henryb

Ok I'll just leave the acceleration thingy off ("power user" lol) Thanks for that! Will be using this then as it will prob be very handy! After saving the AP file, I had shut the app down. Now that I re-opened it in order to save this selection as you explained; to my surprise I see that, for some reason, the marquee selection I had made around the dog, and the brush refinements around it, are all gone!! Is this normal? So I shouldn't shut the app before I save my selections, otw I will lose them?? Also, the history of adjustments & actions is also gone! So I can't go "back in time" until I find the most recent time-point where this selection was active, either. So I guess when saving and exiting AP, the only thing that's saved in the file is the most recent "state" of the photo you were working on and everything else is deleted??

Mac - Big Sur. I just went to File -> Export in the page you see in my last-attached screenshot. (Dunno what "persona" - whatever that is lol - this is)

Ok that sounds exactly like what is needed!! Will check it out!! THANK YOU!!

And BTW, can someone please tell me how come when I export the final jpeg, the colors in it look different than they do in the original AP project page?

YES!!! That did it!! I turned it off and now it works (meaning the Refine window doesn't automatically turn off after a few seconds)!!. What did I just do to fix this problem? (I mean Hardware Acceleration sounds like a "good" thing to have turned on... No??) Slightly off the topic, but does anyone how how to save this marquee selection below that I've made around my dog (now that I've refined it as much as I could with the brushes) so that I can get it out of the way for now, and maybe make new selections to edit other areas of the image (as it doesn't seem like I can have simultaneously selected area "groups" A, B and C, and be able to apply different effects to different groups). And later on me able to toggle my selected area/s at will? (So somewhere I can save this selection/s, deactivate it for now, and be able to bring it back later).

I tried restarting, trashing caches, launch agents/deamons etc etc but it still just doesn't want to work. Step 1 make selection around dog Step 2 click Refine button to open Refine Selection tools/brushes Step 3 - no matter what I do (whether I start painting around edges with matte brush, or simply do nothing and just wait..) after a few seconds the red mask is gone and I can no longer affect the image with the brush so I have to close the Refine Selection window and start over...). Any work I had done using the matte brush is lost. This is an endless loop...

I'm having trouble with this Refine Selection tool thing.. After I've made my marquee selection around the dog, I click on the Refine button, then the area outside the dog turns to red, I then start painting around the edges to refine the edges, and after a couple of places I've refined, the red-colored areas around the dog just disappear and I can no longer use/see the brush on the image. I then click on the Refine button again to bring the red back so I can continue from the point where I got interrupted, but we are back to square one again and I have to start over. It's happened over 10 times and I've given up - I can't keep doing this over and over. There must be something wrong with the tool. Anyone know what the problem is?

THANK YOU! I found this Affinity Photo tutorial on the Matte Brush Refinement method (that you mentioned) and it was GREAT! Thanks again!!

Hello again! I'm trying to hide the plastic bag on the table using the Clone brush tool to make an empty table. But the rotation preview is not helping.. When I change the rotation value of the clone tool preview to fix the table edge so that it maintains its “logical” curve, I get a crappy-looking preview near the rotation slider (which is half-hidden behind the controls) which is no help really. Is there a way to show the rotated result preview where the table is?? *Maybe a keyboard shortcut to affect the slider, while my pointer is at the table-edge position (so I can get the preview where I need it, and simultaneously try rotation degrees using keys, so my pointer doesn’t have to leave the table edge so I can see what I’m doing)?

I suppose you mean change it to 2 colors, so that only black and white "exist" (and not a color mix that produces shades of black?)? If that's what you meant, and why you said it, can you please tell me how I change this?

Ok, now I got it! CMD+I inverts the light & color curves on the selected ("active") area, while SHIFT+CMD+I inverts the selected area that is "active", making the area/s that were active into non-active, and the area/s that were non-active into active! Thank you all for the help!!

thanks! But since I can't read German, reading walt.farrell's reply above, it looks like shift+cmd+i will invert the pixel selection (so I guess that's what your 1st photo shows). But your second photo looks like it shows that cmd+i ALSO "inverts". But what does that command invert, then, if not the pixel selection area? The colors?

Ok the result is FANTASTIC!! WOW!! ❤️❤️ But HOW did you accomplish such a fine selection in all the edges where the hair gets really thin, and the background's color (the brown leather seat's, in this case) shows "through" the ever-so-thin hair?? Ok my selection below was crappy and hasty, but I don't think I could've made it significantly better anyway... What did you do to make the selection so perfect?? And, I don't think I really understood the difference in your method to mine. Did you 1) Duplicate the layer (CMD+j), then 2) make the pixel selection and 3) apply the color change via desaturation or via color sliders on one layer while leaving the other layer (with the dog mask) untouched? Is that what you did? Is there any diff really to what I had done?

Thank you - great to know how to do But, in this specific case (getting the image printed on the custom doormat) it's not at all wh at I need - I followed the steps shown in the video you had linked (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AesJUS2yO2c) and got a result close to the one you showed (attached here). Though it may look like a pencil sketch (which is great), it could definitely not be printed on the doormat because apart from the dog's eyes, nose, mouth and paws which are clear black, everything else that makes the dog up (body contour, fur etc) is made of shades of grey. And the doormat printer can't do that. That's why in my first post I attached a black & white sketch of some dog which was made of thick black lines only. If you see the example of a custom doormat printing, that I had attached initially, you will understand that anything that's designed on it can either be made up of clear black print, or no print at all. So there can be no color gradients nor shades that make the dog's drawing up for this specific use. That's why I wanted to somehow convert a photo of my late dog into an (over)simplified sketch - like the sketch I found online and attached previously. Is that even possible to generate from a photo? (Maybe what I need to do simply can't be done?)

I used an old photo of my late dog in my car and tried to make the best - to my abilities - area selection around him (toggling all the time between On and Off in the Snap To Edges for the selection brush tool to get the most detailed selection I could at the dog's hair endings). Then I inverted the selected area to select everything around the dog, and lowered the color saturation slider completely down to take the color of the surroundings away (so the dog stands out in contrast). But because the selection of the dog's hair edges was far from perfect, the result looks horrible and "unrealistic" when the colorful dog is then in a black&white environment. It looks like someone just cut out the dog from another photo using a pair of scissors, and stuck this cutout atop a different photo! Is there some kind of technique, or tool, within AP that would do this MUCH better? *The last attached file is the original photo I used BTW