Birdseye42

Ron, I may have been a little 'free' with my description. When I said 'out of focus' - I think the correct term might have been 'soft'. I attach a picture taken forty years ago which I am using in a presentation shortly. You will see that, being an old photo a lot of detail has been lost and the photo isn't very sharp. Using the AP unsharp mask I achieved a really good result (see afphoto file) but I need the picture as a jpeg or tiff and exporting in either of those formats causes the photo to revert to the original 'soft' look. I think, as both you and Walt are suggesting, that there is something going on here in AP. I think we've probably exhausted this thread now, but it has been interesting and I thank you for your input. Me_DavidF.afphoto

Walt - you've triggered an interesting point. If you have a photograph which is marginally out of focus and would benefit from using the unsharp mask, try the following: Apply the unsharp mask, make an HSL adjustment, make a brightness and contrast adjustment, make a white balance adjustment. (These are the processes I applied). Now either export the result as a jpeg or just flatten the result. If it nullifies the unsharp mask and goes back to its out of focus state, then perhaps this is something that the Affinity experts need to look at?

Thank you, Walt and Rick - I have found out that if I apply the unsharp mask before any other adjustments and export that as a jpg the sharpened picture exports correctly. I can then open the exported file and apply the other adjustments. Rick, to answer your question I had cropped the picture so it was different to the original. Thank you very much for your input. Many heads better than one!

Yes, the effects at 100% are fine. Rick G - can you explain what you mean by "I did run the controls all the way up."?

I should know the answer to this but I have been puzzling over it until I'm bug-eyed. I have a photo to which I have applied an unsharp mask which has worked well. I have also applied a couple of other adjustments, e.g. HSL adjustment, white balance adjustment etc. It is currently an afphoto file and I want to export it as a jpg or a tiff file. When I do this I lose the unsharp mask. I have tried flattening, rasterizing but to no avail. Am I totally wasting my time or is there a way around this?

Sorry, Walt - I think I've got it. Thank you very much for the tip - brilliant!

I thought there might be a way, Walt. Can you give me the idiot's guide on how to do that. Do I create a brightness/contrast layer and add a mask layer to that? Where does the gradient tool come in?

It would be good to have a graduated brightness adjustment. For example, I have a photograph of a group of people on a staircase taken with flash. Those at the bottom of the staircase are, of course, brighter than those at the top. It would be good to use a brightness or levels adjustment to compensate for the gradual loss of brightness the further up the staircase you go.

Thank you. Going through a learning curve - brilliant software.

If I have, say, five separate 'pen' lines which join into the shape of a polygon, how do I convert them into a polygon so that I can fill that polygon with colour?

Thank you, walt.farrell and carl123. carl123 has given me the answer I require as I have an existing document with over 20 pages which I use over and over again. As there is currently no Master page the user-definable fields look like the answer. Thank you for your time, boys.

A great feature of PagePlus was the ability to create variables, e.g. you could have a document which shows the "Issue Number" at the top of every page. You could change this under Publication User Details and in the case of a multipage document changing this value once, changed it for every page in the document. I have not been able to find this feature in Affinity Publisher. Maybe I am not looking hard enough?