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Please help, things I cannot do with affinity photo.


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Hi,

 

I'm a long time photoshop user, I try to get rid of it... I tried to do some heavy edit and find myself stucked a few times:

 

1. After I select pixels I want to fill all of them with the foreground or the background color: how do you do that? Is there a shortcut?

 

2. How to quickly swap foreground and background color? A shortcut somewhere?

3. Is there a way to "apply" a channel to a layer ? Without that I guess I will stay on photoshop :(

4. How do you quickly change brush size ? Or change the shortcuts ?

 

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1. Shift-F5 then choose Primary or Secondary colour.

2. x, same as PS

3. Not directly that I know of but I'll give it some thought.

4. [ and ] change brush size.  You can also hold ctrl and opt then click and drag sideways - or up and down to change hardness.  It's currently not possible to change keyboard shortcuts but I think it's on the road map for upcoming features.

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2. Shift - X (missed out the shift key)

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I've been thinking about number 4.

 

As I understand it, and please correct me if I am wrong, all Apply Image does in Photoshop is destructively blend two images together.  If that's the case then it should be possible to replicate it in AP as follows.

 

Put the image to be applied on a layer above the image it is to be applied to.

Select the required blend mode.

Select both layers in the Layers panel and, from the Layer menu choose Merge Selected.

 

This does all channels.

 

To do just the red channel then, before the merge, add a curves adjustment to the upper layer and adjust the green and blue channels to be zero right across - that is, drag the upper right hand point of the curve down to the bottom right.

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Thank you for your help guys. I really appreciate.

To Coranda : What I m trying to do is blending just a channel to a layer. And you assumed correctly it will be destructive. Here is what I m doing in photoshop and that I was not able to reproduce in affinity photo.

Go on a layer

Lets duplicate

While you are on this duplicate

go to "IMAGE/PICTURE"

APPLY AN IMAGE/PICTURE

Layer : fusionned or just select the layer you want to work with

Channel : select the chanel of your choice and then the blending type.

 

I use this tool to better color correct a picture (just play with the blending modes). It works in every color mode. It's has been proven unvaluable over the years to help me color correct / swap color or build very impressive black and white (more steps needed).

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1. Shift-F5 is doing nothing. I checked OSX keyboard preferences just in case there would be a conflict... none. I do that on an apple keyboard.


2. Shift + X is working thank you ! you are right its just "X" on PS.


3. See the above post


4. ALT+CTRL+ Clic is doing the trick nice feature BTW. I cannot figure how to push [ and ] directly .. I have to push ALT+SHIFT+ ( or ) to type them.


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  • Staff

Hi Anstellos,

1) You must have a layer selected or an active selection before pressing ⇧ (shift) + F5

2) You can use only X in Affinity Photo too.

4) [ and ] only work on keyboards with that keys. If you don't have direct access to them, it's not possible to use those shortcuts. We are looking into this.

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Thank you MEB,

1) I figured out the problem: F5 was set inside mission control. Turned it off "et voilà" !
2) X is now working. I'm sure I pressed it all night yesterday on another computer without success.
3) I cannot fully switch to affinity without this function please tell me you are working on it ? You have no idea how powerful this feature is.
4) I understand.

Thank you for your help, I really appreciate that.

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Anstellos,

 

I think Apply Image is a very old PS process that dates back to the time when most editing was destructive.  I will have a look at what it does and try to reproduce it in AP.  I'll get back to you when I have more information.

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it may be old but you have no idea how fast and effective it is. I tried for many years to mimic the result with other tools, you just cannot. Trust me I tried. Even asked the photoshop team directly.

But yes Affinity is much more modern so if there is a better way to do it I m ready to learn :)

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Hi Anstellos,

 

Regarding the functionality of Apply Image, have you tried experimenting with the Channels panel?

 

For example:

 

1) Duplicate or import your pixel layer that you want to "apply"

 

2) With that pixel layer selected, go to the Channels panel

 

3) Right click a channel belonging to your layer (e.g. the Background layer will be called Background Red, Background Green etc)

 

4) You have a number of options:

 

Create Greyscale Layer will create a new pixel layer containing greyscale information for that colour channel. You can then use blend modes/blend ranges and opacity to blend it.

 

Alternatively, if you want to just blend the red channel, right click both the Green and Blue channels and select "Clear" for both of them. You will then be left with only the red channel information, which you can blend using blend modes/ranges.

 

 

Does that process achieve similar results to what you are used to getting with Apply Image?

 

I am investigating doing a tutorial video on channels since there is a lot of unexplored functionality there.

Product Expert (Affinity Photo) & Product Expert Team Leader

@JamesR_Affinity for tutorial sneak peeks and more
Official Affinity Photo tutorials

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Anstellos,

 

I think I've been able to reproduce what you want but it is more complex in AP than PS.  Ultimately, the best solution might be for Affinity to improve their own Apply Image Filter, or to add actions so that the process I used can be automated.

