Color fill problem

[AndyV]

I'm fast realizing that there is much more difference in how you do things between what I've been used to in Photoshop and with how Affinity works. It makes asking questions a bit difficult when I'm not quite sure what is going on.

I have been trying to do a fill WITHIN a simple rectangular marquee selection.

From this:

to this:

 

But when it goes wrong I can't figure out what I've done to make it go wrong. Sometimes it has gone from this:

 

And I realize that the GREEN has suddenly disappeared as my primary color (I swear it was before). And so I click that green circle to choose it as my primary color. And the result was this:

 

It turned all the lines of my little character green and I hadn't even yet done a fill. I dont know what is making the colors disappear in the primary/secondary palette and I don't know why my character went green.

[GarryP]

If you just want a filled rectangle, try adding a filled Rectangle Shape instead of trying to fill the marquee selection.

Note: Partial screen-grabs often don’t show us enough information, in this case such as the Tool you are using and the Context Toolbar settings for that tool. Please provide full-screen screenshots so we can see everything that you can see.

[AndyV]

I didn't know how much to show. Sorry.

As for tool I was using, obviously I had the marquee chosen. At some point I was clicking on fill. And you can see the fill tool on the top pictures. The bottom two I can't remember.

You unwittingly express some of my problem. Doing a marquee is how I am used to doing it in Photoshop for some 25 years. Not that I can't change, but it gets difficult to have to bend for the software. The marquee fill does work. So I'm liable not to change my working style. What I'm trying to understand is what my questions are: why the color palette suddenly goes to "nil" and why the character went green.

 

[GarryP]

A good rule-of-thumb is, if you don’t know what the problem is and/or you don’t know what part of the screen is important, show us the whole screen and we’ll tell you if we need more.

We can see that you had an active marquee selection but that doesn’t tell us which tool (dialogs are not tools) you have selected or the settings for that tool.

Please supply a full-screen screenshot showing us the state of the application just before you do the thing which goes wrong and another one after you do the thing which goes wrong. Once we can see the initial state and the result state that can help us to diagnose what happened in-between.

[carl123]

8 hours ago, AndyV said:

And so I click that green circle to choose it as my primary color. And the result was this:

Look at the icons next to the Layers in the Layers panel

The first 2 are different and indicate that they are image layers. The rest are pixel layers

Applying a fill (or colour) to image layers works differently than when applying it to pixel layers

To turn an image layer into a pixel layer, right-click the layer in the Layers panel and select Rasterise

 

[user_0815]

2 hours ago, AndyV said:

my questions are: why the color palette suddenly goes to "nil" and why the character went green.

The colour changes depending on what layer you are working on. It basically remembers what you were using on the individual layers. 

But I don't know much about that feature, I haven't payed attention to that as it just works for me as it is. IIRC there might be a setting but I'm not sure.

Perhaps someone else can tell us more about that and whether it can be changed if required...?

The character went green because you clicked on that little colour dot next to the picker symbol. That means "apply this colour please". It applies it to the object you have selected at that moment. How it works: If you select a colour by dragging the picker from the colour panel, it first gets loaded to that dot. Now you can decide whether to apply it to the primary or secondary colour (fill or stroke on shapes).

[AndyV]

I'm going to try to answer to all three people.

GARRY: Okay, sorry. I'll remember that for the future. For now, I'm done with that work and have nothing to make a screenshot of. As I think I've mentioned, it has worked and I've just blundered forward. It was the sporadic nature of it working and not working that has troubled me most.

CARL: And I think maybe your response explains why it was sporadic. Mea culpa, when I first learned about "pixel layer" and "Image layer" I remember reacting something like "Are you serious?" and just ignored trying to understand the difference. I've just always figured anything I bring up as an image IS rasterized by definition, and that you only need to rasterize vector images and text. Either I"m way behind the times on that, or else Affinity is bringing in new ideas. That's my one complaint about Affinity. It is throwing in a whole lot of new things that for me are completely unnecessary for my usual work. Other than that, I like it a lot. 

U: I think maybe you're saying something akin to what Carl is saying. But as for the character going green, I clicked on that color dot BECAUSE I learned that after you use a color picker, that won't affect the primary or secondary color pics. It brings it to that dot and then you have to "add" it to primary or secondary by clicking on it. And that's what I was doing. And the character went green.

So Im guessing now that the character was going green SOMETIMES but NOT OTHER TIMES because it depends whether the layer is "image" or "pixel".

So! Now that I generally know what the problem is I now know where to go to the manual and read up on that! 

 

Thank you everyone.