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Possible problem with masking after multiple times in 1.9.0


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Hello,
 

I am following an older tutorial on Affinity Photo and the person is masking and reusing the mask in various ways on the same photo and able to change parts of the photo individually. I am attempting to complete the same task and I was able to do 2 mask reuses/changes but on the 3rd it seems although the selection changes the effect doesn't go to the proper place; I tried inverting the selection thinking I was making a mistake but the area selected whether the mask is red or clear in that area doesn't change - to be clear the mask is showing red in different areas when inverting but the effect does not change area. I ran into this problem before and I was thinking I was doing something wrong which is why I am watching the tutorial. I am coming from another software program and wanted to learn Affinity for it's depth of ability in manipulating a photo.

I am on a Windows 10, build 20H2. Other than the other photo which I was just playing around with this is the first time I'm using this technique. I am attaching a quick clip of what I am seeing which is after using the mask 2 other times which worked. Just a FYI - this is not my photo but part of what the instructor is using for Affinity Photo instructions.

Thanks in advance for your help!

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@NJPhotog,

13 hours ago, NJPhotog said:

I am following an older tutorial on Affinity Photo and the person is masking and reusing the mask in various ways on the same photo

What tutorial, could you post a link to it, so we could see what it is the tutor is doing? Hard to say if you might be missing something if we don't know what it is the tutorial is showing.

The Adjustment Panel/Tab, are all Presets for the various adjustments. You are aware that when you click on a preset, a Layer is added to your Layers Panel? Each Adjustment Layer has a Mask included. Look at your Layers Panel, and the White box beside the adjustment, is the mask. Your video does not show the Layers Panel, hard to say if you might have several presets applied.

The Red color is just an overlay and is the Quick Mask. I say Quick mask, because in your video you appear to click on the Quick Mask icon. The only other place I'm aware of, where you can use the red mask overlay is in the Refine Selection.

 

Affinity Photo 2.4..; Affinity Designer 2.4..; Affinity Publisher 2.4..; Affinity2 Beta versions. Affinity Photo,Designer 1.10.6.1605 Win10 Home Version:21H2, Build: 19044.1766: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s);32GB Ram, Nvidia GTX 3070, 3-Internal HDD (1 Crucial MX5000 1TB, 1-Crucial MX5000 500GB, 1-WD 1 TB), 4 External HDD

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Thanks Ron!

In the video he uses the quick mask to show where the mask is which is what I was doing on the video I posted to show the masked areas. I was using the brightness and contrast adjustment (didn't show on the video I posted for some reason). I did use invert mask, which should change the area that is affected by the adjustment, even if I messed up on where I thought the adjustment was going initially inverting should change the location to work in the proper location which it did not.

The photo he is using is not included with the photos he had available so I was using something similar. Here's the video I was following:

Thanks again!

 

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Ok, that's one of @dmstraker tutorials. Hopefully since I tagged him in this reply, he will jump in and give you some guidance on his tutorial. I'll have a look later today if he hasn't popped in here. I have an appointment shortly.

 

 

Affinity Photo 2.4..; Affinity Designer 2.4..; Affinity Publisher 2.4..; Affinity2 Beta versions. Affinity Photo,Designer 1.10.6.1605 Win10 Home Version:21H2, Build: 19044.1766: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s);32GB Ram, Nvidia GTX 3070, 3-Internal HDD (1 Crucial MX5000 1TB, 1-Crucial MX5000 500GB, 1-WD 1 TB), 4 External HDD

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Just tried another video (number 27 in the same series) with a different photo using the select in the top menu for color range and it didn't select just the reds and then used it for mid tones, didn't get marching ants and it affected the whole photo.  I tried to upload a video of the problem and unfortunately it wouldn't upload.

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I've had a little time to go through the first (#20) tutorial. He's basically showing how to create selections, and how they can be used.

