Arthur King

Yes, Photoshop - old version. Affinity Photo has a lot of interesting features, I guess it takes some time to get adjusted to a new environment.

Thanks for advice, this inspires a lot. Still, for me there remains a task that I cannot figure out a smart workflow for. Old Bruce comments: “Super cool. Now if only I needed to use this…” I agree, need and love are not always very synchronized. I ask for patience when describing what I would love/need to achieve. It’s about creating patterns & textures. Here is a picture to take a load of my words: For me this is a nice way to seperate the colouring from the drawing: I can adjust the two aspects one at a time. Often I will want to edit and re-edit the alpha masks until the overall composition fits in with neighboring textures—they are for use in a game. The editing of a mask will include filtering the channel, scaling it, contrast-adjusting it, roughing or smoothing it any way I can think of. In musical terms: I think of these adjustments as getting the “timbre” of the texture right. I have just learned, and this will surely come in handy: In AF(finity Photo) it is easy to set up a sequence of modifying child-layers. But sadly this is not how I have made a habit of working with textures. Making adjustments to a grayscale image and then applying it as a mask is a possible way out, but is it speedy enough when struggling with creative impatience? I have my doubts. Any ideas for a workaround will be appreciated! (Is there some kind of “spooky masking at a distance” that may be used? I’m sorry, I have seen so many instructional videos for different tools that I get a bit disoriented.)

I just cannot edit a layer mask other than by hand-painting on it. I really would like to use curves/levels to accomplish this editing; the mask is almost perfect as it is; I just want to correct some overall sharpness-issues. In PH this is easy. For clarity: I don't want an extra mask-layer, I want to edit an existing one. I get the impression from this discussion that this is possible, just a little awkward. I can accept this, I appreciate AF, but I cannot find my way. Can anyone guide me through the advice given here? Here are some details: There are supposed to be two different menus concerning mask editing. Dan C writes: "Which one you get depends on whether you drop a mask between existing layers or onto a layer icon itself." Dan C also writes: "These options <...which I believe are the ones relevant for me...> will only show for layers that have been clipped and masked to a layer, currently your Mask is only clipped to the layer, which means the behavior is slightly different and the context menu reflects this." I have tried both ways of dropping masks: Only the same menu ...the irrelevant one... appears. This is the same menu that duncan has posted a screenshot of. Later in the tread kirkt suggests a rather cumbersome way out which includes the following step: "In the Channels palette, right click on the Red, Green, or Blue channel of the Background layer (whichever gives you the proper contrast and luminosity you want) and select "Create mask layer." Even this menu I cannot make appear. All the comotion tells me that editing layer masks in AF is not straight forward, but do I also have a bug to fight against? Or is it me that just cannot cope? I am new to AF, version 1.10.4 for mac. AF was so beautiful before I hit this wall. Please make me see the light again!