I placed a .png image on my new file. How do I break it apart so I can change it up and recolor.

[hgreer]

I admit, I am horribly new at this.  I am not a graphic designer.  I am a teacher who is trying to make decent graphics for assessments.  A graphics specialist showed me a "point and recolor" function in A. Illustrator.  He used a png file and was able to "reinvent it" quite easily.  Is there a tutorial on how to manipulate inserted files?

[UncleMonkey]

I admit, I am horribly new at this.  I am not a graphic designer.  I am a teacher who is trying to make decent graphics for assessments.  A graphics specialist showed me a "point and recolor" function in A. Illustrator.  He used a png file and was able to "reinvent it" quite easily.  Is there a tutorial on how to manipulate inserted files?

Sounds as if he was using the Live Trace / Live Paint feature in Illustrator. This outlines areas of similar color in a raster image, and fills the resulting shape with a solid color, using adjustable parameters for number of colors, size and smoothness of paths. It's one of the features I use most, because it will let you make an easy-to-manipulate drawing with sharp boundaries from a photo—great for simplifying, like creating a silhouette profile. Unfortunately, I can't see any sign of this function in Affinity Designer… nor of Photoshop's somewhat-similar smart lasso and extract tools in Affinity Photo. Fortunately, you can get pretty good conversions online, for example at vectormagic.com or (for free) autotracer.org. At first glance, neither site offers the precision of control you get with Illustrator, and autotracer left some gaps in the .svg output. But vectormagic will give you two free conversions (more if you're a sneaky cookie manipulator, I expect), and unlimited conversions for $7.95 a month. Seems pretty good to me.