ForestHymn

Hello Affinity Photo development team,
I'm a newbie to your program, but have worked as a digital illustrator for several years.
Affinity Photo is a really nice program - a nice alternative to Photoshop.
It could be a great program for digital illustrators and painters... But it is missing a critical option for higher speed efficiency: a fast color picker option by pressing "Ctrl" or "Alt"
This is present in Photoshop, Corel Painter, Krita, OpenCanvas, PaintStorm Studio, etc. 
It is very important to painters to be able to access the color picker quickly. When you hold down "Ctrl" or "Alt" and click on the color - it color picks it. Then when you let go of the "Ctrl" or "Alt" key, it goes back to the tool you were using before. When you have to switch between brush and color picker, this wastes twice the amount of time. An extra second or fraction of a second may not seem like a lot - but it adds up. A painting that would take 2 hours, takes 4 hours. A piece that would take 1 day, takes 2 days. 1 week turns into 2 weeks, etc. 
This would be a great addition to Affinity Photo - for all artists.
One last idea... Is allowing the user to "fix" the color wheel triangle in a fixed position - instead of having it rotate all around pointing at the chosen color. Why? Because having lightness point up, darkness point down, and saturation point right - is far easier for the brain to process than having the triangle flip all around the wheel... it makes picking specific shades across different colors inconsistent.. harder to match the same saturation position on different colors... because it has changed position. It's easier for the brain to map out the color triangle when it's fixed in one position. White up - black down - and saturation to the right.. Would be far easier to remember for artists - who need consistency, and speed in color picking.
Thank you immensely for viewing and considering these ideas!!

Hello Affinity Photo development team,
I'm a newbie to your program, but have worked as a digital illustrator for several years.
Affinity Photo is a really nice program - a nice alternative to Photoshop.
It could be a great program for digital illustrators and painters... But it is missing a critical option for higher speed efficiency: a fast color picker option by pressing "Ctrl" or "Alt"
This is present in Photoshop, Corel Painter, Krita, OpenCanvas, PaintStorm Studio, etc. 
It is very important to painters to be able to access the color picker quickly. When you hold down "Ctrl" or "Alt" and click on the color - it color picks it. Then when you let go of the "Ctrl" or "Alt" key, it goes back to the tool you were using before. When you have to switch between brush and color picker, this wastes twice the amount of time. An extra second or fraction of a second may not seem like a lot - but it adds up. A painting that would take 2 hours, takes 4 hours. A piece that would take 1 day, takes 2 days. 1 week turns into 2 weeks, etc. 
This would be a great addition to Affinity Photo - for all artists.
One last idea... Is allowing the user to "fix" the color wheel triangle in a fixed position - instead of having it rotate all around pointing at the chosen color. Why? Because having lightness point up, darkness point down, and saturation point right - is far easier for the brain to process than having the triangle flip all around the wheel... it makes picking specific shades across different colors inconsistent.. harder to match the same saturation position on different colors... because it has changed position. It's easier for the brain to map out the color triangle when it's fixed in one position. White up - black down - and saturation to the right.. Would be far easier to remember for artists - who need consistency, and speed in color picking.
Thank you immensely for viewing and considering these ideas!!

Hello Affinity Photo development team,
I'm a newbie to your program, but have worked as a digital illustrator for several years.
Affinity Photo is a really nice program - a nice alternative to Photoshop.
It could be a great program for digital illustrators and painters... But it is missing a critical option for higher speed efficiency: a fast color picker option by pressing "Ctrl" or "Alt"
This is present in Photoshop, Corel Painter, Krita, OpenCanvas, PaintStorm Studio, etc. 
It is very important to painters to be able to access the color picker quickly. When you hold down "Ctrl" or "Alt" and click on the color - it color picks it. Then when you let go of the "Ctrl" or "Alt" key, it goes back to the tool you were using before. When you have to switch between brush and color picker, this wastes twice the amount of time. An extra second or fraction of a second may not seem like a lot - but it adds up. A painting that would take 2 hours, takes 4 hours. A piece that would take 1 day, takes 2 days. 1 week turns into 2 weeks, etc. 
This would be a great addition to Affinity Photo - for all artists.
One last idea... Is allowing the user to "fix" the color wheel triangle in a fixed position - instead of having it rotate all around pointing at the chosen color. Why? Because having lightness point up, darkness point down, and saturation point right - is far easier for the brain to process than having the triangle flip all around the wheel... it makes picking specific shades across different colors inconsistent.. harder to match the same saturation position on different colors... because it has changed position. It's easier for the brain to map out the color triangle when it's fixed in one position. White up - black down - and saturation to the right.. Would be far easier to remember for artists - who need consistency, and speed in color picking.
Thank you immensely for viewing and considering these ideas!!

