Eric5

Been working with Affinity Photo latest version for about six weeks now on my Dell XPS 420 desktop with ATI Radeon HD 3870 graphics card. Aside from the initial frequent crashing and exception errors of the program (which thankfully have been solved by a simple change from a HDD to an SSD drive!), I have a slow or non-responsive histogram much of the time. Have been trying to work with it, but today it was an issue as a saved Affinity file ended up clipped when opened later. Any way to remedy this? I click the yellow triangle, which supposedly refreshes the graph as it would in Photoshop, but nothing usually happens. Also, I notice better behavior on much smaller files like if I export a large Affinity file to a reduced size jpeg and open later.... the histogram then seems to update most of the time when any actions are done like adding curves or brightness/ contrast.

I'm happy to report that I appear to have solved my own issue. After consulting with some others on a different forum, it was suggested that I swap out my HDD for an SSD. I did so today and, aside from the significantly faster boot up and shut down times, Affinity doesn't seem to be having any more issues. I just want to say that those who are marketing Affinity might want to add a "highly recommended" section to system requirements and that being a preference to use an SSD. I was about to give up on the program as crashes were becoming more frequent. Had I known how much influence switching to an SSD would have, I'd have done it weeks ago. Thanks again for trying to look into my crash reports.

Well, after backing off from the fairly intensive operations I was doing with multiple images, I don't seem to be getting crashing at present, but the issue is still not resolved of course. I'm tempted to switch back to the Radeon card as Affinity performance seems faster than with the GeForce. I've been working on a rather complicated selection and extraction of trees from a panorama Affinity made, but the longer I use the refine selection tools, the slower Affinity becomes until the tool itself has a significant lag time between implementation and action. Not sure if this is due to the card or Affinity, so I will again have to limit usage. I hope progress is being made on these reports. Affinity seems quite capable, but I think there are still issues to be worked out if it is to become faster and stable.

firstdefence, thanks. Armed with the info you provided, I'm going to give that challenge extraction another try later. I agree with your second post about subject planning. At that same location, I imaged several other trees from the ground looking up, and the extractions I did for those were quite simple because there was just a blue sky to deal with for the most part. For some reason though, I have always had the thought that the Autumn coloring of leaves might make tree extractions easier, but not usually from what I can see. If I choose to select by color red, for example, I then end up with leaves but hardly and branches or the trunk so not very useful. FWIW, I did try, just for fun, to use this image as part of a composite where the foreground image covered over the ground and other trees in the background, leaving the main two trees standing out in the background. I simply used the "blend if" sliders in Affinity to cut out the sky in the other foreground image, leaving this one in the background. Worked pretty well and simple, just not an image to write home about, but an interesting experiment. Thanks again for your help.

Thanks, Gabe. Next time I'm in Affinity, I'll give that tip a try. It's not a make or break feature anyway, just wondered if there was any other way than suggested. Coming from Photoshop, I don't think it had the capability either.

firstdefence, a very good result! Did you perform your procedure on the original image or on the one I already tried to cut out the trees? Did you use any of the channels or work on the color composite? Thanks! Eric BTW, in case anyone's interested, the original image here was both an HDR (three bracketed images) and a panorama (2 resultant HDR's) and I used Affinity to make the composite!

Toltec, thanks. That does seem to be working with something like magnetic lasso, but not for refine. I've attached an example of what I mean. I refined the edge in red for as much as I could do in the visible image. There's no way to do more without releasing the click button and, unfortunately, refine is calculated. I wanted to be able to move the image to the next section while keeping the tool engaged (mouse button pressed). Releasing, moving the image, and then re-engaging has a different result than if I was able to use the tool for the entire image at once. As I said before, I could zoom out, which would probably actually work here, but for something a lot more refined, this isn't going to work.

Here's something more specific. In my other post, I was trying to use the refine tool matte to select around the entire tree at once while zoomed into the max. I could not keep the tool pressed while moving the image. If I zoom out so I can see the entire image, which in my case is a tree, then I don't see with the precision I need. If I keep painting and releasing matte, moving to another section and then repeating, this changes the overall image differently than if I had been able to trace the entire image at once. I hope that's clearer. I wasn't sure how to explain better. I guess I could go around the entire trees zoomed out if no other choice, but hoped to do it zoomed in.

I'm trying out the suggestions, but not working so far. I have an image on screen, zoomed to the max, and I'm attempting to use the free hand tool to trace precisely around it. When I go offscreen, there's no way I can move the image without releasing the mouse button. Tried pressing the spacebar while engaged and no difference, image remains stationary. I see it done in tutorials, but no one ever explains how. I know its something simple that I'm missing.