 

I will get my thoughts together and show you a demo of what I did so you can see if it is useful to your workflow.  

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Anstellos,

 

Based on your description of how you might use the Apply Image function I have produced a simple example in PS and then attempted to reproduce the same processing in AP.  The link below is to a simple, rough video of the PS process and the AP equivalent.  Hopefully it is useful to you.

 

If there is a substantial difference between the PS example I have shown here and your typical workflow then please feel free to point it out to me and I will see if that difference can be accommodated in AP.

 

http://youtu.be/Nnfl-krBZX8

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It's just occurred to me that I have over complicated this.  The curves adjustment is actually redundant and, since it's non-destructive, there's no need to duplicate the layer.  I'll post a simplified video shortly.

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Hopefully they are reading this.  As I mentioned in our PM discussion, it appears that Apply Image on a single channel is not using the pure colour channel but a modified form - it looks to be higher contrast.  I'm not sure what the difference is but Apply Image with a single channel (in RGB at least) is very similar to, but not exactly like, using a grey scale image of a single colour channel with the same blending mode.

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I'm working with this tool for years. I'm not yet convinced that it's a different version (I might be wrong). I'm part of a photoshop official club we were invited at Adobe headquarters and had a short explanation about how it works.

They said it's based on photoshop "operator" (just under apply image) witch is adding/ substracting values. The same ways "blending" is working in fact all the colors tools are based on simple "operations" I know that for sure because I had once a demo of photoshop 1 (the very first version) and I was able to do the exact same apply image result with photoshop "operator" only.

I guess we are stucked yet, some dev at Serif must have a close look. I really believe they can recreate the tool, they made Frequency sepraration tool, it's based on apply image technology.

Affinity photo is young, room for improvement. :)
I appreciate your help Coranda. Have a nice week-end.

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Anstellos,

 

The key to getting identical functionality to PS is understanding just what Apply Image is doing in PS, particularly when applying a single channel.  I had assumed that applying a single channel (in RGB at least) meant that the value of that channel was blended with all channels.  However, it seems that the applied image is not the pure colour channel but some modified form of it.

 

As a demonstration, compare (in PS) a single channel image from the channels panel with the result of using apply image using the normal blending mode - which should reveal the image that is applied.  They are clearly not the same so Apply Image on a single channel in PS appears to be similar, but not the same, as applying the values of the corresponding channel.

 

I'd be interested to hear from the Serif devs or anyone who has detailed knowledge of how single channel Apply Image works in PS.

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I've been the last week trying to find a workaround with no luck.

 

If right now we cannot blend any two channels, or a layer with a channel, maybe it is possible to substitute a channel with a grayscale image.

 

It seems that we can get grayscale layers from the channels, and we can blend them as we wish and produce a new grayscale layer exactly as we want. Unfortunately, I was not able to substitute a channel with this layer, it's like channels are "read-only". If we could edit a channel and substitute it with an ad-hoc grayscale layer, we might have a good workaround until the Apply Image functionality is implemented.

 

Any idea or suggestion?

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  • Staff

I've been the last week trying to find a workaround with no luck.

 

If right now we cannot blend any two channels, or a layer with a channel, maybe it is possible to substitute a channel with a grayscale image.

 

It seems that we can get grayscale layers from the channels, and we can blend them as we wish and produce a new grayscale layer exactly as we want. Unfortunately, I was not able to substitute a channel with this layer, it's like channels are "read-only". If we could edit a channel and substitute it with an ad-hoc grayscale layer, we might have a good workaround until the Apply Image functionality is implemented.

 

Any idea or suggestion?

 

 

Hi Asparria,

 

This is a blind suggestion as I don't have Photo in front of me, but have you tried right clicking a channel and choosing Create Spare Channel? You can then right click the newly created spare channel and choose "Load to..." to apply it to a specific channel. Is this what you're referring to?

Product Expert (Affinity Photo) & Product Expert Team Leader

@JamesR_Affinity for tutorial sneak peeks and more
Official Affinity Photo tutorials

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Hi Asparria,

 

This is a blind suggestion as I don't have Photo in front of me, but have you tried right clicking a channel and choosing Create Spare Channel? You can then right click the newly created spare channel and choose "Load to..." to apply it to a specific channel. Is this what you're referring to?

 

Hi JamesRitson,

 

Thanks for your suggestion. It works as you said, however, it seems that in this way we are only substituting one layer by another. The functionality we are referring to implies the blending of two channels using any blending mode (i.e. Normal, Darken, Lighten, Multiply, etc.) and any opacity. Another way would be to create an ad-hoc grayscale layer and blending that layer into a single channel.

 

Thanks again. Any other suggestion is welcomed.

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