webb

My face is red! That was the problem. Don't know how brush flow got set to 0, but setting it to 100 solved my issue. Thank you, @NotMyFault, despite my embarrassment. --Webb

@NotMyFault is right about this being a more general problem of the brush not working. I swear when I was testing earlier I could paint on masks when working in RGB/16, but now neither the mouse nor the graphic tablet seems to work on masks or otherwise, whether using 8-, 16-, or 32-bit settings. Enclosed is a simple afphoto file (history saved) and a video that shows the failure. What I did: created a new document, added a pixel layer, filled it with turquoise, selected the paint brush tool, ensured it was set to black, and attempted to paint in black on the turquoise pixel layer, but I couldn't. The paint brush cursor is hard to see on the video, so I made the history visible so you can see that I used it. This is an RGB/8 example. Previously, thinking this might be some strangeness about my setup, I reinstalled AP and rebooted, but the brush behavior was unchanged. The file and the video were created after I had done this. I can't imagine that this is a widespread problem with AP since painting is so fundamental--it must be something about my setup...but I simply don't know how to get that functionality back. Certainly open to suggestions. --Webb 2024-01-22_13-43-39 - webb.mp4 brush-not-working.afphoto

Affinity Photo 2.3.1 Windows 10 22H2 AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 32GB RAM Hardware acceleration: Default (NVIDIA 3070) Graphics tablet and pen: Intuos CTH-690 Reproducible: YES Problem occurs in new document? SOMETIMES WHAT HAPPENED: Was editing a photo, decided to convert to RGB/32 to use subtractive saturation. Added a pixel layer and a mask, selected paintbrush tool, set it to black at 100% opacity and 10% hardness, tried to paint, but it wouldn't. Tried with graphics tablet and with mouse, neither worked. Gradient tool worked successfully in mask, but of course wasn't what I needed. Re-converting back to RGB/16 did not help. Changing hardware acceleration to WARP did not help. Restarting Affinity Photo did not help. Closed the problem photo. Restarted Affinity Photo and loaded a different photo and did NOT convert to RGB/32 from RGB/16. Added a pixel layer and a mask and COULD successfully paint on it. Closed Affinity Photo, tried painting on a mask in a new photo (in RGB/16) and now I could NOT paint on a mask. The only thing that has changed recently is upgrading Affinity applications. I've enclosed the problem RGB/32 file (bets-380-subtractive-saturation.afphoto) and the "virgin" RGB/16 file that also had the mask problem (P7080037.afphoto.) Please do not make either photo public. bets-380-subtractive saturation.afphoto P7080037.afphoto P7080037.afphoto bets-380-subtractive saturation.afphoto

I don't use gestures on the tablet, so I turned the switch that enables them to OFF. So far, the problem seems to have gone away. So, there's a good chance that the problem is related to some interaction between AP and gesture recognition.

I am using Windows Affinity Photo 1.7.1.404 on Windows 10 Pro (1903) on a Dell workstation with 32 GB ECC RAM, a 500 GB SSD, and lots of hard disk space. My graphics tablet is a Wacom Intuos PT M. I updated the driver an hour ago to 6.3.36-1 in an attempt to fix the problem, but no joy. I normally develop my raw files in darktable and export as tiff. When editing the resulting tiff in AP, everything is fine until I use my graphics tablet. Then, maybe after I've used it two or three times on the photo, the drag screen function stops working. When I press the space bar, the hand appears but it doesn't do anything. When I select the hand from the tool panel, the hand appears but it doesn't do anything. The problem has been there a while, but at one point I made it happen a lot less frequently by updating the Wacom driver. My luck seems to have run out, though--the problem appears with both the previous driver and the new one. I cannot test it on AP 1.7.2 because I rely heavily on group masking and that function is broken in 1.7.2, rendering it useless to me. I'd really, really like to get the drag screen functionality back consistently.

Thank you, @HVDB Photography, that definitely helps with this photo. I'm concerned for other (and future) photos that also need defringing, as well. If there is no other (non-fringing) magenta in the photo, the Channel Mixer technique will work, but I thought that the defringing filter was supposed to look for the color in question near high-contrast edges and not affect other magenta in the photo that is not near high-contrast edges. I guess I could use the Channel Mixer adjustment with suitable masking if there is "innocent" magenta in the photo, but I was hoping there was some trick to using the defringe filter that I am missing. The reason this matters to me is that I have an old Nikon 50mm f/1.4 AI lens on a Metabones Speed Booster adapter for my Olympus E-M1 camera, and when wide open this lens creates an enormous amount of purple/magenta (and a little green) fringing where there is any degree of edge contrast. Obviously I'd like to be able to remove it conveniently. It may be that this lens and camera combination simply isn't workable for me wide open, but I was hoping there was a consistent and predictable way to remove fringing around edges. The Affinity Photo defringe filter (live or non-live, in the Develop or the Photo persona) doesn't seem to work for this, at least not in the way I've been trying to use it. @Old Bruce, I don't normally use Affinity Photo for raw development, but nevertheless I tried it with this photo, and Lens > Defringe didn't work any better for me in the Develop persona than in the Photo persona. I got the same (which is to say minimal) results. So, my question is, is there something wrong with the way I'm using the defringe filter, or does it just not work for this kind of fringing?

