hokic

What about using compounds plus booleans? You can make nondestructive holes. I found it quite useful.
 

I try to explain a bit more. 
I am working on tree painting. Much more complex then the one I have created for this thread. And the tree itself has more layers to look natural. Some background leafs, dark, some branches, foreground brighter leafs etc. etc. 
Branches are fine to paint as curves with variable width stroke. But bunches of leafs, those are better as shapes. But the thing is - to make it look naturally, I need to see through, there are some holes in such shapes. You can see through them, darker leafs and branches bellow, sky, etc. I also need the apples not to be on the top, perfect circles, but their parts are hidden, mostly the top ones. 
For all of this, this type of "hide" masking would be best solution for two reasons
It is non-destructive the workarounds like "duplicate sky color layer and create the holes in the different layer above" etc. do not work clever in complex composition Anyway, thanks for help, really. 

Thank you, but this does the opposite. It shows the intersecting parts of both layer groups. I need to hide them. 
Just to make clear in case I did not explained it right. What I have about is a good visual outcome that I need. The process is not right  Imagine the tree crown having texture - in such case green circles from MASK THIS OUT group would not work. 

Feature request for super useful function.
Toggle: Filled Area of vector mask shows content/Filled area of vector mask hides content.
Thx

Hi
I have a couple of questions that really has been bugging me.
Is there a keybind to opening the color chooser instead of having to double clicking on it?
Is there a way to stop the triangle from rotating in the color wheel in both the color chooser  as well as the color panel?
Lastly is the a way to enlarge the color wheel of the color panel?

Ah, yes, I actually have that trick on my list to report as a bug because it's a real issue. I can almost taste how the programmer has worked with elements in a list here - but incorrectly.
Because:
'Move outside' reverses the order of the selected. (bug) 'Move inside' keeps the order. So if I'm interested in moving items out of a group with this menu choice, the items are inadvertently turned upside down, which is disastrous if the order is relevant, and it usually is.
But thanks for the tip anyway. :)

Just to let you know, you can do that already using a trick.
Suppose you start with this, for example:

 
You can select the 3 layers, Group them, then use Layer > Arrange > Move Outside (Designer, Publisher) or Arrange > Move Outside (Photo) and you'll end up with this:

Then you can simply delete the empty Group.

Ooooh! walt, if a vector brush is touted as such then it should be fully vectorised else call it what it is, the stroke should not be a raster image, it should be a vector such as a vector SVG and the stroke should be expandable, Vectorstyler has the features to make some great vector brush heads for affinity "vector"  brushes. I'm not a programmer but would it really be that hard to use vector SVG files instead of png?
 

@hokic:
It seems from your description that perhaps you do not have Use Fill selected on the Context Toolbar when using the Pen Tool, and that you are not properly terminating one shape when you finish drawing its strokes. You need to make sure you click on the original node when it is highlighted yellow, or you might make an additional node that overlaps but does not close the object. Or you need to press Esc to close the curve without clicking on the start node.

When I press the spacebar to move the visible area, sometimes the hand icon appears, sometimes not. Sometimes there's already something selected on-screen, other times not, and it doesn't seem to affect when the hand icon/move function works/doesn't work.
Needs to be consistency.

Oh. You gotta be kidding me. The thing is - who zooms brushes to 3000% to realize those are probably high-res bitmaps? After he uses for a tool called Vector Brush and it even works in normal zoom ratios. I have been working on a client design, everything is done and suddenly I realize those files cannot be exported as vectors, because all the formats contain brutal pixelation. 
Honestly this is a big disappointment. And not a first one. I have been trying several times to switch to Affinity. But I have to keep taking it as the secondary option only, because I cannot rely on the product yet. I am very sorry. 

Beaten but I'll post it anyway
 
Select the area to be modified using one of the Marquee tools
Press V
In the Channels palette, turn off the channels editable symbol for green and blue
Move the selection with the cursor keys or mouse
Repeat for the other channels
Effective on pixel layers only

As it is for me as I don't use Wet Edges with the basic brushes and every time I switch to a brush that uses it and I go back to the basic brush (or many other brushes from other categories) I have to switch the Wet Edge off. What is even worse, I can't obviously memorize this fastidious setting for all the brushes so for lots of brushes from other categories that don't use the Wet Edge I end up being extremely confused as I can't tell for sure what their original setting was. So, I have to select a basic brush because I know it doesn't use Wet Edge, switch to the other category I want use the brush from, and finally find out what its setting is. Unbelievable.

Je to zvláštní, ale soubory stažené z GitHubu, nevím proč, nefungují. Mohu je zvolit, ale nemají žádnou účinnost (nefunguje dělení ani opravy). Stáhl jsem jiný slovník z dalšího zdroje a přestože má pouze 20kB (oproti 985 kB z GitHubu), tak funguje. Každopádně už to snad chodí
Díky všem za pomoc / Thanks all for help.
 
EDIT: Moje chyba! Špatně stažený soubor.

Já mám cestu ke slovníku nastavenu po instalaci do ProgramData, kde byly i slovníky pro V1.

It is very easy to download the files from GitHub in the wrong format, ending up with HTML code rather than plain text.
It is better to use the V1 FAQ on adding dictionaries, and see the second post in that FAQ which has them available for download in the proper format. This avoids the games that GitHub makes you play.

