Two things I would really love in Affinity (selection / snapping)

[pulse]

Hi. First time posting here.  I got myself the Affinity suite recently as I'd like to finally switch from GIMP to something more powerful.

There's two features I really miss in Affinity that come standard in GIMP. First one is marquee adjusting:

As you can hopefully see above, it's very easy to adjust the current selection by simply clicking on it and then dragging the corners, resizing it in the process. In Affinity I haven't found a way to do it, other than going to the Transform pane and then setting X, Y, W, and H manually. Granted you can do it by pressing down on the labels and moving, but it's not as intuitive.

The other feature I REALLY miss is snapping selection to grid. It works something like this in GIMP:

I work with tiles and a lot of my workflow involves creating tilesets, which means I usually have to copy a lot of grid-locked pieces from source graphics to create a tileset.

I haven't found a good way to do what the GIF shows above in Affinity, the only way I've found is to use the Rectangle tool, create a rectangle (that one DOES snap to grid), ctrl-click the layer to create a pixel selection, and then remove the rectangle, which is just cumbersome and takes a lot longer.

Please let me know if there's easier workarounds around these issues that I haven't found, I've only been using the Affinity suite for a very short time so it might be that I just haven't figured it out. Alternatively it would be really awesome to get something like these features integrated into the software. I do love Affinity, these two things are the only things that really jam a fork in my workflow.

Edited November 18, 2022 by pulse

[Aammppaa]

1 hour ago, pulse said:

use the Rectangle tool, create a rectangle (that one DOES snap to grid), ctrl-click the layer to create a pixel selection, and then remove the rectangle, which is just cumbersome and takes a lot longer.

You can draw your rectangle and then Select > Selection from Layer and Delete.

And optionally set a keyboard shortcut to speed up the process.

[Aammppaa]

1 hour ago, pulse said:

First one is marquee adjusting

This can be done in Quick Mask mode.

Hit Q (or icon on main toolbar, or Select > Edit Selection as Layer) and then transform the selection with the Move Tool.

[pulse]

1 hour ago, Aammppaa said:

This can be done in Quick Mask mode.

Hit Q (or icon on main toolbar, or Select > Edit Selection as Layer) and then transform the selection with the Move Tool.

This actually helps, thanks!

 

1 hour ago, Aammppaa said:

You can draw your rectangle and then Select > Selection from Layer and Delete.

And optionally set a keyboard shortcut to speed up the process.

This one I do know of but it's still a bit of a clunky solution since a lot of my workflow depends on quickly rearranging tiles and tilesets. If there's no other workaround I guess I'll use this, although I have to say the workflow is a lot smoother in GIMP just because the selection automatically snaps to the grid and you can for example quickly move a bunch of tiles around. Thanks though!

[Deemstering]

The first one:
hit Q (quickmask)
hit V (move) handels appear > adjust
and finally hit Q (exit quickmask)

Second one snapping:
Go to view menu: show grid - cntrl+'
Then again view: Grid and axis: Setup as you like
Enable snapping: snap to grid.
Next repeat step one Q> V (-adjust with snapping) >Q

Gr.

But yes, a simple transform selection option (with optional snap) would be awesome.

 

[pulse]

3 minutes ago, Deemstering said:

Second one snapping:
Go to view menu: show grid - cntrl+'
Then again view: Grid and axis: Setup as you like
Enable snapping: snap to grid.
Next repeat step one Q> V (-adjust with snapping) >Q
 

Hmm - yeah, this does work and it's actually easier than the rectangle method. Still, that's *a lot* of extra steps just to select a few tiles on a grid accurately. A snappy behavior with the marquee tool would be a lot quicker and intuitive. But I'll guess I can live with this - thanks for the suggestion.