges which is a powerful feature. It is different from LM though in many situations, it can serve similar purpose. LM aids in slowly building up masks and one can target specific areas precisely. The mask can be made visible. By proper brushing with low flow values and using overlay modes, jagged edges can be smoothened. Different selections can be 'painted-in' into existing masks. The final picture will look natural as a single entity without detectable problems in transition areas. In AP, masks have to be converted to pixel layer for brush overlay to work. With a slightly different workflow when compared to PS, we can work using luminosity masks in AP which is a very notable plus point.
 
 

I'm new to AP and bought it two weeks back. Spent some hours on seeing the tutorials. Went through Luminosity masks (forum topic:  /topic/27214-luminosity-masks ,
by Smadell ) and tried various methods for painting-in the selections onto masks, aligning multiple exposures, etc. Today I attempted exposure
blending of two photos.  The workflow is as follows. Individually processed the two photos for exposure, white balance and slight color
enhancements. Saved as tif. Then opened both photos from FILE>NEW STACK. selected "scale, rorate and translate" in the pop-up.
Then ungrouped the stack. Now the two pictures are aligned and available as two pixel layers. Used "luminosity visualization" macro on one
layer to select a proper mask. Decided on L4. Then from macro "Luminosity selections" , loaded L4 into a mask for the top layer.
Did some brushing with white/black color and various flow/hardness levels to make the mask for smooth transition between the layers.
I am posting the final result and the two unprocessed raw files(in jpg). Lancos non-separable was used for jpg export. Color space used
in AP for all editing is Pro-photo RGB.
Picture taken with Nikon D3100, kit lens 18-55, tripod, ND64 filter, f11. Bright shot taken at 30 sec, dark at 6 sec. ISO 100.
First image is the final blended image and the last two are the un-processed input images used as layers.

Thanks unni. Hope the developers would simplify this in future editions of AP. Perhaps writing macros to do this

unni -- I'm glad you've found these helpful. There are actually some other solutions, but they mostly boil down to variations on a theme - using Blend Options to create luminosity based selections and masks. Glad to have helped.
Ganna -- I am by no means expert in this, but here is my understanding. You cannot copy a pixel layer, and then paste it into a mask layer. I imagine that, despite its on-screen representation, the mask layer has only Alpha components, while the pixel layer has RGBA components. The two don't play together well in AP.
What you CAN do is (i) right click on the channel you want to deal with (e.g., in a photo named "Flower" right click on the "Flower Red" entry in the Channels panel) and choose "Create Grayscale Layer" in the pop up menu. Once you have the grayscale version of the Red channel, you can do anything you want to it. Then, with the grayscale layer selected, (ii) choose "Rasterize to Mask" from the Layers menu and drag the new mask layer into the proper position.
The other thing is that you CAN apply certain adjustments to Masks - specifically, any adjustment that lets you specify that it applies to the Alpha component. That includes Levels, Curves, and Channel Mixer adjustments. Simply create the adjustment layer, choose Alpha from the drop down menu, and drag the adjustment onto the Mask thumbnail so that the VERTICAL blue line appears just to its right.

Affinity is a magic programme. Even a 71 year old can use it (with the help of the Affinity Forum members) When I went to school we did not even have an electronic calculator and computers were a dream in Dan Dare comics. Compare the two images which have been adjusted with affinity tools. The panorama was processed in Affinity from 7 images.  I used MESH-WARP to straighten one lamp post, after the forum members introduced me to this tool. Comments welcomed John Edwin in exile

I came across Affinity Photo software accidentally two days ago while browsing the net for something related to photography. In fact I have always wondered why no software similar to PS is available at an affordable price. When I saw AP in the net , I immediately read some quick reviews and browsed through the Affinity website. Then I downloaded the trial and within 10 minutes of trial, I ordered and purchased through the net at 30% discount (discount will expire in 5 or six days). For the price, there is no need to think a lot, it can be bought straight away. I have been using for six years, Photivo, Rawtherapee, Darktable, GIMP etc. Affinity Photo is a boon to enthusiasts and hobbyists like me who does not make money from photography but want to use professional quality processing software. I immediately called another friend of mine to order AP before the discount expires. I greatly appreciate the enormous work done from scratch by Serif company to bring this software in a short time of 4 or 5 years at such an attractive price. I also wish the team great success in ongoing and future work.
By profession, I am an electronics engineer with 34 years of experience in various areas of design and manufacturing, presently working in the field of SMD manufacturing process development and quality in aerospace and defence products used in water, land, air and space. My hobbies include general photography, macro photography with microscope objectives, astronomy, ham radio, playing musical instruments and flute making for personal use.

I came across Affinity Photo software accidentally two days ago while browsing the net for something related to photography. In fact I have always wondered why no software similar to PS is available at an affordable price. When I saw AP in the net , I immediately read some quick reviews and browsed through the Affinity website. Then I downloaded the trial and within 10 minutes of trial, I ordered and purchased through the net at 30% discount (discount will expire in 5 or six days). For the price, there is no need to think a lot, it can be bought straight away. I have been using for six years, Photivo, Rawtherapee, Darktable, GIMP etc. Affinity Photo is a boon to enthusiasts and hobbyists like me who does not make money from photography but want to use professional quality processing software. I immediately called another friend of mine to order AP before the discount expires. I greatly appreciate the enormous work done from scratch by Serif company to bring this software in a short time of 4 or 5 years at such an attractive price. I also wish the team great success in ongoing and future work.
By profession, I am an electronics engineer with 34 years of experience in various areas of design and manufacturing, presently working in the field of SMD manufacturing process development and quality in aerospace and defence products used in water, land, air and space. My hobbies include general photography, macro photography with microscope objectives, astronomy, ham radio, playing musical instruments and flute making for personal use.

I came across Affinity Photo software accidentally two days ago while browsing the net for something related to photography. In fact I have always wondered why no software similar to PS is available at an affordable price. When I saw AP in the net , I immediately read some quick reviews and browsed through the Affinity website. Then I downloaded the trial and within 10 minutes of trial, I ordered and purchased through the net at 30% discount (discount will expire in 5 or six days). For the price, there is no need to think a lot, it can be bought straight away. I have been using for six years, Photivo, Rawtherapee, Darktable, GIMP etc. Affinity Photo is a boon to enthusiasts and hobbyists like me who does not make money from photography but want to use professional quality processing software. I immediately called another friend of mine to order AP before the discount expires. I greatly appreciate the enormous work done from scratch by Serif company to bring this software in a short time of 4 or 5 years at such an attractive price. I also wish the team great success in ongoing and future work.
By profession, I am an electronics engineer with 34 years of experience in various areas of design and manufacturing, presently working in the field of SMD manufacturing process development and quality in aerospace and defence products used in water, land, air and space. My hobbies include general photography, macro photography with microscope objectives, astronomy, ham radio, playing musical instruments and flute making for personal use.