Cropping (Affinity Photo v.1)

[LesC]

While I am slowly acquainting myself with Affinity Photo v.2 (I have been using v.1 for several years now), I am teaching my wife to use Affinity Photo v.1. She switched later than me from Photoshop to Affinity Photo.
Her English is not as good as mine, so I am writing Dutch instructions for her. I realise I will have to rewrite these instructions for v.2, but I'm not yet familiar enough.

Any way, it looks like some settings are different on her Mac than on mine, but I can’t find how to fix the following issue.

When choosing the crop tool, my wife does not get the thirds grid overlay (while I do), but she automatically gets the straighten tool (a cross-hair and a little yardstick) which you can’t really use for cropping!
 

The only way she found to get rid of that straighten tool is by clicking on the tool above (the colour picker) in the tool bar at the left of the screen and then back on the crop tool.

I’ve been looking through the preferences (called Settings on Mac), but cannot seem to find any way to ensure that her setup is the same as mine.
We’re both running AP v.1.10.6 on a M1 iMac on Ventura 13.2.1.

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

[henryanthony]

I am using Windows 10 so this information may not be exactly what works for you but, I get the Straighten Tool by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on the Crop Tool. Maybe something similar on your Mac.

[Old Bruce]

1 hour ago, LesC said:

When choosing the crop tool, my wife does not get the thirds grid overlay (while I do), but she automatically gets the straighten tool (a cross-hair and a little yardstick) which you can’t really use for cropping!

Tell your wife to hold the Command key down and just click on the image, do not click and drag. then let go of the Command key. Most likely the "Straighten" option got clicked.

If this persists she may want to quit Photo and everything else and restart the computer, this will clean out a lot of cruft.

[LesC]

Thank you, I’ll try it myself, later today or early tomorrow. Hope your suggestion works, but I’ll let you know any way. 

[LesC]

I tried the trick myself late last night, and all seemed fine, even after quitting the program and launching Affinity Photo again. As we shut down the Macs every night, I booted her Mac this morning, launched Affinity Photo v.1, opened a RAW photo, developed it and in the Photo persona, I picked the crop tool. All was still fine!
Thank you again for your quick reply.
As long as my wife does not report any more quirks, she's good to go, and I can go on familiarising myself with v.2.