danlei

There were lovely check marks in a Layers panel, I can saw from a Moon which layer is active, which not
Now they are replaced with awful dark grey and not-so-dark grey dots on which I waste time clicking to detect what is active what not active.
(can't give sample right now as Win7 support is dropped off)

Horrible UI
previously:

It's an odd situation.  AP is great software and I see it mentioned often - it's getting good buzz.   It's just inconceivable to me that it wouldn't be getting active development and be moving ahead.  But this missing "feature" - a core capability that everyone expects - has been ignored for years while other things that I'll never use have been added.  Every time I use AP I miss being able to see masks, and it's frustrating.      I really don't get it.

Surely this comes under "standard feature" and should have been from v1.1

What the hell is wrong with those devs — they are not fixing perhaps the single most important task a serious editor must master. 
One can do curves and colours in every iPad app. Crazy — open Adobe PS

Doing it the wrong way from the very beginning - when starting from scratch on new tech and architecture - without user experience designers is surely not the right thing to do for a small company.  It is the biggest chance missed ever.
Photoshop. Easy peasy to use and understand:

VS Photo:
Ehm... Lets watch a bunch of Serif tutorials to understand what the engineers made. Lets hope we can remember it the day after this time:

 

Yes this drives me nuts too.   Really, really wish they'd add this.
 

Five years later and we are still missing this basic photo editing tool. It's nearly impossible to get a perfect mask along edges where the effect of the mask is subtle. The red mask overlay is critical to refining the edges. I change my brush softness depending on the focal plane of the area I'm masking, and the red mask makes that possible. It's just a guessing game with Affinity, toggling option-mask to show the mask itself as the only way to check. I really want to cut the cord with Photoshop, but until Affinity includes professional nuances like this, it's not happening.

You need to ensure that your Artboards are located on integer X and Y pixel coordinates. If there are any fractional pixels in either the dimensions or in the positioning you'll get that extra pixel during export.
You can see the positions in the Transform panel if you select an Artboard with the Move Tool. But you may also need to increase the number of decimal places displayed for px units in your application Preferences.
Enabling Snapping will help, as well enabling the Snapping option Force Pixel Alignment, and disabling Move by Whole Pixels. But you can still cause issues if you drag an object or Artboard with the Alt key (Windows) or Opt key (Mac) pressed.
 

Yeah I saw that immediately. So this is useless.
The only thing that works - and that I'll be able to remember - is to put the masked adjustment in a Group, add a Recolor adjustment tied to the Group, and toggle it on and off as needed.  

If you click on the checkbox, you will see your original mask that you can revise, but it is quite limiting because you cannot select a brush, you can only change the brush size. I rarely work with hard brush edges when masking, so the feature is relatively useless for me.

Does it work with layer masks as well ?
I'm usually painting on my layer masks with soft brushing tools. My masks contain every opacity from 0 - 100%, which means they are not just black&white. See attachement.
If I add another mask on top of the first one, it affects the whole image and I often have to adjust the masks underneath again which means quick masking tools are very important for me. I'm a professinal photographer and worked with lots of retouchers, they all work this way and I learned from them.
 
 
 

The edit mask shows a black and white mask and not a red overlay. Example: I want to revise a mask for a person's eyes. In this case, I need to see what I'm working on, which I can't see in a black and white only display.
If you apply "command-click" to a existing mask then the selection appears. Now click on the mask icon in the menu bar then you have the red masking I'm talking about. I can edit this mask now, but the actual mask of the layer remains untouched.

But it's the program I think they want to compete with.
I don't know how intensively you retouch your images, but masking tools are one of the most important basic functions for professionals.
Revising masks is a regular part of the retouching process and for that you need the red overlay.
But maybe APV2 is meant to be a pure amateur software which I don't think so.

That's exactly what I mean! Turning the red overlay of an existing mask on and off with one click is a basic Photoshop feature. And you can directly post-process the selected mask in either mode.
In APV2, if you right-click on the mask, you only have the option to refine the mask, but I want to edit the mask by myself, not have APV2 refine it for me. That's a big difference.
 

I add myself to the long list of professionist complaining for this function missing.
Alt click on the mask to see it in grayscale is not enough...

Exactly what all the users say above me!
It's not hate from us, we just really want to use AP in a professional workplace with whole day editing, we don't want to burn Serif down, we just want to se that we can finally ditch Adobe and use AP all day long, but je layer mask is key for me and my team. 

