GarryP

markimark: When you make a pixel selection you are both telling the software which pixels are to be selected and how much of each original pixel is to be selected to be later copied/cut. When you Refine a selection you can see in the Preview where there is a ‘gradient’ between the selected pixels and the non-selected pixels. This ‘gradient’ shows you how much of the pixel is in the actual selection. By Feathering, Smoothing and using other settings you will get a different ‘gradient of selection’. If you want to make a selection which has sharp edges then you can make the initial selection with Feathering set to 0px, as mentioned above, and not Refine it. As far as I've been able to tell, it doesn't seem to be possible to Refine the selection without getting at least a small ‘selection gradient’ and leaving some ‘artefacts’, even when using the Basic brushes to do the refining – see attached video for a simple example (X/Y/W/H of pixel layer really are aligned to the pixels of the document, I’m using 3 decimal places in Settings). I would be interested to know if it’s possible to Refine without these ‘artefacts’. 2023-12-15 10-03-41.mp4

Ah, okay, so changing the brush helped, which is good, but it would have been nice to know which brush you were using to see if the result could be replicated in order to find out why the problem occurred. Either way, you're welcome, and I'm glad you managed to get things fixed.

I believe the behaviour you’re seeing is because you’re using Pinned (Inline) layers. If you select “before<space><block>” then you are really selecting only “before<space>” but if you select “before<space><block><space>” then you are selecting “before<space><block><space>”. This might come about if the “<block>” is ‘anchored/pinned’ to the left of the text that comes after it – e.g. in this case, the second “<space>” – so that the “<block>” is not selected when you select “before<space><block>” because the “<block>” is not ‘part of’ that selection even though it looks like it is. I don’t know if this is how it should work but it looks ‘a bit off’ to me since not everything which looks selected is actually selected.

In don’t think I misunderstood what you wrote in the bug report. To précis: If the Text Frame functionality should exist in Photo and Designer then the button should work, otherwise the button should not be there. Serif decided that the Text Frame functionality was going to be for Publisher only and, because of that, the button shouldn’t be there in the Designer or Photo UI. Serif know way more about their business, and their revenues, and their plans for the software than we do and they will either change their minds on this at some point in the future, or not, it’s entirely up to them. They know that this sort of thing been requested, so all we have to do is wait and see if anything happens. I’m not against it happening, it sounds quite reasonable to me, but I have no control over it and don’t know enough about Serif’s business to have any idea whether it would be the ‘right’ choice for Serif or not.

Ah, sorry, I missed the bit in the original post that said that all of the selected boxes would be the same size, yes, that should work, but only when they are the same size.

I’m pretty sure that you cannot do this ‘en masse’. You can select all of the grey boxes together, as long as they use the same fill colour (and you might also have other stuff selected which has the same fill colour), via menu “Select → Select Same. However, you cannot change the absolute sizes of the selected layers at the same time in the Transform Panel as size modification with multiple selected layers is done on a relative basis. (Same goes for Transform Objects Separately, as far as I know.) I’d be happy to be proven wrong though as this sort of thing has been requested a few times. See here for one related discussion: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/152453-resize-multiple-objects-to-same-size/

As you mentioned in your recent bug report: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/196083-text-frame-button-in-context-toolbar-when-editing-text-on-path-doesnt-work-or-should-not-be-accesible-in-aphoto-adesigner/ … that button should not be there in Designer and Photo as the Text Frame functionality doesn’t exist in those applications. It was reported years ago but either hasn’t been removed or it was removed but came back.

Thanks for sharing the image but it doesn’t seem to match either of the images you show in your examples – it’s more difficult to diagnose a problem when we are working with different things. Also you didn’t answer the question about which brush you were using. Nevertheless, I tried using the Inpainting Brush Tool on your supplied image and it’s working fine for me – see attached video. Try using the brush I’m using with the Inpainting Brush Tool settings (on the Context Toolbar) which I’m using on the image you supplied and see what happens. If you don’t get the same result as me then we will need more information, but we won’t know what information until you try it and then show us the difference (preferably with full-screen screenshots and/or video). 2023-12-14 08-39-52.mp4

The search function of these forums is quite bad and can’t handle search terms of fewer than three characters, amongst other things (for example, putting the word the into the search box only gives 65 results). To search the forums better you should use a proper search engine, specifying the site if you can, e.g. <search terms> site:forum.affinity.serif.com

You can use Global Colours in various places, such as recolouring an Image Layer with a Colour Overlay Effect, and the colour used will be ‘connected back’ to the Global colour. But, once you set the colour of a pixel, that colour no longer has any ‘call back’ to the colour of the Global colour; it’s a ‘destructive’ modification to the pixel.

Pixels coloured with a Global Colour take on the colour as it was when the pixels were painted, there’s no way to change the colour automatically once painted. A pixel is just the colour it is, there’s no ‘back reference’ to a palette. There may be other ways to do what you want to do but we would need more details.

