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Pasting pixel selection question (just confirming that I haven't been misunderstanding)


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Am I right that every time you copy and paste a pixel selection, it creates a new layer? Put another way, am I right that there's no way to paste more than one selection "object" onto the same layer, right?

I do understand rasterizing, Merge Visible, masking to layers, pasting inside and controlling what you paste, etc.; I just want to make sure I haven't been making this more difficult than necessary over the past few months!

TIA

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6 hours ago, nickbatz said:

Am I right that every time you copy and paste a pixel selection, it creates a new layer?

Correct

6 hours ago, nickbatz said:

am I right that there's no way to paste more than one selection "object" onto the same layer, right?

Correct

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There are ways to paint a selection by creating a brush of that selection, this would paint copies of a selection onto the same pixel layer if that is what you need.

image.png.036f525fe1d9a49e5757ec968bca0b27.png

https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/pages/Painting/pixel_customBrushes.html

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https://affinity.help/photo/English.lproj/pages/LayerOperations/copyPasteOptions.html

Paste option Description
Paste Pastes content, preserving the copied content's look and formatting.
Paste Inside Pastes one or more layers inside another layer.
Paste Style Pastes a layer's stroke, fill and layer effect(s) to another layer.
Paste FX Pastes only layer effect(s) to another layer.
Paste Without Format Pastes unformatted text by stripping the formatting from the copied text. When pasted, the target text will retain its text formatting.

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As an alternative / workaround, have a look at clone brush / patch tool in combination with source mode and global sources. These allow to place samples from other layers or files directly into a pixel layer.
unfortunately there is an issue affecting the latter.

 

besides merge visible, merge down might be the quickest option (assign a keyboard shortcut), but you need to rasterize the lower layer once (as preparation) to avoid potential blurriness issues by mismatching dpi / fractural position / rotation.   

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NotMyFault: Yeah, thanks, I use the Clone Brush more than my toothbrush - and my oral hygiene is fine. :)

firstdefence: Right, thanks. 

***
I just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing a way to paste a bunch of pixel selections onto a single layer and keep them as individual objects.

My next stop is to figure out Affinity Designer, which I just picked up while it was on sale - mainly to support Affinity, because I work with pixels rather than vector objects. I haven't used it yet, but I'm guessing it might be useful for this.

You can see why having multiple "objects" on one layer would be convenient:

image.jpeg.b6307ca3a9517d31d83bf8065b6c91f2.jpeg

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Following up, Affinity Designer does work the same way.

I guess the way to work is simply to put all these layers in a group. The advantage to this system is that you can control which layers are in front, i.e. the parent and child layers.

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1 hour ago, nickbatz said:

I guess the way to work is simply to put all these layers in a group. The advantage to this system is that you can control which layers are in front, i.e. the parent and child layers.

Making a layer a child of a parent layer is not the same thing as putting several layers in the same group layer. See for example the Masking vs clipping layers video tutorial.

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You can use Layer (Layers) aka a panda layer lol! 

 

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15 hours ago, firstdefence said:

You can use Layer (Layers) aka a panda layer lol! 

 

 

You can put Layers in a Group so they're in the same "folder." That lets you show/hide several Layers at once with one checkbox, move them em masse, or just keep them organized - which is important, because the list of Layers becomes unwieldy pretty quickly.

Another reason to put them in a group - the one I was talking about here - is so you can select them all at once. What I'm talking about here grouping several Pixel Layers   so that I just click on individual "objects" to move/tweak them without having to switch Layers each time; clicking on the "object" makes its Layer the active one.

But you could accomplish the same thing just by shift-clicking on several contiguous or discontiguous layers to make them all active. The Group just makes it easier.

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