Screenshot cleanup and export.

[TenTo]

 Hi Affinity Community,

after trying several different methods to reach my goal, I sadly have to resort to bother you guys.

What I want to do

I want to create a cheatsheet for a game I'm playing and for that I want to extract different symbols used in the game from screenshots (particularly the one attached).
While the symbols are white in color, the background has different shades of blue, making the masking more difficult (for me).

What I tried
Created new Affinity Designer File.

• Designer Persona
  • Created new artboard for the screenshot itself and for every symbol I want to extract. (see attachment)
  • Used the "Placing content" tool to insert the Screenshot into the designated artboard (and matched their sizes).
  • Rasterized the Layer.
• Pixel Persona
  • Added a "Brightness/Contrast adjustment" (with contrast set to 100%) to the screenshot in the hope to easier select the wanted pixels.
  • Added a "Mask Layer" to the screenshot.
  • Used "Select -> Select Sampled Color" (model: "intensity") and picked the blue/black surroundings.
  • With the selection I clicked the masking layer and pressed "del" to hide everything but the symbols and lettering. (or rather paint the mask black by doing so)
• Designer Persona
  • Used the "Placing content" tool again on each artboard for the symbols and choose the file itself and from that the artboard with the screenshot.
    (Sadly I only get the tool to embed the file itself, but don't get it to just link to itself. This results in it not updating automatically. Is there a way to do that? I found a support page for Affinity Publisher, but I'm not really familiar with that part of the program suit...)
    • I then positioned the embedded artboards so that only the desired symbol is seen in each smaller artboard.
• Export Persona
  • Each artboard is a slice and is exported as PNG for further use in Visio or again Affinity Designer.

After importing my exports into Visio I realised the background is not completely transparent. (see attachment)

In short

• Is there a way in Affinity Designer (or Publisher) to link to a file of itself to make use of automatically updating several artboards?
  (This only works in Publisher?)
• How do I make sure, that selected pixels are completely set to transparent and don't have some color left?
• Would you recommend another workflow to approach the problem?

Thank You!

This is my first post in the forum and I'm quite new to the Affinity Suit, thank you for taking your time answering. 🙂
(Hopefully I didn't ask questions that are actually quite easy to solve, if I had googled the right terms...)

TenTo

[TenTo]

Okay, this is solved by now. Instead of Affinity Designer I switched completely to Affinity Photo and did the following:

• Imported the screenshot.
• Used a threshold filter to create a mask that has only full black and white tones.
• Used the Export Persona to slice directly from the picture without the middle step of creating Artboards. Done.

I guess I overcomplicated things a little. 🤷‍♂️