I am trying to remove some purple and green fringing from an image using Affinity Photo 1.6.5 on Windows 10, but am having no luck. I choose a live filter for defringing, and try to find a hue that matches (having slid the radius and tolerance to max and the threshold to min), but at best I get a subtle effect on the purple, and no effect on the green, no matter how many live filters I stack. It would help if there were an eyedropper to select the color--as it is, I have to count on the filter having a visible effect in the image to see whether it's the correct color. Maybe I haven't found the color, but there are limits to how slowly I can drag the slider (and wouldn't having tolerance at max mean that the range of colors affected is large?) So, since I can't see an effect, I wind up not knowing how close to the fringe color the slider actually is. For both purple and green, I tried a number of colors that looked about right (though they didn't have a visible effect), but with little or no success. And "Also remove complementary color" seems to have no effect. It doesn't matter whether I try to do this in the Develop persona or the Photo persona - I get the same (lack of) effect. The enclosed photo illustrates the problem. There is purple fringing in lots of places, including the right-hand side of the book, between the top cover and the cover jacket, and there is (out of focus, but more visible) green fringing on the left-hand side of the book, mostly on the top cover jacket itself. I've tried various things like white balancing the photo (improves the color but the fringing remains) and using 'Select Sampled Color...' and then using it as a mask for an HSL adjustment layer to desaturate the color (some improvement, but some fringing still remains after a stack of 4 such adjustment layers.) Using the defringing eyedroppers in an old copy of Lightroom, I can successfully defringe--but of course I don't want to use Lightroom, I want to use Affinity Photo. Am I doing something wrong? Am I missing something? P.S. A stack of 4 live defringing filters seems to bring Affinity to a slow crawl on my machine (a 6-core Xeon E5-1650 v3 with 32 GB of memory and an SSD running Windows 10.) This doesn't seem to happen with the other live filters I've used.

I realize that Serif is not taking a poll to decide on a scripting language, but if it were, my vote would be for Python. There may (or may not) be a minor increase in the learning curve, but in my experience it is considerably easier to use when developing and debugging scripts of even modest complexity. It also has a much wider range of capabilities. It is useful for tasks ranging from simple scripting to advanced computer vision and AI (when used in conjunction with some of the existing Python packages and libraries out there), and therefore is considerably more future-proof. Not that I have any insight into Serif's development process or plans, but a Python scripting capability might even be useful to their own development teams.

That worked! I hadn't realized that having an active selection from a layer would prevent that layer from being deleted in a macro. Thank you, @Dan-C!

I am working on a macro that creates a masked curves layer, but am stumped about how to do it cleanly. My first try was to create the grayscale bitmap that was intended to become the mask and to execute Layer>Rasterize to Mask from the menu. Then I created the curves layer, but the macro system wouldn't let me move the mask under the curves layer. So, I tried an alternate approach. I created the grayscale bitmap, used the menu to Layer>Rasterize to Mask, then used the menu to Select>Select From Layer. This loaded the bitmap as a selection. Then, when I created the curves layer, it automatically used the selection as a mask. So far, so good. But now I had the mask layer still hanging around. I could make it invisible, but attempts to delete it from within the macro capability silently failed. (There is no problem deleting it outside the macro.) So, the macro has its intended effect, but executing the macro leaves this extra, no-longer-needed layer underneath the curves layer. Even if I rename it "delete me," it seems like there must be a better way. Does anyone know how to solve this puzzle?

Thanks again, @carl123! It sounds like that will work. For my workflow, it is actually useful to have a stand-alone Luminosity Selection macro, so the way it worked out the first time works well for me.

Thank you, @Carl123! That works. It is interesting that I don't get the selection until the next time I run the macro (meaning those steps can't be literally embedded in a bigger macro), but saving the macro separately as Luminosity Selection means I can call it from a bigger macro, so everything works out.

If I'm not recording a macro, I can get a luminosity selection (which I can easily turn into a luminosity mask) by shift-ctl-left click on the layer icon. This is very handy. But when I try to do this in a macro, it tells me that it cannot record a selection from the layer. However, the macro recorder *does* let me select a tonal range (highlights, midtones, shadows) from the layer if I do it from the Layer menu. I don't want a limited tonal range, though--I'd like to select luminosity from the whole range of the image. Is there a straightforward way to make the luminosity selection (the equivalent of shift-ctl-left click on the layer icon) in a macro?

Thank you, @toltec. That is much better than manual repetition of the settings n times.

I have been working my way through the Affinity Photo Workbook, and in general find it both stimulating and educational. My AP skills have definitely improved. Highly recommended. However, I just worked through Section 2 of Chapter 4 about the Torres Del Paine panorama. I decided to develop the 9 NEF files rather than work with the pre-developed jpegs, but after making adjustments to the first one, the text instructed me to make the same adjustments to the other 8. I assume the intention was that I do this manually? Is there really no way to sync Develop settings across multiple images? Sometimes I do focus stacking and might have 20 or 30 images to develop. Repeating any nontrivial develop adjustments will definitely be both tedious and error prone. There must be a better way! (Apologies if this functionality is already in the AP Develop persona--possibly I just didn't find it.) I am using AP 1.6.4 on Windows 10, in case that matters.