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How do I paste into layer mask?


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On 8/3/2019 at 5:37 PM, HVDB Photography said:

Well, it's just the way it is . Affinity Photo has not the intention to be a Photoshop replacement !!

 

The joke! Affinity Photo is sometime better than Photoshop, sometime as good as Photoshop and sometime less good than Photoshop, but it's look a real competitor.

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  • 9 months later...
On 11/13/2020 at 9:51 PM, Lorox said:

It's like that. With the problem described AndyQ seems to back our feelings/impressions perfectly: after some time anybody working in pixel graphics will have realized that pixel masks ARE in fact just grayscale images applied in certain way to select corresponding pixels (meaning those having the same 2D position on the canvas) and allow to do certain things to them (i.e. adjusting their opacity etc.).
This given it seems only natural that masks should be editable just like any other grayscale image (including copying, pasting, painting in it, filtering it etc.) once you have them as the contents of your active window.

In Photoshop this is very much the case once you know how to make the mask content visible as the actual content of your active window. It doesn't take more than just going to the channels panel and clicking on the mask's channel – there you go and it's easy and intuitive. And turning the mask's content to a selection which you then can use in any pixel layer, adjustment layer, channel or other mask of your file is just one more click away...

In Affinity Photo this whole "field" of channels masks, selections and pixel layers is generally organized in such a "fragmented" approach that it becomes ”cryptic" as no obvious logic becomes apparent: so it becomes hard to understand and cumbersome to use. In effect you experience exactly what AndyQ said: you spend a day on a job which you could have finished in an hour with Photoshop. And true: as the way of achieving comparatively simple thing is so unnecessary complicated you're prone to have forgotten at least half of it of it by the time you have to work on the next job needing this a month later.

Please, to all you developers at Serif: I guess there are quite a number of guys here among us who REALLY WANT to work with your apps, who REALLY WANT you to succeed long term on the market. The workflow must become smoother, more unified and necessary actions for closely related goals should not be scattered over different places in the UI. I'd think in the end it just has to be at least as efficient as it is with those applications you – rightly – chose to challenge. Let's be honest: there may actually be a limit to the time professional users can afford to spend with Affinity Photo or Designer on jobs they could have finished in a fraction of the time needed if they had just reverted– however much loathingly – to Photoshop and Illustrator.

I came just for this. Hoping that there would have been some kind of fix/accommodation of working with masks in Affinity like we do in Photoshop. I must confess the process invoked by affinity is a nightmare and practically the only reason I still hop back in Photoshop as I work with masks ALOT – especially in a painterly way. Affinity’s so counter-intuitive, I had a little of buyer’s remorse after lauding the program so much, going as far as to get additional licenses trying to convince friends to port over.

It’s a fantastic piece of software, don’t get me wrong, and its price can’t be beat. I think it’s worth supporting still considering the option of a perpetual license is still available – something those of us from developing countries still appreciate, however, this masking process truly is a nightmare with the time spent just trying to do what I consider basic tasks at this point. Every other thing I find I can live with or work around, alluding to the competence of the software.

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  • 6 months later...
On 6/25/2022 at 6:28 AM, ludnid said:

the process invoked by affinity is a nightmare

Exactly how I feel. I was hoping this would be one of the things improved in v2, but the serif folks certainly seem set in their ways; they've come up with some weird and difficult to understand process and for some reason they don't want to change it.

Founder & Lead Designer at Amuses Me Games

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13 hours ago, n8o said:

I was hoping this would be one of the things improved in v2, but the serif folks certainly seem set in their ways; they've come up with some weird and difficult to understand process and for some reason they don't want to change it.

Exactly so! It’s definitely very regrettable and I, too, cannot fathom by any means what this "stubborn“ adhering to some weird counter-intuitive "workflow" (if you can actually call it that...) is about from Serif's resp. the developers’ point of view. They can't really mean that this manifestation of unnecessary weirdness helps winning over users from industry standard apps like Photoshop (or even keep their own eventually), can they?

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