Grad snapping w/ selection marquee

[Zack Black]

I recently jumped the Adobe ship and went all on Affinity Photo. Today I tried a very common UI design workflow where I create a grid, select the outer 2 to 4 pixels using the selection marquee, and then stroke that with a color to create a border. I've tried all manner of enable snapping but can NOT get the marquee to snap to the grid for making a precise selection. How do I make this work?

[firstdefence]

Why not use a rectangle with a pixel specified width. 

[Zack Black]

48 minutes ago, firstdefence said:

why not use a rectangle with a pixel specified width.

It's just one example of a workflow I'm used to. Yes, there are other ways to do it, but I have countless situations where I need the marquee to be able to select pixels on a grid. (Another common use is inserting or removing sections of UI elements like buttons, text fields, etc., in order to make them wider/narrower.) I just can't believe that I'm hearing this tool does not snap when so many other tools/adjustments in Affinity DO snap. The design choice behind this seem completely arbitrary.

[loukash]

4 hours ago, Zack Black said:

I recently jumped the Adobe ship and went all on Affinity Photo

34 minutes ago, Zack Black said:

a workflow I'm used to

Well, the best strategy here is to forget all those Adobe workflows (or – in many instances – Adobe workarounds!) and dive into the Affinity universe as is. 
Trust me, been there done that.  
And it took me five years until I "saw the light" and realized that wanting to do everything the "Adobe way" in Affinity Photo after being brainwashed for decades won't bring me any further. 

So for a start, in Affinity Photo it's much easier and more comfortable working with vector shapes and curves than in Photoshop. These are workflows which would be a literal p.i.t.a. to accomplish in PS. Just get used to the fact that you don't need to use marquee selections all the time. Vectors are your friends.

4 hours ago, Zack Black said:

can NOT get the marquee to snap to the grid for making a precise selection. How do I make this work?

But if you want to do it this way, it's simply a different workflow:

1. make a random marquee selection anywhere
2. click the Toggle Quick Mask button or choose Select > Edit Selection As Layer (don't ask me why this exact same function has two different names, duh…)
3. switch to the Move tool
4. if you have Snap to Grid active, moving and resizing the selection will now snap according to your snapping settings
5. when finished, disable the quick mask and the Move tool, and proceed with whatever you wanted to do

Marquee selections are being recorded in the History panel, so you can always revert to an earlier version.

[Zack Black]

15 minutes ago, loukash said:

the best strategy here is to forget all those Adobe workflows (or – in many instances – Adobe workarounds!) and dive into the Affinity universe as is.

I totally get this approach and preach it all the time to peers struggling to learn new apps and coding languages. Several of the discoveries I've had with the Affinity way of doing things has been surprisingly pleasant, and in fact, easier in some cases than the ancient Adobe way. However, this is something I just can't find a workaround for: Say I just have a graphic image of a button that is 96 pixels wide, and I want to remove a 32 pixel section from the middle and keep the remaining 64 pixels by merging the two ends together. How would I go about that in a simple workflow without using the grid?

[loukash]

20 minutes ago, Zack Black said:

Say I just have a graphic image of a button that is 96 pixels wide, and I want to remove a 32 pixel section from the middle and keep the remaining 64 pixels by merging the two ends together. How would I go about that in a simple workflow without using the grid?

It depends. Do you have an actual sample image?

[firstdefence]

I'm making a few assumptions...

• The button is the document size 96px x 30px and not a part of a larger document.
• it has multiple layers
• it has rounded corners so you don't hurt yourself 
• and its Orange, (fav colour) 

With a pixel image...

1. Draw out a rectangle shape that is 32px x {height?} maybe 32px
2. Position it centrally both vertically and horizontally
3. Click on the shape layer icon while holding Cmd on Mac/Ctrl on windows down (this makes a selection using the 32px x 32px shape)
4. Click on the buttons background layer and press delete
5. Turn off the rectangle shape layer to see the erased space created

The reason for using a rectangle shape is,  accurate dimensions and can be snapped into place easily.

Making a button with Shapes...

1. Create a rectangle 96px x 30px
2. Create a rectangle 32px x 32px 
3. Select both layers and subtract one from the other using Layer > Geometry: Subtract 

[Zack Black]

14 hours ago, firstdefence said:

I'm making a few assumptions...

Thanks for the input. This seems like a good workflow for building UI elements from scratch. The use cases I'm talking about are much more... how shall I phrase..."on the fly"? As a game developer I have like 50 projects going back to literally the 90s of things that I have worked on. Sometimes I just want to open a flat .PNG file and make some quick modifications rather than tracking down the original source .PSD that has the full layer stack and such. (I know, it's lazy, but I am a one-man-band so my time is stretched very thin.) There are also MANY 2D sprite sheets where everything is laid out in grids of 8 pixels. I often need to just open one of these source PNGs and move something to a different location. (Sometimes just for quick testing.) Anyway... I hate to say it but Affinity just became unusable to me because of this lack of full grid snapping. It's seriously a real shame because up until now I have been adapting quickly and easily to the differences coming from Photoshop. I absolutely HATE the idea of going back to my Adobe subscription but this is something that is just going to drive me insane trying to work without. Very sad 😞