Kent Kowallis

I have something similar happening occasionally. If I have a selection and then create a mask, it sometimes has all this spurious stuff that should be excluded show as not excluded, and sometimes its square/rectangular blocks. See my post earlier today.

I have seen this on a couple of occasions, but after carefully creating a selected area and then adding a mask, the mask has spurious selections that are unrelated to the area selected. I am on the current version of Mac OS, and had Lightroom up at the same time. My Mac has 16 gb of memory. The original pixel layer was created using Focus merge, and then selectively modifying areas of the photo where the merge was not as I wished. Attached are two screen shots of the "Selected" area and the resulting mask.

Thank you. Something so simple.

Here is the image

The paint brush tool behaves normally on the pixel layer. Here is a screen shot of one example. Not sure how to post a screen shot.

I have the opacity and the flow both set to 100%, and all I'm trying to do is to remove the adjustment layer effects from parts of a photo. With a Black and White Layer it should be readily obvious.

I can't paint on an adjustment layer with paint brush. To verify, I started a new project with one photo, and added a Black & White adjustment layer. If I select the paint brush tool, and set the color to black and attempt to paint out any part of the image with the adjustment layer selected, nothing happens (same with white). Adjustment layer is not inverted. Interestingly, if I use the flood fill tool, it behaves like the paint brush should, except it paints everything. I have tried this on several different images with the same result. I am on Affinity Photo 1.5.2, on a Mac on the current version of Sierra. I have looked at other similar posts which verify what I'm trying to do should work, but there must be something I'm missing. The photos I'm using are all pre-processed in Lightroom.

When using the Depth of Field Blur layer and the Lighting Layer, if you move to anything else, you cannot reactivate the panel to make changes. Things like Curves adjustments and Brightness/Contrast will reactivate if you click on them.