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[AP] Paint brush color picker should use color picker's source setting


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When sampling a color with the paint brush tool by pressing the ALT key, always the global color as it can be seen on the screen is sampled. If there are brightening or darkening layers above the current layer, the sampled color is brightened or darkened once more, which ends up in a completely wrong color. The actual color picker tool has a source setting "Current layer" which samples the correct color.

So either the paint brush tool should consider the color picker tool's source setting when sampling a color or it needs an own setting for sampling colors.

5a8187af84849_2018-02-1213_23_29-AffinityPhoto.png.335589861deb17655bbda3738260041b.png

There is a dark blue circle on the middle layer used as sampling source. The top layer has a brightening effect. The color for the lower dot on the right was sampled with the actual color picker tool with source set to "Current layer", the color is correct.

The color for the upper dot was sampled with the paint brush tool's inbuilt color picker by pressing ALT: the color chosen is already brighter than it actually is and is then brightened once more. 

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Second this, Alt-picking from composited image is really annoying. Makes alt-picking simply unusable on document with many corrections. You just always get WRONG color working on any layer except top one.

Same problem exists with masks - when mask is edited in exclusive/isolated mode, color picker ignores that and gives grayscale version of "global color"... Making picker unusable in this situation too. In isolated mode alt-picker should give color right under cursor, visible at the current time, this is 99% of its usefulness in isolated mode, imho

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On 11/6/2019 at 2:48 PM, Imaginary said:

When sampling a color with the paint brush tool by pressing the ALT key, always the global color as it can be seen on the screen is sampled.

Sampling "as seen", as a result of all transparent layers, laid on top of each other, as a global sampled color is an absolute need for digital painting, by all means. Probably also in many cases too in photography. I'd agree on adding a preferences setting in which one could specify if desiring that the color picker triggered by the alt key when using the brush should ignore all affecting layers except current, so that a user needing that specific behavior could activate it, but the other way could be used as well. Making it only picking the current layer color could end in a nightmare for digital painters, illustrators and other people doing color work in Photo. So, imo this is a matter of user cases.

The other thing looks more like a bug, if I understood it well : If instead of picking a global sampled color it does so, but also brightens the tone a lot more than what is seen as a visual result, as seen happening in the above pic, surely the lighting effect is not contributing properly to the eyedropper tool somehow and is considering only the local color of the transparent layer, and not considering the transparency level this layer has when the color picking action takes place.

I'd vote for two preferences for the brush alt color picker, so that each user could choose. (or same user, depending of the type of project)

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Yeah, 100% agreed this should be fixed. There's this interesting paint program called Realistic Paint Studio with a nice colour engine that allows drawing of very rich looking colours easily, and I just worked out how you can achieve pretty much the same effect in Affinity Photo.

The trick is to explicitly add a white rectangle background behind your painting layers (even if the document background looks white already), and add one or two brightness/contrast/curves/saturation adjustments on top of everything to really darken/deepen the colours (see attached images for the difference between normal painting and this way of painting). I reckon it looks pretty good and it almost works really well, except for this exact problem that the colour picker shortcut modifier picks the deepened (global) colour instead of the underlying paint layer colour, even though the dropper tool has been set to use the current layer! It makes it basically impossible to paint this way except for just toying around.

The colour picker tool has "current layer" mode with good reason, and the equivalent shortcut modifier should either honour the same setting or also have a separate setting of its own!

This is a bit like that other bug where the brush "wet edges" setting keeps changing away from what you set it. Not quite exactly the same, but the same theme of simple bugs where tools don't respect the mode that the user has chosen, making it impossible to work the way you want to..

UPDATE: I also found ways to make this work in Krita, Artrage, and Rebelle. For the programs that don't have adjustment layers, you can do a similar effect by making a mid-grey fill layer with colour burn blend mode above your paint layers (change its opacity to taste). The colour picker modifier can be made to work correctly for ALL of those programs, but still won't work in Affinity Photo!

 

with_high_contrast_rich_colours.jpg

with_normal_bland_colours.jpg

Edited by jclounge
How all the other programs are better than Affinity.
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