I posted on Reddit recently asking for feature requests and one of them was "free rotation." At the time you could either a) rotate the entire document in 90 degree increments or b) freely rotate a particular layer with the Free Transform tool. But there was no way to rotate the entire document an arbitrary amount.

So I added that, and the Crop tool seemed like a natural place for it.

The implementation will feel pretty familiar to users of Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Grab outside a corner to rotate the underlying document and the crop rectangle constrains itself within so you won't have any blank pixels in your crop.

There are some differences however, as we're not just running a photocopier over here.

Affinity resizes the crop box as you rotate, but it also stretches the box in some baffling way. Not sure what's going on there (perhaps they're maximizing the crop box area?) but in Mojave Paint, the crop box keeps its aspect ratio as you drag for rotation.

Affinity's crop tool is superior to Photoshop's in one way though: Dragging the crop box actually moves the box instead of moving the document underneath. Photoshop does this annoying inverted movement thing that leaves the crop box centered in the viewport. It reminds me of the knobs in newer cars where the knob itself doesn't turn; the knob stays fixed and ring around it turns. Nigel Tufnel would never have it!

So what we ended up with is the best of both worlds: The document rotates but always stays in view (unlike Photoshop where it spills out of the viewport), the crop box is never stretched unless you manually grab a corner and drag, and when you want to move the crop box it moves intuitively as we've all been using drag and drop since the dawn of personal computers.

Possible future enhancements:

• Set the angle by dragging a horizontal line (useful for straightening tilted images)
• Allow the crop rectangle to extend beyond the document edge. Some crop tool implementations let you use the crop tool also as a "grow the canvas" tool.

Reach out if any of this is important to you, and please check out this new "free rotation" feature in Mojave Paint 1.7.4 or later.