Notes from a Walking Edge Case

[nickbatz]

I'm working on a picture that's larger than any sane person would make (I've reduced it to 144"x44", although the print will probably be half that size).

Affinity Photo kept getting very slow, so I've been doing merge visibles, deleting everything below them, and saving the resulting file as a new version... with the result that many layers are long gone.

This is the fourth file, and I've made a small selection on the merged visible raster image at the bottom of the layer stack. But apparently Refine thinks the selection includes something that isn't there anymore. It appears (in the second screen shot here, which shows the actual selection being limited to one small area on the right) that clone brush layer is what's confusing it.

My solution was just to do a new merge visible and use that for the selection, but that doesn't detract from how riveting this story is.