Unable to remove out-of-canvas areas from adjustment masks

[NotMyFault]

Hi,

this is a bit complex situation, and i did not fully understand the issue.

As mods requested to do not over-complicate things, i try to share the symptoms. The issue is severe: Documents start to act erratically once have to deal with out-of-canvas areas in masks. There are several reports about erratic behavior, performance issues, and crashes (on Windows) once started.

It is practically impossible with current Affinity functions to rectify those layers to get a working document.

There are quite many possible causes where this situation develops:

• Copy / paste between documents
• Rotating layers with nested adjustments (if mask is non-trivial, meaning not completely white)
• resizing canvas
• Importing assets / images of different resolution
• Having layers partially outside visible canvas, with non-trivial masks

Background 

Steps to create the start situation. There is no artistic sense.

• Having a document with 1 pixel layer and one nested adjustment layer (recolor)
• Use erase brush to remove a part of adjustment layers inherent mask. Brush over full height.
• Use move tool to rotate adjustment layer, and increase height 2x so it clearly is larger than the pixel layer (and canvas size)

Intended activity

In many cases you need to remove out-of-canvas areas.

• For pixel layers, you can use rasterize & trim.
• For mask layers (inherent mask of adjustments / filters), rasterize & trim does not work.
• I'm unaware of any other Photo functionality helping to remove unwanted out-of-canvas areas from masks.

Issue statement

To remove the unwanted out-of-canvas parts of the mask, you need to

1. get rid of the rotation
2. fill area with pure white (but preserving in-canvas areas)

Both is very hard (next to impossible) to achieve in Photo:

I tried to paint in white over the masks. This is possible even for invisible out-of-canvas areas - but you are working kind of blind. Only the layer thumbnail symbol will show out-of-canvas areas in a very low resolution. But the rotation leads to unwanted areas.

• Photo erratically increases the unwanted canvas of masks when they are rotated.
  • create spare channel from mask (rotated adjustment)
  • create new mask
  • load spare channel to mask
    The area of the mask gets far too large, and is (unwantedly again) rotated

So my issues are:

1. Photo currently does not provide a clear way to "rasterize & trim" masks
2. Photo currently does not provide an easy way to derive a non-rotated version of a rotated mask
3. Spare Channels remember the rotation angle (unwanted in my case)
4. Loading Spare Channels with rotation to layers erratically increases the w/h of mask layer
5. Editing outside canvas is possible. This could lead to bad surprises. The out-of-canvas area could be critical if you need to resize / move layers. Some notifications / warnings should be possible. It should be possible to restrict brushes to canvas areas.
6. There is no option to temporary show out-of-canvas areas while editing without loosing/changing the current crop. No option to save/restore/switch between multiple cropped views
7. brush tools and masks do not consistently respect canvas size. Some function stop at canvas boundaries, some work affect outside canvas boundaries.

 

All started here:

https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/150717-affinity-photo-ipad-is-very-laggy-and-often-crashes/&tab=comments#comment-845117

 

[NotMyFault]

OK

i now found a simple document to explain one of the issues:

• Document contains a pixel layer and one adjustment layer with an edited mask
• Adjustment layer rotated and scaled up 2* with move tool
• When you use channels panel to create grayscale layer from adjustment layer's alpha channel, resulting layer is totally oversized.
• same issue applies if you create a mask or spare channel

before

create greyscale from layer alpha

 

result is excessive in size (out of Photo's App Window area)

Channels create grayscale layer oversized.afphoto

[Dan C]

Hi @NotMyFault,

On 10/15/2021 at 1:07 PM, NotMyFault said:

i now found a simple document to explain one of the issues:

• Document contains a pixel layer and one adjustment layer with an edited mask
• Adjustment layer rotated and scaled up 2* with move tool
• When you use channels panel to create grayscale layer from adjustment layer's alpha channel, resulting layer is totally oversized.
• same issue applies if you create a mask or spare channel

I've been able to log this issue with our developers using the steps you've provided

If you're able to provide clear steps such as these for the other issues you've raised here, I'll be able to investigate these further for you. Many thanks!