Struggling with masks and selections. Help!

[London]

I'm going batty trying to mask things in Affinity Photo. I don't know if this is because I'm a Photoshop veteran trying to use PS techniques, if there's a bug, or something else.

In the attached image, Mask 1 was made by drawing a path and then merging it with a black fill because I couldn't get the path to mask anything (I filled it with white, but that didn't work). After I made Mask 1, I right clicked and selected "Mask to Below," which moved it under the layer beneath (the same way dragging it with the vertical blue line works) but the layer wasn't masked.(As shown on the inset layers screenshot.) 

I worked around this frustration by selecting the white area and copying that portion of the image. Then I made Mask 2, which I want to select to mask a motion blur, but I don't know how to select the gradient. In Photoshop, I'd use select color with a high value to get the entire gradient or click on one of the channels to select it. I can't figure out what to do in Photo to get that as a selection.

[Dan C]

Hi @London,

Apologies for the delayed response here!

I'm not certain how your mask layer has ended up in the state as shown in your Layers Studio screenshot - however this shows a Pixel layer clipped to another pixel layer, not a pixel layer with a Mask applied.

Could you please provide a copy of your Affinity document so I can look into this further for you?

Many thanks in advance!

[London]

I did a work around that didn't involve the gradient for that particular file, so didn't have it saved with the masks to share. Attached is a new photo with the same masking problem. The vector mask worked as expected (and desired) when I dragged it so the blue bar showed up on the right side of the layer icon. However, the pixel layer didn't work either by dragging or when using the "Mask to Below" command.

A related question: how do you make a vector mask with holes? When I've created a vector path mask, setting the fill to white, and then tried to subtract and interior area, I get a new path layer and I haven't been able to get that to subtract from the original layer. The only way I've been able to make that to work is by creating a lower black fill layer and merging visible, which makes the vectors irrelevant and then I run into the problem I've mentioned in this thread.

Bunny_Mask.afphoto

[carl123]

1 hour ago, London said:

However, the pixel layer didn't work either by dragging or when using the "Mask to Below" command.

When using a Pixel Layer for "Mask to Below" it is not black/white colours that determine what part of the image will show

It is the level of opacity/transparency that determines what is masked or not

In your pixel layer where you have the white colour for the eye, flood select that colour (white) and delete it so it is now transparent

When you now use "Mask to Below" it should do as you want it to.

[London]

Ah, my Photoshop knowledge is haunting me once again! That approach makes sense in a certain way, but how do gradient and less than 100% white/transparent masks work? Like if I have a grayscale image I want to use as a mask, with values spanning the entire 0-100% spectrum?

[carl123]

4 minutes ago, London said:

Like if I have a grayscale image I want to use as a mask

I believe Layer > Rasterise to Mask will do what you want