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@Sima: yep, it's the same thing - even if in your test the artifacts look smoother. @v_kyr: yes, i mean that. so it looks like something goes wrong, maybe in the process of creating the new layer or just in the rendering step. i'll wait a little to see if someone from the AP crew reads these posts and gives us an explanation; if not, i'm going to repost this in the bugs section of the forums. thank you for your replies and your time.

hello all, and happy new year! please i need some explanation about refining selections to "new layer and mask". i did the following experiment on the attached image: 1) select the background of the image with the selection brush 2) invert pixel selection 3) refine selection (default values, except for a bigger brush) 4) select "new layer and mask" 5) apply i'm not interested in how the quality of the selection could be enhanced (i.e. applying some feather during the refine process): instead, i can't understand how the new layer (with mask) is generated. I would expect a copy of the original layer, with a mask that describes the selection. the mask appears how expected (by me at least), but the new pixel layer shows something weird (to me). in the attached image, if you hide everything except "layer - created by new layer and mask", strange artifacts are clearly visible. they disappear if the mask is activated again. if i make a copy of the original layer and apply a copy of the mask to it, the result is similar - but not identical: if you alternatively make visible the new layer or the background copy (with their masks), you can notice that something in the image subtly changes. if you make both the layer visible at the same time, the quality of the selection improves. it improves even more if you make a second copy of the background copy and mask. now, the improvement of quality does not surprise me so much: i guess it depends on the fact that the areas that are left erroneously slightly transparent by the mask get more opaque when displayed one above the other. but i really cannot understand why the new layer created by "refine selection" is not a copy of the original layer, and what the artifacts are. i'll be grateful of an explanation or any clue. thanks in advance stefano IMG_1904.afphoto

@RNKLN, thanks for sharing.

i cannot reproduce the behavior you described. be sure you select the layer -click on it in the layer stack- where you want to use any tool before you begin.

yes @R C-R you are right when referring to adjustment layers as we know them in AP (and in PS, and other photo retouching programs, i suppose). However, we could think about a special kind of adjustment layer, where the adjustment is not globally applied, but only locally, where painted by a healing tool, or some other kind of brush. A sort of mix between actual adjustment layers and regular pixel layers. it could implement several kinds of "relativeness" to the underlying layer - hue, luminosity, and so on. i don't know if it's possible from programming point of view, and how much it could be tricky.

@R C-R i think @N'Awlins Contrarian means something like this: when the healing tool is applied to copy the pixels from an area to another area on another layer, what should get stored with this second layer are not the actual pixels, but the difference in hue and lightness between the pixels that are copied and the pixels that they cover ("heal"). at least, i think.

great suggestion @Gnobelix! i missed the batch item in ap menus. thank you!

well i use an imac running sierra and i do run bettertouchtool also (great little piece of software!) and i have no issues in resizing brushes with ctl+opt+drag. double check the mouse and trackpad settings in system preferences, there could be some conflict (i vaguely remember i had to check or uncheck something somewhere to make things work as expected). about [ and ], i think i had your same issue (i use an italian keyboard) and solved it by setting "è" and "+" as brush resize keys in AP preferencecs (è and + are the characters you get on an italian keyboard by pressing [ and ]; to actually get the square brackets you have to press the right opt key too -- it looks like AP checks the character code rather than (or in addition to) the key code to determine what key was pressed. keyboard shortcuts are highly configurable in AP, maybe with some experimenting you'll be able to get the uniformity of configuration you spoke about.

yep. thanks for pointing that out. apparently they could not fix for the 1.6 release yet.

thank you for your replies. yes i think there is something wrong in the way ap handles luts, and unfortunately i don't have any other application lut-aware. since, in my turn, i use to copy adjustment layers and paste them to the images where i need more or less the same adjustments, luts are a low priority item for me too. i was just experimenting, since from @Mr. K's reply i caught that something could be wrong. it looks like it is, actually.

