Layer Panel: Visibilty tickboxes not shown initially

[OookLout]

On MacBook Air M1 Big Sur, AP ver 1.8.6 did not initially show Layer Panel Visibilty tickboxes.

After some tutorial work had been done the tickboxes eventually appeared, triggered by manually widening the panel area. The tickboxes remained visible even after the panel area was narrowed again.     

Note I have remained an Affinity Photo novice user for many years, could only ever used AP for the simplest of jobs, like JPG to transparent  PNG conversion. This is probably because of certain non-intuitive UI/operating features which I have not yet seen explained in a tutorial. I recently decided to study the tutorials in the hope that these secrets would be accidentally revealed.   

Not coming from a Photoshop background, more Paintshop Pro and similar, it is not obvious how to do simple things like selecting an area and deleting it to reveal the background. The tutorials all assume that you already know certain things, mainly that you can't do anything in AP  without layers, because the initially imported bitmap is protected. There is no 'locked' icon on each layer, just a padlock above which changes subtly as each layer is selected.      

 

[stokerg]

On 12/8/2020 at 6:20 PM, OookLout said:

After some tutorial work had been done the tickboxes eventually appeared, triggered by manually widening the panel area. The tickboxes remained visible even after the panel area was narrowed again.     

 

Hi @OookLout and Welcome to the Forums,

Thanks for reporting this.  I'll confirm this with the QA Team, who should have access to the M1 hardware and get it logged with the Dev team, if it isn't already  

On 12/8/2020 at 6:20 PM, OookLout said:

because the initially imported bitmap is protected

In Preferences for Affinity on User Interface, 'Automatically lock background layer on import'.  If you disable that, it won't be locked.

On 12/8/2020 at 6:20 PM, OookLout said:

selecting an area and deleting it to reveal the background

Do you have a example of the type of area you are trying to select and delete?  You could try the Inpainting Brush to remove something and Affinity will try to cover of it with the surrounding areas.  You could also just make a selection and use Edit>Inpaint which will do a similar thing.  More information on Inpainting can be found here.

[OookLout]

On 12/10/2020 at 12:59 PM, stokerg said:

Hi @OookLout and Welcome to the Forums,

Thanks for reporting this.  I'll confirm this with the QA Team, who should have access to the M1 hardware and get it logged with the Dev team, if it isn't already  

In Preferences for Affinity on User Interface, 'Automatically lock background layer on import'.  If you disable that, it won't be locked.

Do you have a example of the type of area you are trying to select and delete?  You could try the Inpainting Brush to remove something and Affinity will try to cover of it with the surrounding areas.  You could also just make a selection and use Edit>Inpaint which will do a similar thing.  More information on Inpainting can be found here.

1) << Thanks for reporting this.  I'll confirm this with the QA Team>> 

FYI I have an M1 13inch MacBook so maybe it's the small screen I haven't tried it on my big screen yet (need a USB-C display cable!)

2)  Af Photo and AF Designer have the same initially-hidden Visibility tickbox behaviour   

3) Thanks I'll check I am not trying to edit a locked layer.