What is going on with masks in Affinity?

[Barrowman]

I really, really want to love the Affinity suite, but there are some really annoying and completely unintuitive things that it does like this?

I create a mask for a group, where I just want to mask out some of the background, so I take the black brush and brush away, go a bit mad and need to brush a bit back, select the white brush and nothing happens, in fact it adds to the mask, okay so it's not as straight forward at Photoshop unfortunately, not to worry, will use the eraser, nope it also doesn't work and it also just adds black to the mask. WHY?

What am I doing wrong? Is there some special hidden command or right-click menu option I haven't selected to make a mask just work like one would expect it to?

Thanks in advance. A bit of a rant, but I'm' so frustrated with what should be the simplest of things in Affinity, being a bit odd.

Mac Version, v1.8.6

[lepr]

Look in Colour panel. Maybe your white has zero opacity.

A colour well will look white if it contains white with 100% opacity or any colour with 0% opacity, and the latter will be applied to a mask as if the colour is black with 100% opacity.

In Affinity, paint is bizarrely applied to a mask as if the paint's colour is fully opaque, regardless of its actual opacity, and with an intensity of the colour intensity multiplied by the colour opacity. The same nonsense afflicts the new Spare Channel painting ability in 1.9 beta, of course. The sensible thing would be for the paint colour's opacity to affect the blending of the paint's intensity with the already existing mask pixels, just as happens when we paint in a Pixel object.

[Barrowman]

So there's no way to get it to work simply like in photoshop? 😖

[lepr]

17 minutes ago, Barrowman said:

So there's no way to get it to work simply like in photoshop? 😖

The developers have chosen to go down a strange and inconvenient road when it comes to mask and channel editing. I'm not sure they really understand what users need.

However, painting white into a mask normally works if the white has 100% opacity in the Colour panel.

[gunda]

8 hours ago, anon2 said:

The developers have chosen to go down a strange and inconvenient road when it comes to mask and channel editing. I'm not sure they really understand what users need.

However, painting white into a mask normally works if the white has 100% opacity in the Colour panel.

Black and white are both working for this new user.

@anon2 - can you please explain "strange and inconvenient road"?  I'm new here.  I just noticed that painting on a mask with middle grey produced an odd result.  Is that what you meant?

[carl123]

@Barrowman

Works fine here

When you switch to the white brush, try painting on a normal pixel layer and see what you get

[lepr]

53 minutes ago, gunda said:

 

@anon2 - can you please explain "strange and inconvenient road"?  I'm new here.

You will find loads of discussions with the forum search tool.

 

53 minutes ago, gunda said:

I just noticed that painting on a mask with middle grey produced an odd result.  Is that what you meant?

It's possible that a compositing bug is responsible for an odd result, rather than an inconvenience in Affinity's masking. If you provide an example Affinity document with the result which you consider to be odd, I'll download and take a look at it.

[Barrowman]

14 hours ago, anon2 said:

The developers have chosen to go down a strange and inconvenient road when it comes to mask and channel editing. I'm not sure they really understand what users need.

However, painting white into a mask normally works if the white has 100% opacity in the Colour panel.

It did have 100% white. Sigh, what a pain.

[Barrowman]

4 hours ago, carl123 said:

@Barrowman

Works fine here

When you switch to the white brush, try painting on a normal pixel layer and see what you get

White brush as expected.

[gunda]

22 hours ago, anon2 said:

You will find loads of discussions with the forum search tool.

So I searched and found limitations in how you can edit layer masks.  One can paint on the mask, but one is not able to edit the mask with the full suite of tools that you'd normally be able to use on a pixel layer, at least not without temporarily turning the mask into a pixel layer.  Have I got that right?  Did I miss anything?  If so please suggest search terms to use.

[lepr]

8 hours ago, gunda said:

So I searched and found limitations in how you can edit layer masks.  One can paint on the mask, but one is not able to edit the mask with the full suite of tools that you'd normally be able to use on a pixel layer, at least not without temporarily turning the mask into a pixel layer.  Have I got that right?

That's correct. There has been significant improvement to the editability of Mask objects and Spare Channels in the AP 1.9 betas, though.

[gunda]

On 12/3/2020 at 11:02 PM, anon2 said:

That's correct. There has been significant improvement to the editability of Mask objects and Spare Channels in the AP 1.9 betas, though.

I've read through the new features in AP 1.9 and had a bit of a play.  I can see some of the enhancements, but I still can't see how to easily apply a curve to a mask.  Is there an easy way to do this?  Should I keep looking?  Failing that, is there a hard way?

[user_0815]

I've had this strange behavior a while back and couldn't figure out what was going on. But never again since.

I recommend to hit D on the keyboard to set the colour to default.That should make it work.

[lepr]

18 hours ago, gunda said:

I've read through the new features in AP 1.9 and had a bit of a play.  I can see some of the enhancements, but I still can't see how to easily apply a curve to a mask.  Is there an easy way to do this?  Should I keep looking?  Failing that, is there a hard way?

Curves and Levels adjustment layers targeting Alpha can be applied to a Mask. Change the target channel from "Master" to "Alpha" in the controls of the adjustment.