Photoshop -> Select -> Subject equivalent? [affinity photo]

[kazu san]

There is function which can select subject by one click like "select subject" in photoshop??

select subject in photoshop, example

on reddit, same question

[R C-R]

No.

[Dan C]

Hi @kazu san,

As R C-R has confirmed, unfortunately this isn't an available function of the Affinity app currently, my apologies.

I'll be sure to move this thread to the Feedback section of our forums, for our devs to see and consider adding in a future version, I hope this helps!

[kirk23]

As a Photoshop user I can say this AI selecting works well  for people , cats and a few other distinctive things  which  are usually easy to select manually anyway.   Any complicated matter   like selecting some shadows to de-light or a material/ texture features  this AI starts to rather annoy you than help.

Last year I bought an extra year of Photoshop because of this thing and was kind of disappointed.

[swinwappy]

Select subject is the one thing at the moment stopping me from making the switch to Affinity.

[TimKD]

Yes I just bought the Affinity Bundle and looking into Photo that was the first thing I noticed really missing. Subject select and Object select should be pushed to the top of the list of things to add. 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, TimKD said:

Yes I just bought the Affinity Bundle and looking into Photo that was the first thing I noticed really missing. Subject select and Object select should be pushed to the top of the list of things to add. 

I think these things in Photoshop are powered by AI, so it may be quite some time before anything comparable is added to AP. Also note that some Affinity users are adamantly opposed to adding any AI features to the apps.

[Rodney D Cunningham]

Adding support for this request.

[R C-R]

1 hour ago, Rodney D Cunningham said:

Adding support for this request.

Then you should do that in the Feedback & Suggestions forum where the developers will see it, not here in the Questions forum where they probably won't.

[GarryP]

12 hours ago, R C-R said:

Then you should do that in the Feedback & Suggestions forum where the developers will see it, not here in the Questions forum where they probably won't.

This thread is already in a Feedback area of the forums (albeit for Version 1) and, as far as I can tell from reading the previous posts, it looks like it was moved there by Dan C in 2021.

[Dan C]

16 hours ago, Rodney D Cunningham said:

Adding support for this request.

Thanks for your feedback here @Rodney D Cunningham!

2 hours ago, GarryP said:

This thread is already in a Feedback area of the forums (albeit for Version 1)

I've moved the thread to the V2 feedback section in order to keep this relevant with our team

[John15]

This is a really convenient tool and I knew it didn't exist yet in Affinity Photo. So I was hoping to make a plugin/script using a fast publicly available model (like YOLOv8). But to my surprise, that feature also doesn't exist yet. It has been in the making for many years though. The last update has been:

I hope at least one of these features gets into beta soon.

Edited July 13, 2024 by John15
minor grammatic

[folate]

I'm really missing this feature. Also refining selection needs a bit of work (sometimes i want see what ive selected and not what is not selected) and please add some kind of "Inpaint" settings (maybe some kind of "ai inpaint" to improve it???). Big bump for "subject select".

[R C-R]

39 minutes ago, folate said:

I'm really missing this feature. Also refining selection needs a bit of work (sometimes i want see what ive selected and not what is not selected) and please add some kind of "Inpaint" settings (maybe some kind of "ai inpaint" to improve it???). Big bump for "subject select".

Feature requests should be made in the Feedback & Suggestions forum at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feedback-suggestions/, not here in Questions.

[John15]

With the release of Segment Anything Model v2, it's now possible to build an interactive subject selection mechanism. But that model doesn't have a flexible license, even though it's free for non-commercial use. So Affinity won't be able to simply bundle that with their product as is (they can train their own similar model though). But as a user, it would have been relatively easy to create an extension that uses that model. I'm waiting for Affinity to release a version that has native extension capabilities.

2 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Feature requests should be made in the Feedback & Suggestions forum at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/forum/52-feedback-suggestions/, not here in Questions.

This thread is already in it buddy.

[R C-R]

Just now, John15 said:

This thread is already in it buddy.

Sorry about that. When I tried to post my reply I kept getting 502 & 504 errors but at the time I swear it looked like this topic was still in Questions & Submit Reply became unresponsive (which may explain my double post).

I have been getting these errors intermittently for the last two days but I am not sure if that has anything to do with this or it is just me having senior moments. 🙁

[John15]

The website was a bit unresponsive at the time. Perhaps it was showing an older version due to some database issues (as it was originally in Questions and later moved by an Affinity staff, Dan).

23 hours ago, John15 said:

But that model doesn't have a flexible license, even though it's free for non-commercial use. So Affinity won't be able to simply bundle that with their product as is (they can train their own similar model though).

What I said above was wrong. SAM2 model actually has Apache v2 License. So it shouldn't be a problem for Affinity to bundle it with their product, and it should be a relatively easy feature to implement.

[Juhani]

+1 for this feature. "Select Subject" should definitely come to Affinity ASAP.

It is implemented even in Pixelmator Pro, which does it completely locally and often better than Photoshop, without sending any of your stuff to the cloud. In fact right now I often do my subject masking in Pixelmator Pro, save out a PSD and continue in Affinity.