Deselect isn't working as it should

[AndyV]

Either I'm facing a weird bug, or else the bug is in my head.

In these pictures, I'm trying to build an animated sequence where the arrows and stars are "lit" with a brighter yellow. The stars will light in one direction; the arrows in another. Since there are twenty stars and ten arrows, two stars will light up before it a new arrow is lit up.

The way I'm doing this is to select the yellow of one star and one arrow, then adding two adjustment layers to brighten and posterize. Then export that as file-01.tiff and continue around the circle

So, the problem is that after I finished with the first arrow and star, I deselected BOTH, turned off the adjustment layers. Both star and arrow went back to the dull yellow as before. I then selected a new star, and selected the same arrow as before. I then turned on the adjustment layers again, and guess what happened? The new star did NOT light up. But the first start I had lit previously (and was NOT selected) lit up again.

Why?

[GarryP]

Unless I have misunderstood things, as I don’t do this sort of thing often, when you add an Adjustment Layer with an active Pixel selection, the adjustment is applied to the area under the pixel selection only.
So, if you deselect and then make a new pixel selection, the existing adjustment layer still applies only to the original pixel selection.
That’s what you can see in the thumbnail of the adjustment layer.

[AndyV]

That's so weird. Would they work differently if I nested them? The parent/child thing? OR I guess I could just go back in the history to just where I added those adjustment layers. That should work. Right? I'll go try that now.

But at the same time... i just finished another animation where I did these exact same steps and it worked just fine. But then maybe I did something different without realizing.

I admit these adjustment layers are new to me. I do like what they can do a lot, but I'm obviously not completely up to speed on them.

 

EDIT: Tried backtracking and tried parent/child. Neither work. I have to start afresh each step. I think what I did yesterday was different but I can't remember what I did!!

 

[GarryP]

Because your arrows and stars are not uniform around the circle I don’t know if there is a quicker way to do what you want.

My first thought is to remove the fill from the arrows and stars, then add a circle of the ‘normal’ fill below, and a rotated rectangle of a lighter colour under design but above the circle, then rotate the rectangle as needed – see attached video.

However, since your arrows and stars don’t ‘line up’ I don’t know how well that would work. Maybe have two rectangles, one for the arrows and another for the stars?

[AndyV]

That's very clever. I'll have to remember that trick. But as it is, I'm having the arrows light up in one direction (CCW) and the stars light up opposite (CW).

I started it now. Once I get a rhythm going,  it's not so bad. I'm up to picture #9 already. 

 

I'll post a video of the finished sequence in about an hour if you want to see.

 

Thanks much for your help and going to the trouble of the video.

[GarryP]

If you still have the original design which uses vector shapes (I’m guessing) then it might be easier to change the colours there rather than go to the hassle of changing the pixels. Unless, of course, you have done other editing since it became pixel-based.

It’s often better to stick with vector designs as long as possible before moving to pixel formats.

[AndyV]

I hear you, but....Even though some of my recent questions sound like I'm completely lost in Affinity, I'm much more comfortable with photo editing software than vector based software. I really hate using vectors and points. I was forced to in this case to rebuild some very low rez graphics of pinball machines that I found.

I'm doing okay this way...other than facing new things about Affinity I didn't know about!

[AndyV]

Voila!

[GarryP]

Lovely. I can almost hear the sounds of the arcade.

[AndyV]

Believe it or not, the background is going to be some very loud cacophonous Prokofiev.