Ok, guys, thanks, I'm going to fire up the laptop and see what happens. By the way, this is with Affinity Photo. Tools can be hand selection, refine, etc, doesn't really matter, I've just never found the way to keep scrolling the image while keeping the tool engaged. Will let you know how it works.

This is an elementary question, but I have been unable to find an answer for it. Say I am working on trying to make a selection zoomed in at 100%. I have the mouse button pressed as I am tracing the area with matte of refine selection, but I have already reached the top of the screen and can't go further and I need to trace the entire zoomed image at once. I've never figured out how to move the image while using any of the tools at the same time. Pressing "up" or "down" on the keyboard doesn't seem to make the image move, nor do the arrow keys. How do I do this simple task? Thanks, Eric

Hi, I'm attaching a couple of images here and the result I'm looking for is pretty self evident (to successfully extract the two dominating trees from the background). Yesterday, I tried the standard methods of viewing channel with most contrast, which of course turned out to be blue), and then applying brightness/ contrast/ levels to try and get the trees separate from the sky/ background trees, but that's where my attempt ended as I simply wasn't able to get enough contrast between the green background trees and colored trees in the foreground. Today, I decided to try a different method. Since these are color changing trees of Autumn, I decided to greatly boost saturation. This brought out much more of the reds/ oranges with a lot more green in the background. I went back into curves/ levels, etc to try and get the best contrast separation of colors, then did a select colors of red. This seemed to get me a lot closer, but I still can't seem to get the extraction I'm looking for as I am left with a lot of the blue background within the trees and much fringing around the edges if any curves are applied. I've tried to refine and using matte, clicking on the blue areas between the trees in the hopes the tool would be smart enough to delete the blue in the other areas as well, but no such luck. Perhaps someone here knows of a better extraction method. Almost all of the tutorials I see are doing sky replacement with trees, but seldom get into cases where there are other trees in the background that are not wanted as in my case. Perhaps the correct combination of channels in apply channels might do the trick, but not very familiar with the technique. Thanks in advance for your help. Eric nocutout.tiff cutoutwithtransTEST.tiff

Any updates? Last night, I was working within the program with the switched out GE Force 210 card as I still haven't switched back to the former. After several minutes, I got an exception error and the program crashed. I reopened and continued working. No more crashes, but as time went on operations became slower and slower. I decided to save the file and it seemed to take much longer than usual to save it. I'm attaching a couple more crash reports from last night. Again, unable to read them myself, but both appear to have data for the times that the events occurred. For now, I've stopped use as the crashing is a problem and I hope this is resolved soon. Thank you. 0b135e60-0ed8-4440-b9f1-d43981d4a895.dmp aabca99d-793a-47d9-972b-3eb13a5a3319.dmp

Callum, Looks like there were a series of them created, but I'll attach the last three that appear to show data (several others shows as 0 MB which I assume means no data). Since I can't read them, I'm going to guess that you'll at least get one from each of the two cards I tried. Thanks, Eric e5e8d7d2-eff3-4f63-b01f-b40e77d59986.dmp cb8faf6e-ce61-4c6f-a227-a55beaab763e.dmp 0b135e60-0ed8-4440-b9f1-d43981d4a895.dmp

Ok, two hours after this post, I switched out video cards for a spare Nvidia Ge Force 210 I had. Since this card is newer than the prior, I also had an easier time obtaining Win 10 drivers. To my surprise, after working with AP for a while, the screen went black, but this time it reverted to the Microsoft driver for the card. I don't know if I got a crash report generated or not, but an exception message appeared. I was able to continue working in AP albeit with the generic drivers and not the Nvidia ones. I noticed that in the AP settings, the maximum amount of memory of my system is specified. I don't have a clue if this is the reason for the crashes, but I reset it so that it will only use up to 75% of total RAM. Still looking for answers. Thank you.

Been using AP on the desktop for a few weeks now under Win 10, latest updates. My PC is a Dell XPS 420 with ATI Radeon HD 3870 card. Apparently, crash reports are being made, can someone tell me where they are stored, what directory? I can open files just fine and even start working on them. If I get to using too many layers or using too many tools, the crash will occur. Display goes blank and I have to use the reset button on the desktop to get back into Win, where the video card is then again fine. Any ideas would be welcome. Thank you.

I have several paid Photoshop actions that I am trying to manually transfer to Affinity Photo using Affinity's macro format. The problem is that many of the actions had duplicate document as one of the steps and Affinity does not have this feature. Unfortunately, I have not found a workaround therefore I am requesting that duplicate document be added. Thank you.