I know we had this conversation in the past and I understand for some of you the way it works makes sense, but it totally doesn't for me (and I'm sure, for others).
So, I'm formally requesting to accommodate for users like me who are used to other bitmap editing software were this extremely confusing behavior doesn't happen.
I don't want to have to tweak myriads of brush settings only to avoid something that can be done once and for all by adding a simple option.
The screen record below shows the issue and the fix is not by changing one of the three status option per-brush. A simpler way exists.
2020-08-26 10-57-50.mp4

Some brushes use the Wet Edges mode but changing to a brush that by default doesn't use that setting doesn't revert the Wet Edges to off. This is very confusing. I can't remember each brush setting and there's no way to know whether the setting were originally designed to have the Wet Edge on or off.
Interestingly among the default brush libraries this doesn't seem to happen only with the OIL brushes which switch Wet Edges on and off based on the factory settings.
 
Thanks @walt.farrell for the heads up on a better topic title.

Not all brush settings need to be modified while using the tool, but diameter and hardness are no doubt very frequently used. That's why you have a shortcut for those two but you don't have one for dithering or blending or spacing or flow or all the tens of other settings. To my mind, size and feathering of a brush - or brush preset - should be the one where you last left it. Which is very likely the size you'll use when you pick your work up again. Other solutions, like different color highlights, would seem to me to complicate the UI situation even more.
BTW, another really annoying related thing (unless I haven't found the right setting) is that you can see a brush's name only by hovering over it. No quick glimpsing at the brush list to pick the right one.

What has frequently been requested is the highlighting of the brush used even if the preset is altered. This could be done by the use of a different colour for the highlighting. Or having the highlighting being just an outline if the preset is altered. I am slightly baffled why this hasn't been done already.
The brushes in the Basics section are most likely just one Brush that has many presets made from it. Compare those to the brushes in the Engraving section. Several different brushes with very few, if any, presets.

Here's a scenario for you Affinity:
I start using a brush
I test the size
I see it's too big so I reduce the size (selection of brush type disappears)
I then skip to a marquee tool to make a mask or to the pointer to move something
I then click B to go back to the brush tool and trust I have the same brush type and size and start painting because I can't see which I have selected
then I use a different brush for a different effect and change the size (and also lose the selection of said brush type)
losing the knowledge of knowing which brush I have selected I click on the brush I want, and in so doing I reset the brush to it's default, so I have to modify it to get it back to how I wanted.
Time goes by with every selection and modification
Making custom brushes is absolutely necessary to work efficiently in AP, but I find it very unintuitive.
These things make me frustrated and when you're working under tight deadlines the annoyance levels go up and up.
I love Affinity software but this issue really needs to be fixed. Please give us an easy way to know which brush we have selected and/or modified (just a simply blue dot but the brush selection to show it's modified?)
I could go on, but lets hear from you Affinity - we'd really appreciate it.

"Select Same" menu allows to select hidden and locked layers and change their fill and stroke colours and even delete selected layers.
Affinity Designer 1.9.3
select_same_bug.mov

Well, if the layer is locked (and/or hidden) it should be locked for any actions, not only transformations. I think this is not a normal behavior.

I know I'm not the first person to request this; apparently a couple requests were made back in 2015 and it still hasn't been implemented. In Adobe Illustrator, when you export to SVG, all of the various hidden layers are exported as well, with display="inline" and display="none" being put on visible and invisible layers, respectfully. Part of my HTML5 game is built around showing and hiding various layers of an SVG, using css classes to show different layers at different times. The build pipeline for the game takes Illustrator's odd converting of layer names into pseudo-html-safe strings and reverts them to be used as class names on the elements, and I was happy to redo that bit to function with however Designer outputs its SVG and re-prepare it for use in my project.
But Affinity Designer just removes the hidden layers, period. There's no option to NOT have it remove the layers, there's only an option to remove additional layers for some odd reason. I get the reasoning behind wanting to optimize SVG for the web, but that should be an option left for me to decide, not have it dictated to me by the program. I have an SVG optimizer already in my build pipeline, and its tailored to my needs, meaning it doesn't remove the hidden layers I want to keep while still allowing me to remove bloated pixel data that might be left over. Why is turning off this unwanted optimizing not an option in Designer? And more importantly, why is it still not an option after apparently five years of it being requested?
And before it's suggested again, no, just unhiding all the layers is not a suitable work around. It's tedious to have to make sure every nook and cranny of a complex SVG is unhidden just so it will export, and couple that with the fact that I have several of these SVGs, and it's just not worth the hassle. Plus, it's nice that the SVGs inherently look correct when viewed outside the game window because their initial hidden/shown properties are kept, while still being able to work correctly.
I was recommended the Affinity suite as a cross-platform replacement for Adobe's suite (I'm basically using a decades-old version to avoid the subscription stupidity). But this behavior (coupled with the lack of support for opening AI files natively - though I can understand why for that) is a major deal breaker...

Hi, I am looking for free presets to use with AP. Is there a place/site to get that? Have been working with presets for years now in LR and have a lot of them but since I jumped from LR to AP I am out of presets and can’t use my more than hundred presets.  Or is there maybe a way to transform LR presets to Affinity Photo.  I  am not  using LUTs much because its not as powerful as  presets. (Basically, a LUT targets a narrower set of image parameters to change (color and tone). A preset, on the other hand, can adjust a much wider range of image parameters, things like exposure, sharpening and vignetting. … ) Thanks.   WITH LIGHTROOM PRESET   ORIGINAL PIC.