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I find the thumbnails in the layers palette very useful. However, the thumbnails in Affinity present a number of difficulties for me. The idea of using a different background colour for image and mask or adjustment is a good one, but the black background can be a real visibility problem when working with dark objects. With a pale grey this might work better. Obviously any colour is going to conflict with some layer content but I find the black very hard to read indeed. The thumbnails are quite modest and in the case of masks, adjustments etc. are also occupied by a quite large and very distracting function icon making the contents very hard to read sometimes. Could these icons be made much, much more discreet or, even better, moved outside the thumbnail and placed immediately beside it, before the name and description? I think this would be a huge improvement in legibility. In an ideal world I would love to see a palette option that allows us a choice of thumbnail sizes.

I am keyboard phobic and have great difficulty with shortcuts, so pop up right click context menus are a very useful shortcut device indeed. for me. Now that is a very personal problem but I am sure there are plenty of others who find well implemented context clicking a very focused way of getting to just what you need in a given context. I find that this is rather inconsistently applied in the Layers Palette. There are things one does very rarely included there and things one does frequently that are missing. I think the following need adding to this menu when the appropriate layer(s) are selected. Merge Down for mask and adjustment layers. You have to go to the main layers menu to find it. Merge Selected for multiple layers. Once again you have to go to the main mayer menu to find it. Invert layer (very useful for mask layers). Only available from main menu. Lock Children. It shouldn’t really be necessary to have to select the Pick tool and then select this in it’s property bar. To my mind it properly belongs here in the Layers Palette context menu as well.

Once again I am afraid I am going to make request that comes straight from your competitor. But once again it's simple and it works. A very simple shortcut I use all the time in the Layers Palette of PS is to duplicate and simultaneously locate a layer by holding down the Alt key while dragging it to where you want it. This works in PS for all types of layer. It’s a tiny thing but it really makes life quick and simple. I would love to see this in AP. It is entirely consistent with Affinity which already uses the Alt key for layer duplication by dragging in the image.