It would probably be better for other people looking for the same answer if you said where you found it and what the problem was with the translation.

If you can share the original image then we can try it for ourselves and see if we can reproduce the problem. (If you ZIP the image file before attaching it we will get the image as-is rather than a version of the image which the forum software has modified for display.) My first guess is that it may be something to do with Colour Spaces (RGB vs. CMYK, or something similar) but I can’t tell, and I don’t know much about them anyway. Also, which brush are you using and what are the settings for that brush? (Not which brush tool but the actual brush you’re using with the tools.) P.S. The barbed wire seems to have a bit of a purple tint to it but I don’t know if that’s relevant.

Are you asking for someone to do your work for you?

You’re welcome. (I think “Smart Sharing” is the default setting.)

No apologies necessary. I think the other request is for a keyboard shortcut modifier (if I’m reading it correctly) and you seem to want a separate tool, so they’re different requests for the same sort of requirements. Because of that I think they are both legitimate as separate requests which show that there is a need for something but that there are (at least) two different ways that have been requested to fulfil that need. Rather than a new tool, I’m wondering if the View (Pan) Tool could be extended to incorporate a rotate function via a keyboard modifier (the View Tool doesn’t do much else other than panning as far as I know). Or, perhaps, the View Tool, and Zoom Tool could be combined, with the new rotation functionality, into a new Navigator Tool where you could, for example, pan by dragging, zoom by Shift+dragging, and rotate by Ctrl+dragging. (I don’t use these tools much so that might be a very bad idea for reasons I don’t understand.)

Related to: https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/181966-rotate-canvas-using-a-key-modifier-pen-movement/

Isn’t this what “Settings → Assistant → Brush tool sharing → Brush shared between all tools” does for you when you switch between the Paint Brush Tool and the Eraser Brush Tool? If not, can you give more details of your requirements?

Dragging a layer from top to bottom, or bottom to top, in the Layers Panel doesn’t always work for me in Photo 2.3 on Windows 10 – see attached video – but this might be a slightly different issue (or I’m just doing it wrong). If I drop when the mouse pointer is near the top/bottom then it seems to work but not if I leave a ‘gap’. 2023-12-12 10-15-43.mp4

I believe (dredging up from my dubious long-term memory) that the “L” is used for “Close” as that’s the standard shortcut key letter in Windows for that sort of button in a dialog because “C” is used as the standard shortcut key letter for “Cancel”. (I don’t have proof of this, just a vague memory from a long time ago.) If they were the same then the user could accidentally “Close” a dialog when they pressed “C” expecting to “Cancel” it. Even in dialogs where there is only one button, it’s useful for this to be standardised across all dialogs in an application (and across the OS).

If the grid is not part of the image, and the background is a consistent colour, it shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to paint over the spots with the Paint Brush Tool. If the grid is not part of the image, and the background is not a consistent colour, then the Blemish Removal Tool might be a better option, or the Healing Brush Tool, or the Inpainting Brush Tool. Any of these tools will, if used correctly, leave the text intact and unchanged.

I think it’s worth noting that what you are trying to do isn’t “cropping”. Cropping is normally thought of as the action of reducing the dimensions of the image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cropping_(image) I think it’s also worth noting that, because your image has such a brightly-coloured background, simply removing/replacing the existing background won’t give a pleasing result because the background colour can still be seen reflected onto the foreground objects You can see this on the left of your photo where the seat has become green-ish. To get a better result you will need to modify the image further to try and remove this ‘reflected colour’, but I’m not the best person to advise on that.

A number of users have shared calendar templates, including using Data Merge for different years, in the Resources section of the forums. Have you looked at those templates to see how they work? As for the problem with tables, as I understand it, the Paragraph Styles applied to a table on a master page are ‘set’ on the normal page when you start to enter values in the cells on the normal page and they can’t be changed in the normal pages by applying a different Paragraph Style to the cells of the table in the master page. If this is correct, I don’t know if it’s expected behaviour or not. Also, re-applying the master page to a normal page can often disconnect the table from the master on that page, so you can’t do it that way either. However, you can apply a different Paragraph Style to the cells of each table on the normal pages – not as quick as a one-time fix but doable if you only have twelve months to do.

You should be able to do most of the normal modifications which the Edit Text Style dialog lets you do via the Paragraph Panel (and Character Panel) and then update the text using the style via the “Update Paragraph Style” button (or “Update Character Style” button) in the Text Styles Panel (where there are also buttons for creating text styles). By doing that you might be able to reduce your reliance upon the dialog and make things a bit easier.

You’re welcome. I don’t know of anything else you can try but someone else might. One thing you can do, and it’s a bit of a ‘hack’, is to move the window via the keyboard shortcuts – Alt+Space, “M” key, and then use the arrow keys to move the window – but I wouldn’t like to have to do that very often.