GarryP

--- Answer to original question which already has a solution, but this might be useful to someone else --- My first suggestion would be to change the Layer Fill Mode (menu “Layer → Fill Mode…”) but that might adversely affect other things in the Curves layer in this case. My next suggestion would be to try reversing the direction of the smaller curve shapes (Node Tool, “Reverse Curve” button on toolbar). (Or you could try a combination of both.) If neither of those things works and you can supply a document with only that Curves layer in it then we can experiment with it and probably come up with something. --- Answer to second question --- Since your ‘outline’ is an expanded curve you cannot colour the gaps using the existing shape – in this case the ‘outline’ is the fill. However, you can add new differently-coloured filled curve shapes below your design – roughly draw the new shapes so that they deliberately ‘go over the line’, but not by too much, then put them below the original design in the Layers Panel. Attached is an example video showing one method. In it I am using the Smart Mode of the Pen Tool to draw a curved shape, which sometimes makes it easier with this sort of thing – just click near the ‘extreme’ points of the outline shape to get a decent approximation most of the time. 2023-10-07 10-01-02.mp4

Have you tried using the Line Mode of the Pen Tool?

The Help search functionality works fine for me, see attached video where I search for arrow and pen tool. If you can show us a video of you doing your searching then we can probably advise further. 2023-10-06 14-11-44.mp4

Are you sure it’s the Path that you want to be working with and not the filename? (See attached image.) From the Help: “Path—defines the folder name for the JSON imageset to be written to. For Xcode UI development only.”

If in doubt, or just for peace of mind, you can export your Assets via the relevant functionality in the Assets Panel (use the ‘hamburger menu’ at the top-right of the panel) and then re-import if it becomes necessary to do so. (This also gives you a backup if something worse happens.) You can do similar things for other user-defined content in the other panels – e.g. Brushes, etc.

It sounds like Paragraph Decorations might be what you need (only available in Publisher) but it will only work on whole paragraphs rather than selected parts of a paragraph.

You’re welcome. I’m still not entirely happy with it – it’s not as ‘crisp’ as your sample image – but if it’s usable for what you want then that’s good. Tip: Changing the Blend Mode of the Live Filter layers often produces surprising/interesting results, so you can try that.

After a bit of messing around I came up with this. I’ve attached the document which you can experiment with it’s of any use. I’m sure someone else can come up with something better. grunge-dots.afphoto

Thanks for the explanation; that makes it much easier to understand why you might want such functionality.

You don’t get the window that Lee showed until you have selected the file to open.

Looks like you used menu “Document → Add Pages...” instead of menu “Document → Add Pages from File...”.

How I understood the request was that the single dashed Curve layer would be converted to a Curves layer containing multiple individual curves, each of which was part of – and the same shape as – the original curve ‘arc’ where the dash is drawn. Something like that in my attached image but with the red curves as multiple curves in a Curves layer. I have no idea how this could be helpful, but I’ve never needed to do it. (Maybe I've not interpreted the request properly though.)

It might help you to get more people interested in this is you can explain why it would be “VERY beneficial” to have it.

In addition to what Seneca said above, if you are using a font which was supplied with the operating system, upgrading/updating the operating system may cause the font to be changed – and therefore give a different text flow because of tweaks to glyphs/kerning/spacing/etc. – since fonts can also be upgraded.

Another simple alternative is to put the Pixel layer inside a Rectangle layer (with the same size and position as the Pixel Layer) and give the rectangle a stroke as required – see attached image. (The Rectangle layer then becomes the vector container, as mentioned by Dan C above, which the initially placed image had.)

As you have seen, some Photoshop tutorials can be modified to be used with Photo but some can’t. Even if a Photoshop tutorial can be modified there’s a chance that it’s not the best way to do it in Photo. If you haven’t done much isolation work then I would recommend starting with something much more basic and moving up in complexity as you understand what the various tools do and the results they produce. By doing so you will understand the basics better and be able to adapt your knowledge to more complex projects more easily. Trying to ‘jump straight in’ with something like your example image may cause a lot of confusion/frustration and you might want to give up pretty quickly. P.S. I don’t know why you are using the “latest beta version” because V2.2 was released commercially a little while ago and no betas are newer than that, that I know of. (The betas are for testing only and should not be used for ‘normal’ work as their functionalities may change or even be removed without notice. Always use the latest commercial release which you have access to unless you are doing some user testing.)

I would recommend also trying the other things mentioned in the thread so that you have a better idea of what is possible.

I think that would go against (at least some of) the reasoning behind creating the ~lock~ file. As far as I’m aware, and I could easily be wrong, the ~lock~ file exists (at least in part) to tell the applications, which may be running on different machines, that the original version of the file is in use and cannot be opened elsewhere. If the ~lock~ file were to be created somewhere other than the same folder then the applications on the other machine(s) would not necessarily know where it was and therefore couldn’t use it to see if the file was in use. It might be better (but I haven’t thought this through properly) if the applications, when encountering a file that cannot be opened with write access (or if it’s already locked), to tell the user that saving isn’t possible but give the option to open the file anyway (with the Save function temporarily disabled).

There’s quite a bit of ‘lag’ in your video so I mistakenly thought that you had selected the live filter layer after selecting the image layer in the Layers Panel, and I didn’t notice the highlighting. I’ve tried to replicate, as much as possible, what you are doing but it seems to be working fine for me on Windows. Would it be possible for you to share the document so we can compare like-for-like?

Starting with V2.2, the Affinity applications try to create a ~lock~ file (same file name but with “~lock~” added as a suffix) in the folder containing the document. (They do this for technical reasons which someone else will be able to explain better than I can.) If the document is on a drive which is read-only, or it’s in a folder which is read-only, or it’s on media which is inherently read-only (e.g. CD/DVD/BluRay), then this will not be possible and is probably why you are getting the error message (with, in this case, slightly confusing wording). You should still be able to open read-only files but only if the software can create the ~lock~ file in the same folder as the document. A possible ‘workaround’ would be to copy the document to a read/write folder on a local drive but you might have trouble if you have linked resources.

Thanks for supplying the image. There are lots of trees in that image; which tree do you want to isolate from the ‘background’? Personally I wouldn’t bother trying with this image; the process will probably be very fiddly and time-consuming. Instead I would look for some images of trees that have already been isolated. Try doing a web search for image tree isolated and see if you can find something suitable. Having said that, if you are trying to teach yourself how to remove the background from a complex image, you can look for tutorials about isolating an image which contains hair, which will be a similar process. Try searching the web for image hair cut out tutorial affinity to get some advice on that.

Like you say, just another of those Windows/macOS differences I guess. Hopefully your original issue gets some attention from the developers when they have time.

Attached is a video showing what I get with only one document open – maybe I’m just missing something obvious. 2023-10-01 13-06-20.mp4

The “best” background removal technique will normally depend on what the particular image looks like. If you can supply an example image, and describe what you consider to be the background (it’s not always obvious), then someone should be able to tell you a good way to do it for that image. Other techniques may be better/easier for other images.

My attached video shows one simple technique using the Quick Grid functionality (press arrow key while drawing the shape) and Clipping (drag layer onto the name of another vector layer). 2023-10-01 12-35-55.mp4