Thank you so much for this idea!
It would be a good option for photo re-touching. In the case of painters, though, the magnifying glass is, unfortunately very confusing.
The reason for this is that - when digital painters paint.. at least, in my case... I work zoomed out (so I can see the entire painting on the screen.) When I color pick, I'm attempting to pick the color of the pixels that are shown on the screen. I don't want to zoom in - to the tiny pixels and pick from there - I want to pick from the pixels I'm already seeing. When the magnifying glass zooms you in... you lose track of the area of color you... actually wanted to pick from.. and have to now guess which of the tiny pixels represents the color you were going for at first.. This is especially true when working with giant canvases. I work with 15,000 x 8,437 size canvases. And zooming into pixel size on these canvases completely throws me off, from picking the intended color. It zooms miles in... As a painter, the goal is to pick color in context to the rest of the painting. Zooming in loses the context.
So it's a bit of a pain for painters.  
Maybe if it were an optional check-box, in preferences, or something. Where, Photo re-touchers can keep the magnifying glass - with immediate feedback, maybe? And painters can choose a simple "color picker" icon, or cross-hair, or something precise - with immediate feedback upon pressing "Alt." This way, both Photo re-touchers and painters can be happy.
In any case, it looks like the idea has been covered thoroughly, by many comments.
I'm probably just repeating some of the previous conversations.. Thank you for the support!
 Maybe this is something that can be improved in the future at some point...

Oh wow - I apologize, I didn't see the suggestion of the crosshair before. Wow - thank you for making the video - it is a good "in the meantime" option!
Thank you!!

I am not an expert regarding these things, but my guess is that it's because the Affinity Suite as a whole does not support high precision tablet input yet. Last year I got into contact with the guy behind the addon Lazy Nezumi Pro (great addon), and he said the reason his addon wasn't supporting Affinity products was because of them using "low-resolution mouse coordinates instead of high-res tablet coords" as the creator himself put it (I checked my old e-mail for a quote). I guess these two things are the same thing, so once that is added, it should get more precise for tablets.

Also, here's a topic I made not too long ago where a developer gave me the answer that high precision tablet input is going to get added properly, and that they are going to remove the current experimental feature since it doesn't really work. Hopefully we get it once 1.8 comes along:
 

 

I agree. Immediate feedback on pressing the ALT Modifier is badly missing. 

As the cursor doesn't change to a colour picker there's no way to understand that the mode-change has registered. One needs to start sampling to have that magnifying glass appear: But also here the feedback is poor, as it easily takes half a second or more, until the Loupe finally shows up. One nearly can feel the program think: "Hang on – the user has pressed ALT and now even keeps LMB held down – what was it again what I'm supposed to show?

While speeding up that widget one might consider removing that distracting bevel-effect from the  picker. Giving the user a picker-experience which lets users judge the just sampled colour sure was more helpful than skeuomorphism. That's how things look in Photoshop CS6. 

Hello Affinity Photo development team,
I'm a newbie to your program, but have worked as a digital illustrator for several years.
Affinity Photo is a really nice program - a nice alternative to Photoshop.
It could be a great program for digital illustrators and painters... But it is missing a critical option for higher speed efficiency: a fast color picker option by pressing "Ctrl" or "Alt"
This is present in Photoshop, Corel Painter, Krita, OpenCanvas, PaintStorm Studio, etc. 
It is very important to painters to be able to access the color picker quickly. When you hold down "Ctrl" or "Alt" and click on the color - it color picks it. Then when you let go of the "Ctrl" or "Alt" key, it goes back to the tool you were using before. When you have to switch between brush and color picker, this wastes twice the amount of time. An extra second or fraction of a second may not seem like a lot - but it adds up. A painting that would take 2 hours, takes 4 hours. A piece that would take 1 day, takes 2 days. 1 week turns into 2 weeks, etc. 
This would be a great addition to Affinity Photo - for all artists.
One last idea... Is allowing the user to "fix" the color wheel triangle in a fixed position - instead of having it rotate all around pointing at the chosen color. Why? Because having lightness point up, darkness point down, and saturation point right - is far easier for the brain to process than having the triangle flip all around the wheel... it makes picking specific shades across different colors inconsistent.. harder to match the same saturation position on different colors... because it has changed position. It's easier for the brain to map out the color triangle when it's fixed in one position. White up - black down - and saturation to the right.. Would be far easier to remember for artists - who need consistency, and speed in color picking.
Thank you immensely for viewing and considering these ideas!!

My feature request is to make the settings you use for your colour picker apply to all colour pickers globally. Sometimes I just want to colour pick from my selected layer, but I can only do it while using the Colour Picker tool. Would be a very nice quality of life change.