yes @v_kyr, your explanation is clear and sounds good to me because you effectively described more or less what i had understood of the whole matter. thank you. what i can't understand now, is the apparently strange and incoherent results i obtain by doing very simple operations of lut exporting and importing. basically, if i have 2 identical images, alter the colors of the first, export its lut and import it into the second image, i'd expect to obtain an image the presents (approximatively, at least) the same color alterations i did in the first one. if you look at the pictures i attached to my posts above, you can get what i mean.

well @v_kyr, no mercy for non-english speaking people here? the clip -better, what i could understand of the clip- reinforced the idea that luts are a tool suitable to share color settings among videos or pics to make the look uniformly. this is what AP tutorial essentially say (i.e.: ) but the effect i get by doing what i understood to be done is unexpectd. so, i think i am missing something, but what?

hello @walt.farrell after reading your post i did the same experiment (i hope i did not miss anything). i applied an exaggerated white balance to a pic, then exported its lut. then i loaded an exact copy of the original pic and imported the saved lut. i obtained a completely different result, where the second image histogram shows an apparent inverted symmetry with the one of the first image (please look at the attachments). so i inverted (cmd-i) the LUT adjustment in the second image and what i got is an image that looks a bit "colder" than the first original image before the wb adjustment; the two histograms are similar and reflect -i think- the differences between the two pics. this mystery gets deeper and deeper can someone from the AP crew help please? EDIT: after posting this, i've gone through some switching back and forth amon the active applications on my mac. then i came back to AP... and added a pixel layer above the lut adj layer, then painted a bit on it. then i disabled it and, to my surprise, i found that inverting the LUT adjustment makes the image appear as if no lut had been loaded - that is, the image looks identical to the original one. so, i am certainly missing something about luts, but it looks like something does not work right as intended anyway.

about the clone tool, it seems to produce strange artifacts sometimes. i think it happens if the origin falls within the destination area. did someone else experience the same problem? the untitled.jpg attachment is an examples; settings.jpg shows the clone tool settings.

non mi è chiaro cosa intendi con click su ctrl dopo il lancio. per reesettare ap bisogna lanciarlo cliccando sull'icona mentre si tiene premuto ctrl

hi @Polygonius [ and ] resize brushes. ctrl-opt (ctrl-alt on windows) + horizontal drag resize brushes ctrl-opt (ctl-alt on windows) + vertical drag modifies the hardness

hi @Wil, here you can find a series of tutorials that cover about every feature of AP: https://vimeo.com/channels/875980 they are in english, but you should be able to understand the explanations by observing what happens onscreen. i also found a german collection of tutorials: http://affinityphototutorials.com/

bonjour @Pierre Hurtubise sorry for replying in english, i can read some french but i have big difficulties in speaking it, and i hope i did not misunderstand your questions. about file formats, AP can export images in a variety of standard formats: jpeg, png, tiff and more -among them photoshop's native format. You have to choose "export" from the file menu, since "save" is intended to create a file in AP's own native format. So you "save" your images to get a version you will be able to re-edit in the future, maintaining layers, live adjustments, and so on. you can also create "snapshots" from time to time, to backup the current version of your work: these will be saved in the afphoto files as well. if my memory does not fail me, there's also an option to include the history of changes in the saved file, so you can reopen it later and use the undo command just as if you stayed in the previous working session. about multiple file handling, i fear that AP is not so strong in this aspect and i think it has no batch capabilities, for now. i hope some more experienced user can correct me. however, please note that AP is not a DAM software: it is not intended as a tool fro cataloging and organizing an image archive. i hope this helps stefano

