Fruitbasket

That sounds like a different situation than @MEB was describing. He really was talking about importing AI documents where the AI document has items that are outside the artboards.
For documents you create In AD, you have a choice of having an Artboard or not (in which case you have a Canvas).
If you have a Canvas, and you drag an item off of it, its visibility is controlled by the current status of View > View Mode > Clip to Canvas. However, if you have an Artboard, objects that you drag completely outside of an artboard will always be visible. Objects that you drag partly outside an artboard will be partly visible.

You are painting with pixels so affinity photo will Add additional brush strokes to the same pixel layer. Brushing over an existing brush stroke will overwrite any pixels underneath and the only way to get back from that is to undo.
I’m not at my Mac but take a look at the assistant icon; looks like a butlers tunic, and see if there are any options you can utilise. 
 
Sounds like you would benefit more from affinity designer which applies raster brushes to a vector curve.

You could try using the Select > Select Sampled Colour command to select a colour you want to change then use an Adjustment Layer such as Recolour, HSL, Selective Colour etc to change the colour.
 
Not exactly sure what you mean by "you are using masks" in your illustrations, so not sure if the above will work for them
 

Most apps that utilise pixel brushes will stay on a brush layer (pixel layer) until you manually add another layer, take a look at the likes of Krita and even the mighty Corel Painter.
 

The Assistant Options won't be of much help here because they can only be configured for painting with no layer selected. This means that you would have to do one (and only one!) brush stroke at a time, deselect all layers (which you could at least define a keyboard shortcut for) and then paint again to get the next brush stroke placed on a separate layer. I can't imagine anyone would want to paint like that. The question is: Do you really need to have every single brush stroke editable via its own layer? Or could you not make use of Affinity's selection, masking and erasing features? I've seen many illustrators use separate layers for each color, each shade or for differents parts of an image – but never for each brush stroke. If you really can't live without it, Designer is your only option I'm afraid.

Thank you so much, Walt, that's it! 👍

I so agree to this post, it is one of the things that gave me quite a shock while using affinity. 

??
There is no difference if you use shapes or drawn paths. Try Layer>Geometry>

Hi I'm new here,
 
In Illustrator a simple click on the "Unite" pathfinder and/or "Minus front" will do the trick.
 
I understand this is not possible yet,
so whats the best way to do this in Designer?
 
Really want the go with Affinity now, so I hope someone can help, thanks

Thanks for the tip. Hopefully what I'm asking for is easy to implement. It should just be made so that clicking on the mask layer of the isolated layer doesn't kick you out of isolate mode... That's all. :)

When I try to edit the mask of an isolated layer in Photo I go out of isolated mode. Is it possible to isolate a layer and edit its mask as in Photoshop?

Thanks. The issue is not to understand what adjustment layers or their masks do. The issue is with adjustment of the mask. I've yet to see anything by way of tutorial, or to find by trial and error in the program, a way to apply levels and curves to the mask itself. Most of what's available, as with the videos you refer to here, simply involves painting into the mask. The only operation I've found applies to the mask overall is the Invert command, which one of these videos shows.
So, suppose I use the background image to create a mask .. that immediately and automatically gives me a mask that corresponds accurately with the image, including with the subtle transitions from highlight to shadow that you find in a face or figure (I mostly shoot people). I invert the mask, and now I have a mask that protects my highlights from the effects of the adjustment layer, and which transitions in its action as subtly or abruptly as does the background image as it moves from highlights to shadows. But now I want to control, for example, how my mask works in the midtones. I want to look at the mask, and then use levels or curves to adjust the midtones of the mask. I can't see how to do that in Affinity. Ideally I would like an adjustment layer that applies only to the mask. Failing a live adjustment layer for the mask, I would like at least to be able to apply curves and levels in a one-off operation to the mask, and with the option to use the history brush to paint in those adjustments to particular areas of the mask. And then perhaps later in my work on the image, I might go back and re-edit the tonality of the mask, again with a one-off application of curves or levels.
I appreciate that it would be possible to duplicate the background, use whatever adjustments I want, and then apply that as a mask, but then the mask remains fixed. That just doesn't work. I want to be able to create the mask, and then adjust it or refine it as I continue with my editing process .. perhaps altering the way the mask for one adjustment layer works as I look at how other adjustment layers affect the overall result, balancing the effect of one masked adjustment layer, say HSL, with a different masked adjustment layer, say a Curves layer set to Colour Blend.
This use of the original image as a mask for an adjustment layer has been a central part of my editing process for years. As far as I'm aware, it's part of many photographers' editing process. I just can't seem to find out how to do it in Affinity. I'm using the example of curves and levels above, but of course, I might just as easily want to apply filters to the mask. The point is to use the image to mask itself, and be able then to edit the mask freely.

Hello, I am new to masks and have a question I am really hoping has an easy answer.   I have created a document imported an image and then created  a mask.  I am wondering what are the steps I must follow to edit the mask to make further adjustments as no matter what I try I cannot get into it. Apologies for the beginner question.

Hi Wilco Bakker,
Welcome to Affinity Forums :)
This is already available in Affinity Designer/Photo. You can enable it permanently so the Layersbpanel always highlights the selected object on canvas. Go to Affinity Preferences, User Interface section and check Show Selection in Layers Panel.

Hi edge07,
No, currently there's no way to do it automatically.
 
@Madame,
If you are working on a document with dozens of layers/groups where you have to scroll the layers panel to select/see them all, it's easy to loose track of a selected object/layer in the canvas. 
In those cases you can right-click an object in the canvas and select Find in Layers Panel to quickly locate it, but you have to do this each time you want to locate a specific object/layer. What @edge07 was asking for is a way to permanently have this enabled, so that when you select one object in the canvas, its corresponding layer in the Layers panel will become visible (and highlighted).

This feature is from illustrator (i used cs4).
this is very powerful features which allow to re-color any part of an object: symbols, shapes, groups etc'

It shows the user all the color used, and let him modify any of them.
saves the user time of selecting objects and sub object individually.
Attaching pic.

also the ability to make  a keyboard short cut to it is vey important.

I'm very miss this thing.
 
Thanks,
Rotem.

 

I've spent hours trying to figure this out, it might not even be a feature, but I can't change the color of any of the brushes I make. I tried to create a tree brush, a cloud brush and a leaf brush and they is no way to change the color they were created in. This sounds like it has to be a mistake on my part because I cant see any art program not giving you a way to change a brush color.

I'm concerned about how long this feature is taking to be developed. I bought Affinity Designer 4 years ago thinking it could replace Illustrator in workflow however without features like these it isn't usable in industrial contexts. For example, you get a technical drawing in pdf vector format, it reads as a layer per vector object. However you want to re-build the layers which happen to be colour coded. Affinity Designer while good, hasn't seen many improvements beyond bug fixes since it release. I agree with @toltec on his/her pile of features we're  **still** waiting for.
 

I also would like this feature! Global colors wouldn't be a solution for me. After creating an svg for the cricut, I need to group all of the objects of a single color together, for each color. In illustrator I do this by selecting, say, one black object, and then selecting all of the same fill color.

I also need it badly. I was really surprised when I found out that Affinity Designer lacks this important feature.

Is selection by color or by line width still not possible?