[Documentation/Manual]

I'm a few weeks down the same path. I endorse the Simon Foster course (not free) cited above, and after that I have been studying the Serif/Affinity ones on Vimeo, but I like the ordered listing at

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/10119-in-house-affinity-photo-video-tutorials/
 

There is an eBook version of the online Help that is useful for offline study:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/15552-downloadable-affinity-photo-help-file-14-for-ibooks-epub/&p=84508
 

For extended glossary type discussions, see, for example, such entries (and links therein) as https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_editing or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsharp_masking

 

In looking for books on image editing, I borrowed two from my library: Photoshop in a Weekend and Adobe Photoshop CC for Photographers. The first was at a better level; the latter, about four times as long and aimed at professionals, plus many Photoshop-specific discussions of no use to us, but did have an excellent discussion on using Curves as the primary tool for adjusting tonality and color. So find and use what you can. Some of these books come out with yearly revisions, and used copies are cheap.

 

A scrolling mouse is handy. Also learn the keyboard shortcuts (second link in Lee D's post, also in tutorials, plus more in Affinity Photo Help).

[100% opacity brush does not paint]

Thanks for all the comments.  I finally found the best Help description of the Color Replacement Brush, which says that this is not the right tool for the job. The illustration shows making a strong color change to a towel worn by a cat.  It also seems that the tool only looks at one pixel in the target area rather than a larger sample, which may explain why it sometimes seemed to be changing the sky color, based I guess on a stray different pixel. 

 

I think that a cloning type operation will do my retouching for now, and I will learn through experimenting what the basic paint brush can do.

 

If anyone cares to comment further, I don't get what the point is about hue vs. color. I thought they were near synonyms.

[100% opacity brush does not paint]

Crabtrem: Attached is PNG of workspace for your analysis.

Manu: I'm avoiding the workaround because I'm trying to master this technique and interface. After posting, I also saw a reference in a tutorial to tools not working when the wrong layer is selected, but this morning I've verified that it's my panorama copy that is selected, and I still can't paint new blue.

 

More info: If I change the color to pink, the brush paints, but it doesn't cover at 100% opacity. True on yesterday state and today's. Blue paint does not seem to stick.

 

My original bad sky area did not look like the one I copied and attached to my OP and that is visible also in my workspace screen grab of today. I am attaching what it looked like from my (belatedly) locked original. It appears that when I made that copy and image from clipboard, some blue painting that was invisible became visible in that copy and today in my working layer (labeled Panorama copy). But I still can not paint new blue on that layer.

 

This picture is an oddity - a vertical panorama - and it may be that its structure is causing an issue not anticipated by the developers. It's made from a photo of the top of the tree and the trunk. I tried to blend it in panorama and the result was botched, so I rotated the two images, stitched them, rotated back, and then cropped to a squarish rectangle. The histogram shows some odd negative comb structure, so the process may have created some artifact.

 

[100% opacity brush does not paint]

I'm trying to fix a patch of sky that I retouched badly after inpainting out some stray branches and saved over the original. I could use healing tools, but since the sky is uniform I wanted to sample some unretouched sky and paint over the bad area. I have sampled the good sky (blue shows as foreground color), and the toolbar indicates my brush is at 100% opacity, but brushing over the bad area changes nothing. Same behavior for Paint Brush or Colour Replacement Brush.

 

 

 

This is a file of the problem corner made as New from Clipboard and doesn't look much in detail like what's on my screen but will give an idea of what I am trying to fix.

 

 

Bad sky.afphoto

[Add a Lighter/Brighter UI-mode (implemented)]

New idea: instead of having to search the whole group to find the current tool, just display the tool icon at the top, next to the line of tool-related options. You would look in one place instead of scanning.

 

Of course, this need comes from the difficulty in distinguishing the active tool due to the dark/darker interface.

[Photo Stitching / Panoramas]

Can panorama stitching be extended to tiling? I sometimes would like to merge two photos vertically for a tree or building. Another posting in this forum mentioned regular use of Brenizer portrait stitching, which according to Wikipedia involves tiling plus other effects. Microscopists, I believe, use such software to assemble mosaic pictures.

[Separating dark and light pixels by threshold]

Thanks. Will have to work on this.

[Separating dark and light pixels by threshold]

I have a photo with an area of dark (~black) silhouetted trees against a sky that is overexposed to white. I would like to simply select the white pixels to replace with blue. Is there a numerical threshold function that can do this, presumably on a selection where the contrast is great? Obviously highlight/shadow functions do this in a more sophisticated way.

 

Thanks.

[Tutorials Difficult to Follow]

Actually folks, I found the iBook Help and will not bother you again until I have absorbed it. Prefer books over videos, at least for introduction. Maybe this good stuff deserves to be in a pinned thread.

[Downloadable Affinity Photo Help 1.5 Epub for IBooks (Updated Dec 7, 2016)]

Just tried to download this at the link. Nothing happens. Previously successfully downloaded the Affinity Designer Help book from the same site without a problem.

[Tutorials Difficult to Follow]

I am a perplexed and frequently frustrated newcomer, in spite of some contact with scientific image analysis and paint programs 20 years ago. But I will be patient.

 

Main point: In addition to the videos, a glossary would be useful. (If someone knows one on the internet, please post the link.) Examples: types of layers and of masks and of channels. Some operations/adjustments are mathematical like opacity; some are painterly. How to proceed to accomplish some common tasks?

 

In this forum I saw a discussion of how to turn the built-in help into a document. Could the clever users make this available as a file through this forum so all those interested do not have to repeat the process?