Perspective without crop

[Antricion]

Sometimes I have photos from whiteboards or something like that, and for better usage, would like to get the perspecitve distortion removed. While I can do that when using the perspective tool and setting it to source mode, the tool enforces automatic crop, because the crop box is checked and grayed out. If that was not grayed out, but could be checked out, I could use the tool to mark any clearly visible rectangle in the picture, use it to set up the perspecitve correction, and manually crop the image to the part I really need. While I can use the target mode to try and move the corner points until the image looks like it is straight, the other way would be easier.

Similar to that, in the "straighten" tool or other transformation tools, I would sometimes like the opposite of the crop: grow the image so the transformed image is completely visible! By now the straighten tool without cropping turns the image inside the current image size, so some transparent parts are added, but the same amount of image is lost, because it is rotated outside the current borders.

[Fixx]

Hmmm. My experience is that perspective tool does not crop but uses current canvas area. Usually perspective controls are used such way that important image area stays within canvas (dragging control points also in, not always out), (and transparent parts can be inpainted after).

Using perspective tool as Live filter (Layer>New Live Filter Layer>Distort>Perspective..) keeps areas that fall behind canvas area and you can recover those by "uncropping" canvas with crop tool. You might want to try that.

(It is fully possible that I did not understand the problem.)

[Antricion]

Probably you did, but I am still struggling with the Affinity Photo terms and the way of thinking needed for it. It's exacly this other way of thinking which led to me abandonning the Affinity Photo beta test in those days, because it seemed too much effort to learn. Gladly the functionality of the program as improved since then, so now I give it an earnest "re-try".

So yes, it seems the image is not cropped, but rotated inside the canvas. And yes, it seems I can either "uncrop" the image, or use the canvas size change. And now I understand the issue everybody is having with the standard settings of the canvas change tool. But, as it is with the perspective tool, a lot is left then to "guess work" and several retries, as the un-crop doesn't show a hint of the image parts that are gowing to reappear.

So in terms of Affinity Photo, it seems what I would like to have is an option of a canvas "auto-grow" on certain operations.

With the new insight you gave me here to the correlation of the image parts to the canvas, which can basically be handled like a layer below all other layers, I can better work around that issue.