hello, i suggested to try with LUTs because -basically- a LUT should contain the tonal features of an image, thus exporting the LUT and importing it into another image should have the effect of transferring the tonal appearance of the first image to the second one. so, i was surprised when @Mr. K answered that this process did nothing. that was not what i expected, so i made a try. i made a duplicate of a pic, opened the original and applied a hsl adjustment, then i exported its LUT. I then opened the duplicate and loaded the saved LUT, expecting to get two identical images again. Instead, I obtained a completely different result: so, maybe there's a problem with LUTs in AP, or (more probably) I did not understand how hey work. I attached the files to this post: - trenino.jpg is the original pic - trenino2.jpg is the duplicate - they are identical - trenino-hsl.jpg is the original pic trenino.jpg exported after applying the hsl adjustment - trenino-lut.cube is the LUT exported from trenino-hsl.jpg - trenino2-lut.jpg is the duplicate image trenino2.jpg after importing trenino-lut.cube any explanation or suggestion will be gratefully accepted. trenino-lut.cube

hi john, thank you for your reply. yes, i know i can adjust the colors, also after leaving the tone mapping persona.

hi @stokerg yes i did try the AP hdr functionality. it works well, but in some situations it seems to me that nik's hdr efex creates a bit more natural colors. maybe i have to experiment deeper. thank you for your reply.

did you try the LUT export/import function? it basically allows to export the colour palette from one image and apply it to another image. i'm not sure it will work, i did not try, this is just a guess.

hello all, anyone knows how to use the nik hdr efex pluing within affinity photo? in order to create a true hdr image, multiple exposures of the same pic are needed. the problem is, how can they passed simultaneously from affinity photo to the plugin? the plugins menu gets grayed if more than one layer is selected. this prevents passing more than one image to nik hdr efex. i only could use it outside AP until now, making it load multiple tiff or jpeg files. maybe i am missing something obvious... any suggestion would be appreciated. thanks, stefano

@walt.farrell, thank you for your explanation. i hope i understood it well: if so, i'd say that you can achieve the same result without using snapshots. the "layers menu -> merge visible" command merges all the layers in the image, leaves them untouched, and creates a new raster layer containing the image as you see it. what i meant with "so from that point on i also loose the possibility to take advantage of the non destructive editing i made before" is that the old layers, which are now below the merged layer (which i apply the plugin to), become invisible because they are covered by that new layer. so, if i decide later that i would modify the setting of, say, and adjustment layer that is below the merged one, the visible image will not reflect the change. it is true, however, that i can still apply new live adjustments and filters to the merged layer (that is, place them above it). And it is true that i can delete the merged layer, turn off the layers i added above it, change the settings of one of my original, pre-merge, adjustments, redo the merge step and reapply the plugin to the new merged layer, and finally turn the above layers on again. but this does not ensure that the adjustments i added after the first merge will still look good. i see the action of applying a plugin as a cut between a "pre" and an "after", so i prefer to use them as the very first or very last step of my workflow. snapshot are an interesting alternative to merge visible, however: plus, it's more or less like making a backup of the image at a certain stage of the work, and it can be useful for a number of reason, besides working with plugins. the absolutely best options would be plugins acting like live filters or adjustment layers, but i think it is just not possible.

well when i wrote my answer above, i missed the bit about replacing the original pixel layer with a new one, coming from a different raw-to-image conversion. right said @kaffeeundsalz: the pixels created by the healing tools would be taken from the original image and the healing could be strongly noticeable when you change the underlying image. my fault. on the other hand, as @R C-R explained, an adjustment layer only contains effects, to be applied to the underlying pixels, but it does not contain pixels at all. this means that one cannot use them for healing; or you could achieve your goal masking them so that the effect only applies to certain areas of the image below, but if you change the image, their interaction with the new image could not result as expected. @owenr's suggestion sounds interesting: if you record your healing work (on a pixel layer) as a macro, you can repeat exactly the same healing for another image: since the macro would not record the actual pixels, but only the healing tool strokes, playing it in a new image would take the pixels from the new image itself. and (Offtopic), as to concerns the gimp, i used it for at least ten years and i really loved it. i also customized it somehow and recompiled it more than a few times. what drove me to AP was the non destructive editing and i never looked back since i switched. i still think that the gimp is a great tool: it is powerful and it is free (as in speech, not just as in beer).