Undoing crop after saving In Affinity Photo

[Richard Liu]

I'm sure somebody has posed this exact question, but searching in the Affinity forums is a real trial.  There doesn't seem to be a way to search for the phrase "undo crop."

So, having cropped an image in Affinity Photo and saved without saving history, how can I get back to the original image the next time I open the file?  Yes, "Unclip canvas," but that puts some annoying transparent "stuff" around the original image.

[Hilltop]

14 minutes ago, Richard Liu said:

 Yes, "Unclip canvas," but that puts some annoying transparent "stuff" around the original image.

I don't see transparent 'stuff' when I follow your steps but could you not crop that?

[Richard Liu]

Made a screen movie of what I did.  I find no way of getting rid of the borders, I don't understand what the "marching ants" are supposed to signify.  I attempt to crop off the borders by specifying the original dimensions as absolute size, but I still have to adjust the cropping frame to the smaller unclipped image, and for that I don't receive any support from snapping.  So, inevitably, I don't get the cropping frame to align exactly with the image, and the one pixel too much on one side displays as "marching ants."

I somehow don't thinks this is the way uncropping was meant to work.  Logically, to uncrop I should not have to recrop, should I?

>>> I must apologize.  I cannot upload the screen recording.  It's too large.  After trying several times to make it smaller, I've given up.  This has been an exercise in frustration.  I wish I knew why unclipping puts a border around the restored image to begin with.

[walt.farrell]

If you started with an image file, cropped it, and saved a .afphoto file, then try looking in the Snapshots studio panel (View > Studio > Snapshots) and restore the background snapshot.

[Richard Liu]

I even tried saving a snapshot before cropping -- I usually do that last in my workflow -- and saving the cropped image as an .afphoto, but restoring the snapshot immediately after opening that .afphoto does not restore the document as it was before cropping.  For one thing, it's much too dark.

I think I'll report this as a bug, seeing as how doing the same thing with a variant of the RAW image processed in the workflow described above, i. e., snapshot - crop - unclip canvas, seemed at first glance to reproduced the original uncropped image.  Actually, each dimension had 2 px too many, i. e., 1 px on each of four sides, as opposed to this RAW file, which, when I unclip canvas, has 168 px too many on each side.

[Ron P.]

I can not replicate this. The first snapshot was automatically created by Photo. I then cropped the image, and immediately created a snapshot and even renamed it to cropped. I then saved as an .afphoto file. I closed the image and Photo. After a minute or so I opened Photo and my snapshots were intact. I was able to restore to the background snapshot, which produced the uncropped version. I could back and forth between the cropped and uncropped, without any added "border". I then took it one step further, and added a B&W adjustment layer. Created another snapshot. Saved the file, and closed. After opening Photo and the file, my snapshots were intact.

[Richard Liu]

Thanks.  I'm trying real hard to give public access to the .afphoto's of original and cropped versions of both these images in order to allow people to "play around" with them, but I'm running into the problem of limited space.  They are 420.5, 417.8, 315.3 and 314.9 MB.  I can upload them to Dropbox, but I seem unable to share just a plain link to them.  Dropbox insists on sending an email invitation.  When I send one to myself, then click the "View file" button, Dropbox tries to display the file.  This is getting to be a real pain.

It seems that I can only share links in Dropbox Professional, and I am disinclined to upgrade.

Where can I upload these files?

>>> Here's a link to a .zip file on Google Drive:  https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bOasvxCDbrza4_hNk6XffJb7-RJXqhXd/view?usp=sharing

The files in it are name as follows:  _DSCnnnn_AFP32.afphoto and _DSCnnn_AFP32_cropped.afphoto, where nnnn = 2082 or 2093.  Before cropping _DSCnnnn_AFP32.afphoto, I made a snapshot and saved the file.  Then I cropped (fixed ratio 1:1 from upper left corner) and saved it as _DSCnnn_AFP32_cropped.afphoto.  When I open the cropped file and immediately restore the snapshot, the image is much, much darker.  So I undo the restore and attempt to restore the uncrossed image with Document | Unclip canvas.  For nnnn = 2082 this results in the original image displayed with what seems to be a border, 168 px wide.  For nnnn = 2093, the border is only 1 px wide.  The original image is 5600 px x 3728 px.  I have no idea why the two crops unclip canvas so differently.

I am using Affinity Photo 1.7.1 on a 2018 MacBook Pro 15" running macOS 10.13.6 with all the latest Apple updates.