OldDog

In response to ICONOCLAST, I tried to use the eraser because the mask did not remove all of the background. In any case. I decided to follow you suggestion to use a mask, and paint the areas that I want to remove with black paint. I opened a photo. Pressed the letter Q. The red mask covered the photo. However, no matter what I tried, I was unable to paint on the mask at all. Obviously I am doing something wrong. I just don’t know what it is.

As a reply to NotMyFault, thank you for the advice. I’m sorry, I am very new to Affinity photo. Please explain what UI means. I did discover, I have a choice of masking brushes, which I was not aware of. I tried using a round solid brush on a different photo, just to see if this brush made any difference. The areas that I selected were much cleaner. Also, when I deleted the background, no “shadows” around the subject were left. Therefore no need to use the eraser tool to remove them. In addition, the subject was not translucent at all. I did try the eraser tool on a separate pixel layer as suggested. The eraser tool worked fine on that. I found the info panel. Unfortunately, I do not understand the meaning of “alpha should go from 100% / 255 to 0.”

I am having the same difficulty when trying to erase the "debris" left behind by a mask after refining. I am selecting a trees from a photograph. I refine the mask. I invert the selection and delete the background so I have only the tree.s The problem is, I still have debris, or shadows around the trees that were not totally deleted. In addition, I need to duplicate the layer of the selection and merge the selection about four times so the trees do not appear translucent. When I use the erase tool to remove the junk around my trees, it takes NUMEROUS passes over the unwanted shadows to completely remove them. I have the flow, opacity and hardness all at 100%. 1. I am frustrated that the mask does not cleanly delete the background. 3. I am frustrated the selection appears somewhat translucent as compared to the original. 2. I am frustrated that the erase tool is somewhat transparent when using it. Any suggestions?

Thanks for the suggestion. It solves the problem most of the time.

Thank-you. I wil give this a try!

I am new to Affinity Photo. I have been using the selection brush tool to select a tree. Then I refine the selection. The problem I run into is, when I am close to finishing refining the selection, the program abruptly closes. I then have to open the document and start over. Perhaps I am doing something wrong. Any suggestions are welcome.