Can't paint with black on a mask

[Rose Wells]

I am using Affinity Photo 1.10.5, on Mac OS 10.14.6

I have a mask layer which I painted on with white. I then wanted to correct something, and pain with black, but I cannot get this to work.

I have looked in the forums. My blend mode is set to normal, and protect alpha is unchecked. I have also checked I'm on the correct layer and using the correct brush. I have also restarted the computer, and the issue is still occurring, so I have concluded it must be a bug.

[ashf]

That's what it is. (though I guess it will be fixed in the future)
Use the Erase Brush instead.

[Rose Wells]

The erase tool does the same thing as the white paint brush. I'm wanting to add black to the mask. Is there a way to do that with the erase tool?

[ashf]

Strange. I don't have such problem on Monterey.

Are you actually painting on the mask layer?
In order to edit a mask layer, you have to alt click the mask layer, you do know that right?

[Rose Wells]

16 minutes ago, ashf said:

Strange. I don't have such problem on Monterey.

Are you actually painting on the mask layer?
In order to edit a mask layer, you have to alt click the mask layer, you do know that right?

Yes, I am on the mask layer. I can use the white paintbrush to erase, but I can't use the black paintbrush to reinstate bits like I usually would.

[ashf]

Have to tried disabling the Metal Computing in Preferences>Performance?

[stokerg]

Hi @Rose Wells,

Can you just try on the attached test file?  I've Masked an area and if you can try to restore it using a white brush and let me know the results.  If it does work, can you attach your afphoto file you are having trouble with and i'll see if there's anything in the file that would cause the Masks to stop working.

I'm also not aware of a bug where you can't paint on a Mask with either black or white.

Mask test.afphoto

[Rose Wells]

20 hours ago, stokerg said:

Hi @Rose Wells,

Can you just try on the attached test file?  I've Masked an area and if you can try to restore it using a white brush and let me know the results.  If it does work, can you attach your afphoto file you are having trouble with and i'll see if there's anything in the file that would cause the Masks to stop working.

I'm also not aware of a bug where you can't paint on a Mask with either black or white.

Mask test.afphoto 8.3 MB · 3 downloads

Hi, thanks for that. I have tried this file and it's working ok.

Now I look at my file, maybe it's the white brush not working properly? Basically, the black and white brush are both doing the same thing, which is the problem.

PRD_SM_monarch-butterflies_woodland-farmyard_wall-decal_bed-cushion_shelf-animals_small.afphoto

[thomaso]

17 minutes ago, Rose Wells said:

Now I look at my file, maybe it's the white brush not working properly? Basically, the black and white brush are both doing the same thing, which is the problem.

Same to me with this file, both black and white paint black. If I draw rectangular marquee selection and press the delete key the mask layer gets unselected but the mask is unchanged. Also the Flood Fill Tool appears not to work.

I experienced such masking colour issues quite a few times and with various documents. For some few days the black brush was always set to 0% color opacity every time I switched to black. I never detected what was causing and what solving these oddities.

Now, with your file it appears to got fixed after I tried the brush and the selection rectangle and the fill bucket several times in QuickMask mode. First it didn't alter the mask (which meanwhile was fully black/red, then suddenly it worked and I couldn't reproduce the odd behaviour even if I go back in the history. – But when I closed & reopened the file the issue was back.

Okay, the culprit seems to be in the colour: although the round colour wells in the panel and the tools show white the colour definition is black:

Really strange that reopening this file does recall this issue.

[Rose Wells]

9 minutes ago, thomaso said:

Same to me with this file, both black and white paint black. If I draw rectangular marquee selection and press the delete key the mask layer gets unselected but the mask is unchanged. Also the Flood Fill Tool appears not to work.

I experienced such masking colour issues quite a few times and with various documents. For some few days the black brush was always set to 0% color opacity every time I switched to black. I never detected what was causing and what solving these oddities.

Now, with your file it appears to got fixed after I tried the brush and the selection rectangle and the fill bucket several times in QuickMask mode. First it didn't alter the mask (which meanwhile was fully black/red, then suddenly it worked and I couldn't reproduce the odd behaviour even if I go back in the history. – But when I closed & reopened the file the issue was back.

Okay, the culprit seems to be in the colour: although the round colour wells in the panel and the tools show white the colour definition is black:

Really strange that reopening this file does recall this issue.

Thanks for looking into that, and identifying the issue for me. It's definitely not something I would have picked up! I have tried your fix, and it seems to be working. In fact, while using the fill bucket and undoing it several times, I actually inadvertently fixed the problem area, completely by accident.

Now we know that it is a bug, hopefully someone is able to figure out how to fix it.

[ashf]

Actually it's no color(back slash) on my side.

[ashf]

4 minutes ago, N.P.M. said:

Sure you're selecting the right layer?
eg the mask.

Yes. actually I noticed that if I select the bottom color instead of flipping colors, it's zero opacity like yours...

[thomaso]

7 hours ago, N.P.M. said:

it was just a wrong setting and not a bug 🙂

As I mentioned above this setting is not set by the user (me) but by the app automatically and gets especially obvious in situations were the colour panel for white has the opacity set to 0 … which the user (me) never would do even not incidentally (like e.g. incidentally set of layer opacity by hitting a number key with no object selected). Also I experienced that this odd setting can resist/return even if I fixed it once and switched tools or layers and came back to a mask + brush again.

From this perspective (set by the app, not the user) it in fact appears to be a bug – though it can't get reproduced from scratch.

[stokerg]

On 11/3/2022 at 4:09 PM, thomaso said:

From this perspective (set by the app, not the user) it in fact appears to be a bug – though it can't get reproduced from scratch.

I might of found a report of this before.  It seems to be trigged by making a change to the image, using Control+Z to undo the change and then using X to switch the Colours in the Colour Panel.  That will set the opacity to Zero.  This is logged with the Dev team and could explain what is going on here.

Theres also another way to trigger a similar issue, if you set the Colour Panel to greyscale and 8 bit or 16, then move the grey slider, the opacity also jumps to zero.  This is also logged with the Dev team.

[Rose Wells]

6 hours ago, stokerg said:

I might of found a report of this before.  It seems to be trigged by making a change to the image, using Control+Z to undo the change and then using X to switch the Colours in the Colour Panel.  That will set the opacity to Zero.  This is logged with the Dev team and could explain what is going on here.

Theres also another way to trigger a similar issue, if you set the Colour Panel to greyscale and 8 bit or 16, then move the grey slider, the opacity also jumps to zero.  This is also logged with the Dev team.

Thanks for looking into this. I don't think I would have used X to switch the colours in the control panel, I'm not familiar with that shortcut. Unless I did it by accident, or if switching them another way also triggers it.

[Rose Wells]

On 11/3/2022 at 9:12 PM, N.P.M. said:

At least @Rose Wells can go forward with the project since it was just a wrong setting and not a bug 🙂

It's definitely a bug, it wasn't a wrong setting. The Devs already have a similar bug logged, so hopefully it will be resolved in the next update.