  • Are you looking at your Layer's Panel, to check on the adjustment layer(s) you're adding? FWIW, I do not like the Adjustment Panel/Presets. I add mine from clicking the icon at the bottom of the Layers Panel.
  • There's numerous ways to make selections. I wasn't having much luck following his tutorial, because I use different methods and have become very accustom to them. I use a tablet/pen, and have so for long enough, I find it difficult to use a mouse for a lot of things in Photo. For instance, when making selections, I can press the ALT key to subtract, and I can change the size of my brush quickly. So I refine my selections on the fly, making more precise selections before entering the Refine Selection dialog.
  • When you make a selection, then add an adjustment layer, it should mask out, what you did not select. You can see this in the Layers Panel. The box (mask) to the left side of the adjustment, should be white and black, unless you masked out everything. When you invert the selection the mask would appear the opposite, what was white, would be black, and vice-versa.
  • Another way to approach this, is to add your adjustment. Move the sliders, for example on the Brightness/Contrast, make the image as bright and with the contrast you want for a specific area. The entire image will however be brightened or darkened.
  • Now grab the Paint Brush, make sure the color is Black. Select the adjustment layer's mask, the box beside it, it should be all white.
  • Now paint out the areas on your image that you do not want altered by the adjustment you applied.
  • OR, you can select the white mask, then go to the Layer's Menu, and select, Invert Layer. This will invert the mask, turning it black.
  • Now you need the paint color to be White, to Paint IN, the areas you want changed.

Getting clean selections is a little tricky, unless you have sharp clean divisions between what you want selected and not. Tree branches, leaves, hair are all things that will drive you nuts trying to get clean selections. Try watching other tutorials, there's tons on YouTube. Each may give you a different way, perspective, tricks on how to do them.

Finally I've neglected to ask, even though they've had a ton of issues with the current release, Do you have Hardware Acceleration>Open CL active? It's found in the Preferences>Performance. If so untick the box beside it, restart the program. It's been the cause of more headaches with this latest release.

EDITED: I can't believe I missed it!! What dmstraker is doing after applying an adjustment, he's "Merging" it. Big difference, it's destructive. If sometime afterwards you need to go back and make some further changes to this adjustment, you can't, it's baked in. I choose to work non-destructive, that way I can always change things if need be.

When you select Merge on the adjustment, you do not get the adjustment layer and mask in the layers panel, because it's merged with the background or whatever layer you're applying it to. So therefore it appears he's using the same mask/selection several times, but he's not. After doing the first Brightness/Contrast he merges. He still has the pixel selection active, so he just inverts it to get his second one. He does the same (merge) then proceeds to get a third different selection.

A little more in depth, you can use the Channels Panel (bottom, below layers panel), and just save your pixel selection as a Spare Channel. I use this one all the time. Then when an adjustment is added, I can Load the saved spare channel into that adjustment layer's alpha.

If you really want to learn quite a bit about working with Photo, and can spend just a little money, check out drippycat's (here on the forum), tutorials he has on Udemy.com. I've purchased 3 or 4 of his tutorials. He also provides tons of download material to work alongside him. His name on Udemy is Simon Foster.

Affinity Photo 2.4..; Affinity Designer 2.4..; Affinity Publisher 2.4..; Affinity2 Beta versions. Affinity Photo,Designer 1.10.6.1605 Win10 Home Version:21H2, Build: 19044.1766: Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-5820K CPU @ 3.30GHz, 3301 Mhz, 6 Core(s), 12 Logical Processor(s);32GB Ram, Nvidia GTX 3070, 3-Internal HDD (1 Crucial MX5000 1TB, 1-Crucial MX5000 500GB, 1-WD 1 TB), 4 External HDD

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Ron,

My apologies for not answering sooner ... was at work and what I thought was my password didn't work! :)

First - yes hardware acceleration is on, I will turn it off. When I had this problem originally I was using the selection brush, selected my first area and then adjusted whatever with that selection just like the first video (#20). I deselected the section and selected another part of the photo and that's where my problem came. Although I got the marching ants around my selection it wouldn't change the selection which I thought was odd. I come from another software  program so I just assumed I was doing something wrong and I needed instruction so I went to YouTube and found this and another but this broke everything down. Sorry to say that I find the new Affinity produced photos a little hard to follow, something seems different vs back in 2016 when I first purchased Affinity. I went through the tutorials until I came to #20 which is where I had my original problem and the problem came back ... so here I am!

