AlanPC

That doesn't appear to be the case? OK, my steps: I open a jpg... Create duplicate layer of the background original Turn off visibility of the original, Select the duplicate layer. Outline something, using one of the vast multitudes of selection thingies. Have a marching ant outline of the thing selected. Select "Effects" Pick the G' blur thing Slide it... EVERYTHING IS BLURRY. How do I make the selected thing blurry, or the non-selected things blurry (or other effects)? Thanks

OK... but that doesn't answer my confusion over how to apply effects to the selection-only? Sorry to be such a helpless puppy

Mm. I'd used the pen tool to outline something, and was trying to create some blur in the background. I'd followed the basic concept of inverting the selection, so it was the background selected. However if the main background layer was selected everything was blurry, but if the new pixel layer was selected nothing was blurry. How to make adjustments only on the selection? I'm obviously missing something on this whole "create a new layer so you don't damage the original" thing, as any adjustments to the new layer don't really DO anything, because it's a new layer... or something. But for some tools, sometimes, it does? Argh.

Actually as a new wannabe-professional, the biggest complaint I have is that the software and all its naming conventions seems to be trying too hard to be Photoshop, instead of some simple and easy to use software for normal people, that's CAPABLE of going much deeper for professionals. I work in marketing, including User Experience or "UX", and my experience so far has been one of "Wow, this is great, if only I knew all about alpha frequencies or whatever the &%$# he's talking about..?" The "wow it's great" bit is very real. That's why I'm trying so hard to figure it out. The WTF? bit is all too real too.

I have to agree that selecting a layer and actually clicking Enter or selecting a 'rename' option would be preferable to the current system, as all too often I find myself clicking away because it's trying to rename itself. I've noticed others in tutorials doing the same thing, so it's not just me being a noob.

I keep finding tutorials will explain something, but the button layout they have is different from what I have. Yesterday it turned out to be a named tab, not a button.. heheh... but today the same kind of thing. In this tutorial the lady mentions my problem, that a new pixel layer doesn't actually DO anything when editing. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyHvT_dfJ54 I've found an "edit all layers" button - but it doesn't seem to help? I found a "All layers" checkbox. That didn't help either. The lay shows there's a button for this, called "Current layer and below". She then clicks the button. Great - except on my screen I see no such button? All I see in that area is the option to choose the measurement type, which is currently set to pixels. There are no other buttons in that area of the screen. Elp?

Yes, hence my facepalm.

https://vimeo.com/135046552 Actually you know what... looking closer, I now realize he's not clicking a button; he's clicking a TAB marked "in-paint"!! #facepalm

Aha... that's better. Cheers! So has the button been removed?

In the tutorial the chap just clicks on the helpfully-labeled button for the in-painting brush, but I see no such button? I've tried every icon down the left hand side, none of them show a context-sensitive inpainting brush button. In the help section it says to select a layer... ok... and then press the button. Sure thing, if I knew where the button was? It's not in the same place as shown in the video. (Edit: Have found it can be activated via the Edit menu, but I'm still missing a button. Both the tutorial video and Help system say there's a button?)

Cheers Leto, I'll check it out!

My time isn't.

v_kyr, yes there's a help thingy, but it's less than helpful for someone entirely new. For example I see I can "Liquefy persona"? I work in marketing; a persona is a fictional but representative character that you direct your marketing messages to. What does that have to do with photography and why on Earth would I ever want to liquefy one? I would never, ever, in a million years, search for 'persona' in a photo editing help thingy. The terminology is like some foreign language to me. Sure, I can grind my way through a bunch of tutorials, with no idea what I'm looking at until maybe 3/4 of the way through each 20 minute vid, at which point I feel like asking "Why don't you just call it that? Why the jargon?" Or, a feeling of "I'd never do that to my photos. Why am I even watching this?" I guess maybe what noobs need is a glossary or something? Mark, you say there's a Workbook? Erm... where? (And again, I would never, ever, search for a 'workbook', just "instructions" or "manual" or something) I'm introducing a friend of mine into photography, and she is, quite rightly, frustrated at the terms used. A lot of it is either deliberate jargon to make things more complex than they are, and/or using old film terms that are confusing in the modern era. She understood a lot easier when I explained the "aperture" as a hole, the "ISO speed" as the sensitivity etc. Sure, I explain the 'correct' terms too, but for clarity and understanding we keep it plain English. I've pushed hard for her to also understand that photography is generally pretty simple and easy in terms of the basics, that the bit we both need to work on is the editing of photos later. I've told her to get Affinity, as it's a much fairer pricing model. So here I am, trying to learn it myself, and I know EXACTLY how she feels in terms of obscure jargon. I guess Serif are using the same terms as Photoshop, entirely understandable, but neither of us have ever used Photoshop either, so that's really not helping lol. It's like I say to my friend, "Try widening the depth of field with a lower aperture..?" and she's like: 'Wut?' 'Try getting more of the pic in focus by using a smaller hole." 'Oh right' and she twiddles the aperture ring. Is there a manual, in plain English, that explains what we can DO, then we can learn the funky jargon about liquidizing our persona frequencies later? I mentioned I work in marketing, in fact helping people sell software is what I actually do, that's me. Trust me, I would never, ever, suggest to a client "Just tell them to grind through 200 videos; that'll work". No. Just no. 0_o

Forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere, but is there some resource or guide as to the ABSOLUTE basics? For example today I discover that what I thought was the cloning or healing tool is called "inpainting"? I've never heard of that expression. Point is, for a noob like myself, I have no idea what to search for and no idea what I'm looking at. For example I can see I could perhaps alter the "alpha range". OK, that's great. What the heck is an alpha range? "frequency separation". What even is that? I have no idea what "guassian blur" means, and adjusting doesn't seem to do anything? Is there like a really simple and basic overview of what the software can DO, and what that thing is called, and from there we can learn the how-to aspect of those features? Another example, I saw a vid on Vimeo about changing the tilt effect of a wide angle lens on a building. Without seeing that vid I would never have known the software can do that, let alone know what words to use to search for it. Right now the tutorials strike me as absolute, exact, step-by-step guide to the teeny tiny nitty gritty details, of how to do things I know absolutely nothing about. Elp?