Desktop 2019.06.20 - 18.15.56.03.mp4
  As a side note, but still pretty important, I would like to bring more attention to the issue of not having any form of indicator when holding down alt to do fast colour picking with your brush. This was based on the conversation I had in this thread below, and my comment had a few suggestions on how to best solve it. Fixing the above issue as well as that issue from the other thread would make a lot of painters very happy!
 
 

Thank you @Frozen Death Knight
Here's a quick preview in case anyone still does not understand it.

 
 

Hello Affinity Photo development team,
I'm a newbie to your program, but have worked as a digital illustrator for several years.
Affinity Photo is a really nice program - a nice alternative to Photoshop.
It could be a great program for digital illustrators and painters... But it is missing a critical option for higher speed efficiency: a fast color picker option by pressing "Ctrl" or "Alt"
This is present in Photoshop, Corel Painter, Krita, OpenCanvas, PaintStorm Studio, etc. 
It is very important to painters to be able to access the color picker quickly. When you hold down "Ctrl" or "Alt" and click on the color - it color picks it. Then when you let go of the "Ctrl" or "Alt" key, it goes back to the tool you were using before. When you have to switch between brush and color picker, this wastes twice the amount of time. An extra second or fraction of a second may not seem like a lot - but it adds up. A painting that would take 2 hours, takes 4 hours. A piece that would take 1 day, takes 2 days. 1 week turns into 2 weeks, etc. 
This would be a great addition to Affinity Photo - for all artists.
One last idea... Is allowing the user to "fix" the color wheel triangle in a fixed position - instead of having it rotate all around pointing at the chosen color. Why? Because having lightness point up, darkness point down, and saturation point right - is far easier for the brain to process than having the triangle flip all around the wheel... it makes picking specific shades across different colors inconsistent.. harder to match the same saturation position on different colors... because it has changed position. It's easier for the brain to map out the color triangle when it's fixed in one position. White up - black down - and saturation to the right.. Would be far easier to remember for artists - who need consistency, and speed in color picking.
Thank you immensely for viewing and considering these ideas!!

Thank you Janno!
Oh, thank you! It looks like "Alt" does color-pick quickly already...
But.. there is one big problem - the cursor doesn't change to the color picker icon. So if you're painting with a large size brush - for example: 100 pixels wide, and you want to color pick a tiny spot of color (quickly) - and you don't want to wait 2 seconds for the magnifying glass to appear... then you're forced to try to pick a tiny spot - with a giant 100-pixel wide cursor. Which will make it very hard to pick the right spot. 
So maybe the suggestion would change to - have holding "Alt" immediately change the cursor to the color picker icon. So you get to have precision quickly, without having to wait several seconds for the magnifying glass to appear? Maybe that would make more sense.
 

Thank you Janno!
Oh, thank you! It looks like "Alt" does color-pick quickly already...
But.. there is one big problem - the cursor doesn't change to the color picker icon. So if you're painting with a large size brush - for example: 100 pixels wide, and you want to color pick a tiny spot of color (quickly) - and you don't want to wait 2 seconds for the magnifying glass to appear... then you're forced to try to pick a tiny spot - with a giant 100-pixel wide cursor. Which will make it very hard to pick the right spot. 
So maybe the suggestion would change to - have holding "Alt" immediately change the cursor to the color picker icon. So you get to have precision quickly, without having to wait several seconds for the magnifying glass to appear? Maybe that would make more sense.
 

Hello Affinity Photo development team,
I'm a newbie to your program, but have worked as a digital illustrator for several years.
Affinity Photo is a really nice program - a nice alternative to Photoshop.
It could be a great program for digital illustrators and painters... But it is missing a critical option for higher speed efficiency: a fast color picker option by pressing "Ctrl" or "Alt"
This is present in Photoshop, Corel Painter, Krita, OpenCanvas, PaintStorm Studio, etc. 
It is very important to painters to be able to access the color picker quickly. When you hold down "Ctrl" or "Alt" and click on the color - it color picks it. Then when you let go of the "Ctrl" or "Alt" key, it goes back to the tool you were using before. When you have to switch between brush and color picker, this wastes twice the amount of time. An extra second or fraction of a second may not seem like a lot - but it adds up. A painting that would take 2 hours, takes 4 hours. A piece that would take 1 day, takes 2 days. 1 week turns into 2 weeks, etc. 
This would be a great addition to Affinity Photo - for all artists.
One last idea... Is allowing the user to "fix" the color wheel triangle in a fixed position - instead of having it rotate all around pointing at the chosen color. Why? Because having lightness point up, darkness point down, and saturation point right - is far easier for the brain to process than having the triangle flip all around the wheel... it makes picking specific shades across different colors inconsistent.. harder to match the same saturation position on different colors... because it has changed position. It's easier for the brain to map out the color triangle when it's fixed in one position. White up - black down - and saturation to the right.. Would be far easier to remember for artists - who need consistency, and speed in color picking.
Thank you immensely for viewing and considering these ideas!!