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AP: Best practice to place objects and remove background + scale


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Hi, 

 

with my old photo app (photoline win/mac) I could copy a part of an image, place it into the document and use the eraser and the brush to add / or remove transparency.

I can later , move scale and skew the object. I can also change the perspective etc.

 

Now in Affinity Photo I can also make a selection and paste it as a new layer. I can use the eraser to add transparency but I do not find a way to remove it (undo eraser). 

 

So, as different approach, I added masking to my current layer and here I can use the brush to add and remove transparency. But when I then try to move the layer the masking layer (although it is tied to the layer) is not moved with the object.

 

I can resize the object but the mask does not resize with it. And I do not find a way to move the edges of the object arbitrarily, i.e. to change the perspective.

I used all this all a lot to modify photos. Is there a way in AP to do this as well?

 

Thanks!

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  • Staff

Hi Julian23,

 

If you make the mask a child of the object that you are trying to move then it will move and resize with it. In regards to changing the perspective of an object we have a Perspective Tool this can be accessed on the fly out menu for the Mesh Warp tool. I have included a screenshot of this to make things easier :)

 

C

post-12469-0-46686400-1441987974_thumb.png

Please tag me using @ in your reply so I can be sure to respond ASAP.

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  • Staff

Hi Julian,

If the mask is attached to the image layer, it will scale and move with it. Make sure you have the parent layer (the image) selected in the Layers panel and not the mask, otherwise it will be transformed independently from the image. Check this small clip (no sound). To select just the mask, click over the mask thumbnail in the Layers panel.

If the mask was created (placed) above the image layer in the Layers panel, just drag it over the image layer thumbnail until a small vertical blue bar appears to attach it to the image.

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Hi, 

 

thanks for the little movie - that is exactly the functionality I expected. Great. 

But unfortunately somehow it did not work for me with AP 3.3.5 - After I created a mask which is displayed as child of my image object, it was always locked to the whole image when I move the object. ...

 

I now found the reason for this behavior: My selection rectangle was still active (although it was not visible) - I used it before to copy the object from the background which was pasted as new layer. While the selection rectangle was active, the mask of the pasted image layer will not move. If this a feature or a bug, I cannot say. As soon as I remove the selection frame (i.e. with command + D) it works as expected.

 

About perspective correction: The mesh tool is certainly nice, but it works destructive and does not deal with sublayers.

The ability to move the corners of *any" layer is quite powerful. I read that you plan to implement this for vectors, but for bitmaps it also makes a lot of sense: Think of a multitude of the same image object placed as overlay over a bitmap. Each of the image object should be adapted to the background to simulate objects in different distances and angles. When using the destructive mesh tool I cannot really apply the transform to an object which was already transformed without risking distortion and data loss.

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