Photo cut outs

[RichR]

I am new to Affinity Publisher having moved from Pages Plus.  I did not purchase Affinity Photo or Designer since the old Pages Plus Publisher did everything I needed for my purposes.  In Pages Plus, I was able to "cut out" photos to eliminate unnecessary background.  I can't find that capability in Affinity Publisher.  Does it exist in Publisher or do I have to purchase Photo to obtain that capability?   The promotional information for Publisher seemed to imply it had that capability, but maybe I just misunderstood. 

[Alfred]

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, Rich.

Although Affinity Publisher doesn’t include a cutout feature as such, you can perform a vector crop to yield the same result as choosing the ‘Vector-cropped bitmap’ output option (as opposed to ‘Alpha-edged bitmap’) in PP’s Cutout Studio. However, the procedure in the Affinity apps is comparable to performing a fiddly irregular crop in PP: there’s no direct equivalent to sweeping around an object with the Discard Brush.