imported brush transparent

[gw_westdale]

Apologies if this is answered elsewhere - cannot see it.   I'm starting to make use of the abr photoshop brush import and find that some brushes ( big background texture brushes like planks of wood  vp-wood-brushes-cs2.abr  ) are semi-transparent. Is this a result of an original alpha channel being imported with the brush?  Layer set 100 and normal -- result appears to be about 50% when seen over a layer with red rectangle  . Explanation/help welcomed! 

[gw_westdale]

After more playing  ... and 2 questions if anyone has an idea :  

1) the help file says that          New Intensity Brush—creates a brush stroke based on the opacity values of a raster image.
  What happens is the opposite,  it creates a brush where the opacity is controlled by the darkness of the original image (the original image is fully opaque as one can see if one 'places' it )

2) Does  Affinity assume that *.abr are intensity brushes ?

3) How can one recognise an intensity brush within Affinity  - when one edits them all the options look the same and there is no flag to say which type one is ?

[Chris B]

Hey gw_westdale,

On 4/26/2020 at 3:15 PM, gw_westdale said:

1) the help file says that          New Intensity Brush—creates a brush stroke based on the opacity values of a raster image.
  What happens is the opposite,  it creates a brush where the opacity is controlled by the darkness of the original image (the original image is fully opaque as one can see if one 'places' it )

The Help file appears to be incorrect. We use darkness for the Intensity Brushes. I have logged this with the developers—thanks for catching this  

On 4/26/2020 at 3:15 PM, gw_westdale said:

2) Does  Affinity assume that *.abr are intensity brushes ?

I think the app just looks to see if there's a texture or not. It doesn't categorise them. As you have pointed out in point 3, we don't differentiate between what is an Intensity Brush or a Round brush etc. as we use the same dialog to display the settings. If there's a texture in the Texture tab, it's either an Intensity Brush or an Image Brush, if there's isn't it will be a Round Brush.

I can import an .abr pack with no textures and Affinity just displays them as is. I don't think it has a clue if it's an Intensity Brush or not.

I'm not au fait with Photoshop—does Photoshop display the difference between brush types in the UI?

[gw_westdale]

Thanks for response. I am not a photoshop user so cannot answer the question. I am mostly an Illustrator user and I am moving into the Affinity family. Nearly very happy!