About the merging - If I understand the program correctly, if I "x" out of the adjustment box it is fully adjustable but if I "merge" then it becomes destructive. I think I've done that before and the "x" is able to be called back up. I was not using merge, I just selected, did an adjustment, deselected, made another selection, tried to adjust and it didn't work. I originally thought I had to use 1 layer per adjustment but if it is supposed to work the way it is being done in video #20 (without the merge) - I was not getting the same result.

I am going to turn the hardware acceleration off and try it again and will report back on if it worked.

Again, thanks for your help.

 

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Just found this. I only drop into the forum now and again. Thanks @Ron P. and well done @NJPhotog. It's useful to know that the hardware acceleration can cause such strange effects. Maybe Serif should turn it off by default on new installations, and perhaps add a note at the beginning about it.

Yes, in the first beginners' series I just used the Adjustments panel and merged adjustments. When I started out, layers took me ages to understand, so the idea was to get comfortable with adjustments and get to layers later. The second Absolute Beginners' series introduces layers and the layers panel. As I write, I'm nearing the end of this 30 episode series and I have covered a lot of layer stuff that I hope is making sense. As a former high school math teacher I know how easy it is to get lost along the way and it's so difficult to judge how fast to go when your students are not in front of you with bored, happy or confused faces that tell you how fast to go. Also as a former engineer and programmer, I can go into detail and do so in a number of my InAffinity videos, but still worry about the speed, clarity and so on of what I do.

 

Dave Straker

Cameras: Sony A7R2, RX100V

Computers: Win10: Chillblast i9 Custom + Philips 40in 4K & Benq 23in; Surface Pro 4 i5; iPad Pro 11"

Favourite word: Aha. For me and for others.

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dmstraker,

Thanks for responding and thank you for making the videos!

I think your videos are very good and easy to understand assuming that a glitch isn't happening. 😉 I like to view a couple of sources to get an idea on the basics and/or techniques and the person's teaching style and I found you on YouTube!!!  I stopped going to the Affinity website tutorials as they changed something in them and find they aren't as easy to follow as they were when I first bought the program. I've owned Affinity Photo since 2016 and was using it for just stacking and a few HDR photos, it was a bargain then for its capabilities and has remained a bargain.

I'm coming from an all-in-one program that is easier to use but the program gets glitchy so I figured I'd learn AP. I started watching your videos and wasn't actually opening the program to follow along and then my issue reported here happened and knew I needed to follow along properly. As you can see I have only gotten into the 20's on your first beginner's course and will continue along.

Thanks again for the videos!

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I just updated to 1.9.1 and the problem came back! Hardware acceleration is off - just posting this here as information if anyone cares.

I am going to revert back to the last update to have it work somewhat correctly.

Edit: I tried to revert back to the previous version and it looks like uninstall, going into Windows and removing all traces of AP that I could find still keeps traces of AP around. After completely uninstalling to the point I needed to re-enter my product key AP still went to the file location I had the demo photos stored and wouldn't let me select more than 1 item. I attempted to use Revo uninstaller but it was picking up other programs to uninstall. I made sure hardware acceleration is off and made sure the graphics card software is not pointing to AP. Also restarted Windows and AP a few times.

Edit 2: Apparently it was my stupidity why AP wouldn't work correctly ... when using "X" it was not working correctly but after using merge it did. Not sure if this is the way it's supposed to work but it is working using merge.
 

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