Tony Jackson

Darn! There it is. The Help system didn't show the icon, but did show an affinity icon, so I presumed that was what I was looking for... I'll try online in future. Thanks! Tony.

Alas, not about the Flood Select Tool. The help system believes it exists, but doesn't tell me how to find it. So how on earth *do* I find it? Best regards (and thanks for your patience!) Tony

Hi R C-r, I think you have it. There was probably always a selection of some kind when I was trying! Gottim! In fact while hunting for a way te recolour my blue lines I'd got them all selected, but not in the working window. Cmd-D did it! Thanks! To first defence – most of the way there – and my lines (at 600 dpi) are typically 12 pixels wide. Getting these legible is quite demanding of the colour selection – e.g. the yellow needs some custard added to make it followable on the white background, the blue, in its new form, looks very similar to the grey, the grey likewise. The grey has to be quite pale if it is to be distinguishable from the black, etc.. There are six colours, plus white, grey and black. The present document, FWIW, is a wiring diagram for a 40-year-old french car! And now I've skirted getting the quoting etc right and tidy, John. Next time! (Is the spelling-checker part of the Affinity site? It seems to expect me to write in French, which I can, but it is slower, and having all my English words underlined in red makes it harder to spot my numerous typos!) Best regards – and thanks! Tony.

Good morning all! I had a go at size, and looked at the tutorial (only for Designer, not applicable to Photo). Then, in a moment of brilliance, I tried the Help system from the menu. Immediate success! Sorry to have been so slow to think of that! So now I realise that all the blue lines in my diagram (Photo has made them a sort of RAF blue-grey, which makes them much harder to discern at a magnification where the disagram is useful) have ants crawiling around them! But the help system doesn't offer any way to tamper with the colour (never mind to get it back to what it was in the first place). I searched for 'change colour' which got nothing of interest – is there a jargon word I have to learn to find this? Of course, being able to control the colour of pixels I place individually would also be useful... Meanwhile getting to be able to zoom so conveniently is a big leap forward! As to the pixel tool, I found that almost always I needed to make a marquee around what I wanted to edit, but occasionally the tool would work without the marquee. This would be important if it could be relied upon, as it appears to be impossible to modify the marquee other than by moving it. So if I'm trying to make a pixel-accurate marquee it usually takes several fresh starts before I succeed. I guess I must be doing something which causes the program to allow pixel-editing without marquee, but I can't figure out what! Best regards, Tony.

Next level of frustration is the display size. I'm used to being able to flip the magnification around to suit my purpose. 1000% for fine work, 66% if I want to go looking for something, 20% if I want an overview of what the document looks like. Having successfully exported the file as a .png I opened it in 'Preview'. Pleasing that the file is now so much smaller, not so pleasing to find that my colours are no longer as I chose them... Then I tried Graphic Converter, which produce bits of the file in a big black rectangle. I think my aging copy of this has suffered some kind of corruption (which has prompted me to get on and try Af Photo...) I'm pleased to be able to move things using the marquee tool, but underwhelmed by the need to draw a fresh marquee all the time and then click back into pixel if that is what I wish to do. Pixel occasionally works without a marquee drawn over the area I want to work with it, but not often enough for it to be worth trying, so I have to draw a fresh marquee every few actions. And without being able to choose the screen magnification I can only do a few actions in the bit of the document I have on the screen. Best regards, Tony.

You need to select the text by dragging over it with your mouse. You should then see a pop-up saying 'Quote selection'. Click on the pop-up and it will appear in the reply box. Nope. No pop-up box. And come to that, nowehere to thank you at the beginning, which I was managing somehow earlier... So, thanks for your kind reply John! Best regards, Tony.

Ah, found the pixel tool, and now the marquee moves with its contents! Thanks every one!

Yes, the marquee is called a 'Crop Tool' seemingly, and I was trying to use it to alter something. The pixel tool would have been a very long-winded way to move a whole bunch of pixels. Except in my case it won't, and the message below appears to conflict with what I was told? P.S. how do I quote part of what some one writes, then reply to it in context before quoting another bit? Best regards, Tony.

Best, Tony (suddenly out of the box!?)

Hi, thanks for this speedy reply! No pixel tool on my screen or in my menus that I could see? I have a single column of tools on the left – is there somewhere I should collect the pixel tool from and drag it into that column? Of course, I've no idea what sort of layer I'm on/on. I just opened the document in Photo and got what I got. No obvious place where I could change layers, if that is what I should do? I'm on a Mac, so I don't have left- and right-click (although I have an accessory mouse which I think does, I've not started using it yet! I tried the control key for dragging my marquee with its contents. No effect. Tried the Command key, not quite sure what it thought it was doing, but everything went all mushy and jpegged-looking. I quickly pressed Command-Z! Written beneath it says : Drag handles to set crop size. Drag inside to move crop. Drag outside to rotate canvas. Well the handles work, I was quickly able to set the marquee to fit what I wanted to move. Dragging inside the marquee just dragged the marquee, having no effect on what I hoped I'd gathered. I hope before long I'll look less stupid, but that is how I feel at the moment! Best regards, Tony.

I've been persuaded to change to Affinity Photo, after a good many years using Graphic Converter as a pixel editor on my MacBook Pro's and desktop Mac's. The relevant work I've done is scanning and cleaning up old documents, sometimes generating diagrams mostly made of solid-colour lines. So far I've imported a task I was working on, and re-saved it as a .png, with a file-size (800KB) half that which GC had produced, so I'm pleased about that. However, that is as far as I've got. I tried opening a marquee on my work-piece, wishing to shift a clump of pixels sideways, but after an hour or two trying I found no way to move the contents of the marquee sideways, only the marquee itself. Not very usefull. For a rest between efforts I clicked on the page I spotted behind the working one. This was called 'New Document'. I clicked on 'My Presets' and found that the list of platforms included no computers at all, only tablets and smartphones. I've never indicated that I work on either of those, so I've no idea where Photo got the idea that I might wish to? So I don't really have much idea where I want to go next. I'm used to being able to plant or delete pixels one at a time, but there doesn't seem to be a tool for that. And corralling stuff in a marquee doesn't seem to let me do anything to them. I don't want to paint anythingm so the various brushes don't help. I sometimes want to change the colour of things, but first I need to put them where they belong and clean up what is usually a scan, with untidy edges to everything, Where (if not here) should I seek help? Best regards, Tony.