I think management need to pay more attention.
This has been a much spoken about basic need for many, many months now.
I'm wondering how quick it would get in there if everyone in need of it posted and tagged affinity with an instagram (or other media) highlighting the absence, and simply asking "when?"

Sorry, this seems overly complex and cumbersome (compared to Photoshop which I use daily). I know it probably gets the job done. But, it looks like you need 4 layers and a Group, enabling / disabling various layers, to accomplish simply editing a single mask? There are several workarounds posted here, and you can tell people put a lot of thought into them, so they might forget how unintuitive and strange the process looks to someone who hasn't put a lot of thought into it. I'm glad this works for you though, but just looking at it it's not clean or simple enough for me to adopt. Imagine if you had 10 masked layers... in PS I have 10 layers. How many would Affinity have in this case? 
 

Great that you have fixt a workaround, but in my professional work this is not workable in stead of just hitting the \ key like in PS. 

The workarounds posted here are very clever.  But my problem is memory - not the computer's, but mine.   Although I've used AP extensively on photos I'm not doing it often enough - even if I got the 8-step process outlined here to work, I'd never remember it next time.    I need a more direct, discoverable solution; and I'm sure we'll get one eventually.  

Happy new Year to everyone here at first 🍀
My question is already answered with this post but very unsatisfactory. So I more write to express my dissatisfaction about the masking problem here.
I started working with AP intensely and with youtube-tutorials for 3 month now. It's really a great software but it has some lacks that make it hard to work professional with it.
Most important for me is a good function of the masking. I'm a professional photographer and I worked with lots of different post producers worldwide. And all of them work with overlay masks in most of the layers. I'm used to that in PS too, but wanted to make a cut with Adobe because of the subscrition system, to give another company a chance and to recommend AP to other photographers, Photo assistants and students that just don't really need an Adobe subscription.
I suppose most people underestimate what it means to work for demanding clients. Just to give you an impression of how many layers can be in one picture I added an example. I have photo composings with more than 70 Layers and sure you have to make corrrections afterwards regularly if some masking has to be adjusted. Workarounds with even more layers at the end are very contra productive then. Colored overlay layer masks above the background are a basic requirement for me and any professional. Until now I just thought I couldn't find the function, but now I found out it's just not implemented, so please Affinity put in on your list with high priority.
Just as an addition it's pretty impossible to make a good pressure sensitive brush with AP. Most professionals work with tablets and there are so many parameters you can change in AP for a single brush but opacity with pressure is unfortunately not part of it. This for me is the second thing which really would be great to add to AP2.
Hope to see this 2 functions no too far in the future...

 
 

Thank you for bumping this, AP is really on the verge of kicking Adobe out for me and a lot of editors in my network. But je layer mask thing is just THE thing why we can't use it as professionals. So Keep on bumping the feature, and if management doesn't understand the importance they are not the right person/team for it. 

Hello,
thanks to share your workaround. Such workaround can be helpful if you have one mask only or a simple use case. But working in a professional context with dozens of layers and several masks such workaround is not acceptable and disturbing the workflow. It is only a workaround and this cannot replace a basic function.

I have already bought the Affinity V2 Universal Licence to support Serif for their great Affinity suite and to support the development of an alternative to Adobe's "abonnement-only-products".

Nevertheless, it is really frustrating to see that this basic function is still also not included in Affinity Photo V2. Especially due to the fact that this discussion is already running since in 2017 and the functionality for the overlay is already existing for the "Refine Mask" function. 
Why it is not possible to implement the overlay view as well for the "Edit Mask" function?

Still hopping this function will be soon higher prioritized in Serif's development & implementation backlog.
Best regards,
Tor
 

Having worked in software development, I know the complexities of the "feature list" and the release cycle.  I'm in AP for the long haul.
So I'll just say that yes, being able to see the mask is a bedrock feature that I miss every time I use AP. 
 
 

MEB, I am not "understanding". This is a basic need that should have been in V1. Not finding it in the latest version was pretty insulting as a user where we have been voicing that one need as priority for so, so long.
I think that the product and the alternative to Adobe is great and very much needed. I only want to see it succeed (and rule supreme). But not having this from the start is like selling ladders where the first rung is missing. You can still use them, they might work great. But that first rung would be better there than not, and certainly make the whole experience a more rounded and efficient experience.
What do we do in a photo editing app. Some small processing things that are no great shakes. Image manipulation. Photocompositing where masks and layers are bread and butter. Come on?
Best
J