blue-ten

Also, here is an example of how the Undo Brush works. Having this functionality available for masks as well would be extremely useful. 2018-11-28_00-18-03.mp4

To further clarify, here is how Photoshop handles masks. The original primary/secondary colors are restored once you click off the mask. This is something that Affinity Photo would greatly benefit from, as the current function of the Color Picker when you have a mask active makes it useless for masks. 2018-11-28_00-05-05.mp4

In case I'm explaining the masks and color picker issue poorly, here's an illustrated example of what I mean. This would ideally just be a temporary state for the Color Picker tool solely when you have a mask active, and it would revert back to any Primary/Secondary colors you had previously chosen when you click on any normal layer again. This is how Photoshop and several other programs handle masks. Affinity handles masks in much the same way, except when it comes to the Color Picker.

I'm not sure what you mean about it being confusing and complicated for the color picker to choose only the colors from the mask and not the layer or merged image when you have the mask selected. That's exactly how Photoshop, GIMP, and Krita can do it, and it works fine. Maybe I should rephrase it as: when a mask is selected, the Color Picker (the tool that lets you click on the canvas and pick a color for your primary or secondary color) should swap to a grayscale color space by default and choose just from what's available in the mask below your cursor), then switch back to the document's color space and your previous primary/secondary colors when you select a normal layer again. Being able to hold Alt and grab a color directly from the mask takes all the guesswork out of choosing the right color by hand for the exact masking level you need. It can be done in seconds instead of the pure guesswork you need the way it's done in Affinity now. My last suggestion wasn't about completely 'clearing' or "refreshing" a mask --- a Fill with Shift+F5 currently works just fine for that. The tool I referenced, the "Undo Brush", lets you paint any layer back to a previous state in the document History. For example, if a layer had only two brush strokes at one History State and you've since used the brush several more times on that layer, you can paint over that layer with the Undo Brush and revert all, or just a portion, of it back to being just two strokes. I'm suggesting that functionality of the Undo Brush be available to masks as well as normal layers when using the Undo Brush, as it currently does not work with masks at all.

Masks are a huge part of my image editing workflows. One of the only things still keeping me partially tethered to Photoshop is how that program manages masks with other tools --- particularly its brush blending modes, color picker, and history brush. Brush Blending modes and Masks -- Blending modes like Lighten and Darken are invaluable when doing meticulous mask editing, or when painting with a mask. Lighten would allow you to paint in slightly less opaque portions of the mask without altering already existing opaque portions, while the Darken blending mode would provide the opposite functionality. The Color Picker and Masks -- When you have a mask selected, the color picker could choose a gray/black/white directly from the mask for you to paint/fill/etc with, which makes intuitive sense and is extremely useful for being precise with edits, even with a gradient of grays in the mask. The Undo Brush and Masks -- Another great way to increase the options for editing Masks would be to allow the Undo Brush to work with them. Currently (as of Beta 1.7) nothing happens when you attempt to use the Undo brush on a mask.

Suggested features for Affinity Photo: Color Picker sampling white, grays, or black directly from a Mask while you're working on it. Masks allowing certain blending modes like Screen, Multiply, Lighten and Darken. Undo Brush allowing painting from the History in a Mask. One of the great things about masks is how much control they can give you over opacity when you want something to be partially visible, using grays you sample from the Mask can be a huge time saver, especially when paired with brush blending modes like Lighten and Darken. Unfortunately, some of that control is currently missing in Affinity Photo. When you use the Color Picker to sample while you're working on a Mask, whether you have Global or Current Layer as your source, it uses the whole image to sample a color. It would be far more useful to have it sample the tones directly from the Mask, and even better if it allowed you to use brush blending modes as well. Lastly, the Undo Brush currently behaves like a normal brush when you use it on a Mask, with some very strange distortion in the strokes (a bug?), and would be extremely useful if you could paint from the Mask's History like a regular layer.