Jared

I left a note about my solution for a similar need, here: It may not be exactly what you are asking for but I believe I have achieved something that could be described quite similarly, with a very dynamic bush that uses hardware stylus (Apple Pencil on iPad) Pressure to control Flow, but leaving Opacity and Accumulation at 100% (or change them as needed) but still allows very transparent and light brushes that build up to heavy paint without lifting the stylus / Apple Pencil. (If you set Opacity you can control the max transparency to be less than 100% if you desire, but after a day of painting I find I don't need that, I just leave it at 100% and lower my Flow slider and always have the option to keep overpainting to get it as dark as I want.) Good luck JEH and other painters out there.

Awesome feedback, lepr! Thank you for the response. I think your input and some custom brush fiddling have more than solved my problem. For those following along, for my workflow, now my one-brush-to-rule-them-all masking and even painting situation is highly improved. I just leave Opacity and Accumulation at 100% and then change Flow between around 10% and 70%, and then adjust the Width of the brush as needed, and maybe sometimes Hardness, but mostly I leave it set low to get soft soft edges for masking. The big improvement has been going to the brush editor and saving a custom brush with Dynamics that I like, where I can control Flow with Pressure (I also set a response curve that is a little non-linear). This achieves the effect that I can either draw very lightly with a single stroke, or go over the same area repeatedly to build up to full 100% alpha, or anything in between, without picking up the brush. It is quite powerful now, yet feels very natural. (Also since I am mostly masking, I use the same custom brush for the Erase Brush tool and it works amazingly.) Changing the Flow slider changes how fast the pixels pile up, but even different values of Flow still work very well in a wide variety of situations because of the pressure control, which is a very subconscious effect that feels like magic. I am loving Affinity Photo for iPad more than I thought possible. It's marvelous!

1. I am using Affinity Photo V2.1.0 version 1799 in settings. iPad 10.2" with A13 running iPadOS 16.4.1 (a). 2. I can reproduce this issue with a new document. Create a new document with a blank white background. Make a new pixel layer. Select Black foreground color. Choose any Round Soft Brush. Then set the brush sliders as follows: Width 128.0 px, Hardness: 100%, Flow: 100%, Opacity: 100%, Accumulation: 100%. Make sure Force Pressure is off. A. Now paint a single stroke without lifting the pen, but go over the same area multiple times. The result is an area of black pixels as expected. B. Now set Opacity to 50% and leave Accumulation at 100%. Paint a single stroke without lifting the pen, but go over the same area multiple times. The result is a grey area of pixels, which maxes out at alpha = 50% because Opacity is set to that. C. Now set Opacity to 100% and Accumulation to 50%. Paint a single stroke without lifting the pen, but go over the same area multiple times. The result is a grey area of pixels which is not s expected (should max out at 100% Opacity, not at 50%—it is not Accumulating!), but in V2.0 and V1.0 I'm fairly certain it would have become black pixels if you overpaint the same area without lifting the stylus. The fact that Accumulation and Opacity appear to behave the same seems like a regression and makes the Paint Brush tool much less useful. I spent months using the V1.0 and V2.0 paint brush tool for extensive amounts of masking (black and white painting), so I don't believe I'm making this up or imagining a difference. When Accumulation just behaves the same as Opacity, the tool is much less useful. I have to keep picking up the Apple Pencil to achieve the same result, and this messes up my Undo history. Before I could shade in areas by using very low accumulation, but paint them to the desired alpha level or intensity by simply painting over the same area many times without lifting the stylus. This worked especially well for large radius brushes, so the effects were very subtle. This core change pretty much ruins my masking-heavy workflow for me. Please advise if this is intentional or can be restored to the previous capability from V2.0 and V1.0 somehow. Any users out there with access to V1.0 or V2.0 if you can verify the difference in behavior, that would help. (I cannot download older version on my iPad because I am locked in to the latest version, V2.1 with this strange difference in behavior.) Thank you.

I ran into this within ten minutes of using AP. I guess it is great to rethink how the same tasks can be accomplished compared to Photoshop, but at the same time, a lot of people with PS will do as I did and search through the menus for a Crop action (Crop to Selection) and be confused when they are unable to find it.