Gradient Tool?

[wolfnowl]

Hi There: This may not be a bug as I'm still new to Affinity and taking a course on learning it, so feel free to correct me.

1) I created a new document, added a pixel layer, and dragged a gradient across. I set the left point to red, and the right point to blue:

Now, without leaving the gradient tool, I added a third point at 50%: Here you can see there are three colours, with yellow in the middle.

If I switch tools or even click on the canvas outside the document, I still have the colours showing but I've lost the gradient.

This is where I decide I want to move the yellow more to the left.

I click on the Gradient tool, but I still don't have my existing gradient (only the colours, not the control points). I draw a new gradient, but it looks like this:

Clearly this is not what I want. I click back on the white->gray colour in the context bar and click on Swatches. Here my previous gradient is stored under Recent. I click on that colour bar and it replaces the white to gray gradient with the previous colours.

From there I can click back on the Gradient option in the context bar, select the middle point  (yellow)  again, and move it to 25% for example.

The biggest challenge as I see it with this method is where the gradient doesn't go straight from left to right across the document, but starts somewhere in the middle, or is angled like this:

Duplicating that is going to be a challenge. The swatch maintains the colours, but not the gradient parameters, or if it does, I don't know how to find them.

Mike.

[walt.farrell]

@wolfnowl: Once you have applied a gradient to a pixel layer, and left the gradient tool, you can not make further changes to that gradient.

As you're in Photo, try using a Fill Layer instead of a Pixel Layer if you want an editable gradient.

[wolfnowl]

Thanks, Walt. The teaching assistant and I couldn't figure out why we were getting different results when doing the same thing. It turned out she was working on a rectangle (vector) layer and I was working on a pixel (raster) layer. The gradient tool does indeed perform differently on the different layer types.

Mike

[walt.farrell]

You're welcome. And I thought about mentioning trying a rectangle, but for some reason I forgot to.