Took me a surprisingly long time to find this answer, but as answers go it's a good one Can I suggest you mention that on the shopping cart or closer to the point of sale? I am using Publisher Beta and seriously thinking of getting Photo, to replace my aging Photoplus 7, if I'm to replace my beloved Pageplus with the Affinity thingy. A.

Aha! The "ignore space for some styles" thing seems to do the trick! Thank you both, Ian and Walt, for your help. I prefer to reduce my reliance on Word if possible and this helps. My main PC remains Windows 7 and for my laptop I removed Windows 10 and installed Linux Mint. If I have to learn something new then I'll learn something without the bullying business methods and spying of Microsoft. Sadly it looks like there will never be a Linux version of Affinity, but hey, Wine is a thing... A.

Indeed In fact I was lucky enough to learn to type on a Canon "word processor", which had a little blue LCD screen so you could see about 6 lines of text. You could (slowly) scroll up and down and when happy, hit "print". When that wasn't working, or someone else was using it, which was frequent, i'd use a manual machine, which hard a hard return bar. There was none of this "hold some key down and the bar does something different" stuff; you either hit that thing and made a space, or you didn't. The greatest thing I hate and despise about Wordpress is that "Oh, you hit return? BLOING! Here's a HUUGE space!" Sorry but I'm too old to change where this is concerned. I hit return, I want ONE space. I don't want 1.5 or 1.25 or 2.25 or anything except 1.0. If I wanted 1.5 spaces I'd hit it the return key 1.5 times...

I'm old (think about it)

I'm not trying to structure a document; I'm doing desktop publishing. Arguably the same thing but not entirely, as I'm talking about having control over the layout. Sure, text styles, headers, H1 all that, fantastic stuff, for websites, books, even magazines, but most of the time I'm doing PDF reports of between 3 to 7 pages, and being able to choose how the darn thing looks and prints is far more important to me than being "correct". The "no spacing" command in Word is a fantastic way of clearing all formatting and putting whatever text you have into the document's default font and size, without big gaps or anything else. It's no biggie, just means I'll still be using Word for my writing, and then pasting into Pageplus or Affinity, instead of being able to use either of them for that task. Classic example, though for my own use, not work, decided to recreate my daily schedule sheet. It's just a sheet I print out each day and fill in, with various little sections. I gave up trying to fit everything onto the page with Affinity and just did it in Word, then pasted it. That was a lot easier than trying to figure out how to do it in Affinity.

Well I eventually stumbled upon this while trying to find "line spacing", so my comment is for anyone else looking for that phrase. When using Word I almost invariably end up selecting "No Spacing" for my text, to avoid the big gaps each time I hit "return". If I WANT a bigger gap for a paragraph I just hit return twice. Been doing that for more than 15 years and my clients seem happy, but this rather clunky layout does mean there's no real possibility of AP replacing Word for me, which is a shame as I was rather hoping I could.

Hi Chris. Upon exporting you can immediately see just by the document's thumbnail that something is wrong, as it turns into a mostly white thumbnail with a little image in the corner, so no, it's not the right size. They're not just appearing smaller, it's registering them as smaller. If I import a PDF that, when printing it in Foxit, shows as an 8x11 inch A4 document, Affinity is showing that same file as 1.5 by 2 inches! And it seems that is what get exported, a little 2 inch image in the corner of an A4 sized doc. I'm glad it is actually a known bug, rather than a learning-curve issue I would still prefer to see a simple pull-down menu of A3, A4, A5 etc, for the whole doc' after creating a document, rather than typing the length and width of each page or 'spread' individually. For example my wife will often just change some multi-page A4 docs into A5 size for quickly printing some black and white handouts for discussion. I don't see how that would be possible with this menu, without laboriously typing lots of numbers? Cheers, A,

OK have been searching some more... I see for the Affinity Photo people had or have a similar issue and one can adjust things in "spread"? With the NEW document it seems easy enough to create A4 portrait, in fact it seems to be the default. OK... I think this is some kind of bug perhaps.. I've tried 3 different documents now: If I open a PDF it looks normal enough, if I then open a blank A4 document that looks normal enough, but if I copy and paste anything from the open PDF to the new blank page it does paste but it's TINY? See? Every doc I try does the same thing. (as an aside, what I'm hoping to do is to export my Pageplus files into PDF, then edit/update via AP, but as you can see that's currently not practical. If it's necessary to re-size and re-arrange everything, plus importing fonts etc, it would be easier to recreate the document from scratch, which i'm really trying to avoid if possible A.

Hi, first, I'm stocked to discover the beta release! Woot! OK, so I tried editing some of my existing docs, see how it would go. Tried a PDF, seemed to be fantastic - but upon exporting it was a little thing in the corner of a huge, wide and rectangular document? With Pageplus I'd go to 'Publication Setup' and could easily choose paper size and orientation, landscape or portrait. With Affinity I'm looking at 'document setup'... I can see some options and I pretty much understand what they are, but none of them cover such basics as the paper size and orientation? Further, when I open an existing PDF I can see it as the correct shape in the page manager, but on the main working screen it is much more square-looking? I'm guessing this is more a change in the way of doing things (ow) rather than a bug, but I'm completely lost here? TL;DR; How so I set up a doc to be A4, portrait? Thanks! A.