henryb

Try this...
Goto page one
In Layers panel right-click the Master page and select Edit Linked
From the menu select Layer > Arrange > Move to Front
(Do not instead drag the layer to the top of layer stack - does not work for me)
Click the Finish button on orange coloured "Editing Linked" information bar
Check your other pages to see if it worked
Note: The pages thumbnails,  after page 1, do not seem to update to show that the master page content is now on top of other content, that may be a bug.  If I close and reopen the document then the thumbnails are updated correctly.

Ok that sounds exactly like what is needed!! Will check it out!! THANK YOU!!

Just a quick take, the background is overall not the best in terms of contrast and coloring for cutting out the main subject here.

 
hund.afphoto

Just select the total outline of the dog - don't try to deselect the bits, say, where the chair shows through in above image
Once selected hit the Refine button then use the Matte Brush to paint around the fur edges (and where the chair shows through) which does a pretty good job (in this case) of separating the fur from the background
 
If you look at the attached APhoto file, not the JPG file, (in my original post) you will see that I used a HSL adjustment layer and Levels adjustment layer to desaturate the original layer the rest is essentially as you have surmised
There are many different ways one can desaturate the image - no one method is correct in all situations
 
 

You're right, that is poorly placed. But you're in luck, there is a keyboard shortcut for rotating the clone brush - try using the Left and Right Arrow keys which will allow you to rotate the cloned brush while it's exactly where you want it. And the Up and Down Arrow keys will change the brush's size.
Good luck!

@henryb
Try turning off Hardware Acceleration in Edit > Preferences > Performance if it is on
 

Ok, now I got it!  CMD+I inverts the light & color curves on the selected ("active") area, while SHIFT+CMD+I inverts the selected area that is "active", making the area/s that were active into non-active, and the area/s that were non-active into active!  Thank you all for the help!!    

Reduce the image colors to just 2 then, or the amount of colors that printer supports at all. - For a bitmap-to-vector tracing tool adjust the colors to just two for tracing!

What v_kyr said plus
Select/Invert Pixel Selection changes the selection so that what was selected now isn't and what wasn't is
Layer/Invert basically applies an inverted Curves Adjustment

The Layer content, since it's in the Layer menu. And when you happen to have a pixel selection active, it would act on the selected pixels of the selected layer.

A slightly different approach...
I selected and refined the selection of the dog then outputted it to its own layer
Then I just "lowered" the colours on the original layer
APhoto file attached
 
 
 

dogincar.afphoto

I'm not sure where you read that, but if you look in the Select menu (since you're working with a Selection) you'll find what your actual shortcut is. If you haven't changed them it's probably Cmd+Shift+I. 

For raster/bitmap see:
Image to pencil sketch (Photoshop tutorial) - sequence not working
Sketch Effect with Affinity Photo + Free Macro
Creating a sketch effect, with macro and extras- Affinity Photo
Pencil effect macro
... etc. ...
For vectors use some bitmap-to-vector tracing tool (Inkscape or one of the Online tracers).
Prepare your dog image, cutout the background & make a good fine grade selection of the dog. Save the result as a JPG/PNG image. Let the JPG/PNG be processed by the tracing tool, adapt the tracing settings accordingly to your needs, the result will be vectors here then. Save the vector result as PDF/SVG and reuse it in Affinity. Just a quick one minute take with a vectorizer/tracer and no fine grade selection/preparations at all ...

dog.afdesign

Hi henryb,
Thank you for your report. As you pointed out we are already aware of this issue however we weren't yet able to fix it. The dev teams are working as fast as they can but as you may guess there's various issues to go through after major updates in various platforms and a new application release like we did. Please bear with use while we work to fix/stabilise the apps. I've bumped our report to bring this to devs attention again.
Meanwhile if instead of right-clicking the thumbnail in Apple Photos to invoke the context menu and pick the Edit With option you double-click the thumbnail to display the image, click the Edit button on the top right, then the ellipsis icon and select the Edit in Affinity Photo extension, it will save your changes back to Apple Photos after you finish editing the image in Affinity Photo.

any news on the release of the official AP version that will fix the saving back into Mac OS Photos problem that has been known for EIGHT MONTHS now??...

any news on the release of the official AP version that will fix the saving back into Mac OS Photos problem that has been known for EIGHT MONTHS now??...

any news on the release of the official AP version that will fix the saving back into Mac OS Photos problem that has been known for EIGHT MONTHS now??...

Absolutely not a full app, tested, tried and released as a replacement of the official AP release.  Beta’s are released to test potential fixes or add features to AP.  Serif will release 1.8 to replace 1.7.3, after all the bugs are fixed.  My suggestion, hang tight on downloading beta version.  Bugs will be fixed and you will have time to download revisions, not replacement of AP.

in the future
HTH

Have you tried Pixelmator Pro? I feel like they got Apple Photos integration down. It even has layers support right from within Apple Photos! Why can't other DAMs have that feature? Capture One's layers are basically just adjustment layers, which is great, but it would be nice to have object layers as well. I assume there are Affinity features you need or want but thought you might not know about how good Pixelmator Pro works recently.

The potential fix for this is included in this beta build, However, we are still investigating some unexpected results in that it does not yet work 100% of the time and so it is not listed as "fixed"

Well, that's disappointing especially since for the past several months "1.8 will fix it" has been the mantra.  Hopefully it was just an oversight. 

Catalina here. We have a Mojave machine which I'll look at too  

Hi jeffnles1,
If it's not listed above, it's unlikely the fix is implemented in this build unless it's an oversight.

Does this version fix the MacOS Photo's bugs in Catalina? (i.e. can't save in Photos when editing with Affinity?)