Mask's & brush colours

[Deano.S]

Hello all,

Still learning Affinity v2, left adobe after 15 years so there's a few wiggly niggly bits here and there and my question is on Masks.

 

its very basic.

If I have a mask and I've done what I need todo on it... but I decided to come back to it and I need to hide/show more of something, I click my masking layer, but why can't my brush colours automatically goto Black & White so I can work on the mask? 

I can press "D" to reset the brush colours  to Black & white and use "X" to switch between. but why doesn't the brush just automatically goto the Layer Mask usable colours of B&W?

 

Its something photoshop did for you.

 

Am I missing something. Is there a setting I've missed? 

 

cheers everyone!

[GarryP]

I don’t think you are missing anything.

As far as I remember, if I’m remembering it properly, the mask allows you to paint in any colour as it’s the luminosity of the colour which matters.

For instance, painting onto a mask with a dark yellow will mask more than painting onto a mask with a light purple.

For this reason, the available colours aren’t automatically changed to greyscale so you have more choice when painting on a mask.

[Murfee]

11 hours ago, Deano.S said:

Am I missing something. Is there a setting I've missed?

Hi @Deano.S, I am on a Mac and this does work as you expect, the colours default to grayscale when I click on a mask layer, they do not change for the built in mask of an adjustment layer.

This was added in V1.8 or 1.9 I am not sure which, maybe you need to add as a feature request for it to work like this on Windows

   

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, Murfee said:

Hi @Deano.S, I am on a Mac and this does work as you expect, the colours default to grayscale when I click on a mask layer, they do not change for the built in mask of an adjustment layer.

I think what @Deano.S is asking about is the two color wells at the top left of the Color panel. For me, if I have them set to something other than black & white they do not change to black & white when I click on or create a new mask layer, although the rest of the panel's color options do change to greyscale if that panel is set to show sliders, as in your first screenshot.

Regardless, like @GarryP said, painting on a mask layer only uses the luminosity (grayness?) of the picked color.