Affinity Photo: stroke a selection

[David in Яuislip]

Why not use a macro ?

This creates a new Pixel layer, opens a dialog for you to adjust width, fills with the primary colour, deselects. Sadly the dialog doesn't allow choice of Alignment 

dcStrokeSelection.afmacro

[Greg E]

I found a way to achieve this effect around any selection (either marquee tools or selection brush, etc). You may find it a bit of a kludge, depends on your goals. First, make your selection. Then copy the selection as a new layer (<CTRL>J in Windows, Command-J on Mac). There is a layer effect called "outline", referenced above. You can get it, with the new layer selected, by clicking on "fx" at the bottom of the layers panel, then selecting the outline effect in the dialog. You can stroke inside, outside, or centered, and control the width, color, blend mode, etc. I hope that helps a little.

[chaswp54]

I really do appreciate the few work arounds posted, but at this point it has not made PS obsolete for me.  Affinity is a really great program, but not having the very simple ability to "stroke" without having to go through multiple steps slows my work down when I have to do it those ways. 

[ajahn]

MEB suggested 

On 2/5/2018 at 5:13 AM, MEB said:

Hi JLGF1,

Welcome to Affinity Forums

To "stroke" / outline a selection in Affinity Photo go to menu Selection ▸ Outline.... You can pick the alignment you want from the Outline Selection dialog. Affinity doesn't work the same way as Photoshop here - it doesn't stroke the selection directly with the colour you want - it offsets the selection boundary to create an "outlined selection" which you can then fill with colour.

I don't see a menu item "Selection". I see "Select", but no "Outline" under it. I'm using v 1.8.0

Thanks

[MEB]

Hi @ajahn,
Welcome to Affinity Forums
The menu is indeed Select (no selection). Original post fixed. Sorry for the mistake. If you are using Affinity Photo the command is indeed in the Select menu (please check again). If you are using Affinity Designer, you must switch to Pixel Persona (the icons after the traffic lights) and check under the application menu Select there.

[Brian020]

This would still be a great feature to have! Any word on whether or not this will happen? Just stroke an active selection with a path thickness of your choosing… 

[RoyMcCoy]

On 2/5/2018 at 5:13 AM, MEB said:

To "stroke" / outline a selection in Affinity Photo go to menu Select ▸ Outline.... You can pick the alignment you want from the Outline Selection dialog. Affinity doesn't work the same way as Photoshop here - it doesn't stroke the selection directly with the colour you want - it offsets the selection boundary to create an "outlined selection" which you can then fill with colour.

How can you fill it? Edit > Fill... is grayed out, and if I change the color the whole image is colored, not just the selection as desired. This is turning out to be yet another occasion when I have to fire up the old Mac and do what I need to do in Photoshop. The procedure for stroking a selection is not adequately presented in the replies on this, and in any event it seems clearly too complicated.

P.S. I finally managed to do it after creating a new layer. My impression is that there are several techniques for doing this, which seems unnecessarily confusing, particularly when the techniques themselves are complicated, at least as compared to the good old simple Photoshop command.

Edited March 3, 2023 by RoyMcCoy
Finally managed.

[tap quentin]

I know this is not photoshop, but adding a stroke to a selection has always been important to my work process. After all this time, and number of posts relating to this topic, I am wondering if  anyone from Affinity is reading this forum. The earliest post in thread is from 2015... that is 8 years ago. I would think the developers would have added this feature. : ( 

[walt.farrell]

4 minutes ago, tap quentin said:

I know this is not photoshop, but adding a stroke to a selection has always been important to my work process. After all this time, and number of posts relating to this topic, I am wondering if  anyone from Affinity is reading this forum. The earliest post in thread is from 2015... that is 8 years ago. I would think the developers would have added this feature. : ( 

This is in the Questions forum. The Developers read the Feature Requests (Feedback) forum for planning purposes, not this one. But in any case, they will provide the functions they want to provide, and they may not do everything the users are asking for.

[true_blue1878]

+1

I also think this feature needs to be added. It's really simple and would be super useful. I've found this thread by searching for the same answer myself, and it's beggars belief why it's not in the software as standard. It's not good business to ignore requests like this for 8 years!