Can't choose color

[RoyMcCoy]

I posted the following question in the wrong place on the forum last night, realized my mistake but couldn't delete the post. This Desktop Questions section was proposed as more appropriate, so I'm reposting here with a screenshot as suggested.

"I confess that I'm trying to use Photo [2.0.4 and 2.1.0.1709, Ventura 13.2.1 on M2 MacBook Air] without reading a manual on it, but it still seems that it should be easier to choose a color for the paint brush. Both the foreground and background colors are set to Clear, with the red diagonal line through the white circle. Maybe I'm stupid, but I either have great difficulty getting this to change, or – as at the present moment – I can't get it to change at all. One of the several ways I've tried has been to click on the color tab at the right and double-click on the foreground circle, and then the Color Chooser dialog comes up. But I can't choose the color! Whatever I do, it just springs back to where it was originally. I realize there's some kind of trick here and somebody will likely tell me what it is, but I don't think a possibly unintuitive trick should be necessary. TFG reports the same problem at https://forum.affinity.serif.com/index.php?/topic/75219-changing-color-of-brushes/, so it's not just me. If this is indeed happening with multiple users, I think it's something that should be corrected/avoided if possible, thanks."

 

If this is indeed a recurring problem (and I afterwards found yet another person reporting the same thing), then I think this post should be considered a bug report or a beta issue rather than simply as a question, even though it doesn't essentially concern the current beta release (which I'm using, but I have the same problem with 2.0.4). What I wound up having to do last night was boot my old 2013 Mac, copy the file to it, perform the desired operation in Photoshop and then copy the modified file back to my current Mac – hardly an ideal procedure and not one I would want to have to repeat.

This morning I discovered the lock icon in the Color tab, and I find that I can move the sliders without their snapping back to their original positions as before. This is only in the Color tab, though: in the Color Chooser they're still snapping back, and in any event I still can't change the foreground and background colors, both of which remain set with the white circle and red diagonal. Or maybe these aren't the foreground and background colors, even though they look the same as Photoshop's and have what appears to be the same switch arrow? It's curious that when I search the Internet on "can't change the foreground color in Affinity Photo", I only get finds on the background color, which itself appears to be different from what's understood as the background color in Photoshop.

[Hangman]

@RoyMcCoy, right click on the image in the Layers panel and select Rasterise... and you should be good to go with paint brush colours... you can only apply the paint brush tool to pixel layers which you achieve by rasterising an image layer.

Having an image layer (denoted by the icon of a person to the left of the layer) should not affect the ability to drag the sliders, they shouldn't snap back to any particular setting either in the colour panel or the colour chooser so I'm slightly unsure why you are seeing that behaviour...

The switch arrow will indeed swap between primary and secondary colours when working with raster based graphics or painting with the paint brush... For vector shapes, lines and text, the colour selector is for stroke and fill colour instead of primary and secondary colour, respectively.

[RoyMcCoy]

6 hours ago, Hangman said:

@RoyMcCoy, right click on the image in the Layers panel and select Rasterise... and you should be good to go with paint brush colours... you can only apply the paint brush tool to pixel layers which you achieve by rasterising an image layer.

I would never have guessed this, but okay, thanks. I haven't even read the Quickstart Guide, so I'll at least have to do that.

6 hours ago, Hangman said:

Having an image layer (denoted by the icon of a person to the left of the layer) should not affect the ability to drag the sliders, they shouldn't snap back to any particular setting either in the colour panel or the colour chooser so I'm slightly unsure why you are seeing that behaviour...

If this is not just me it will presumably come up again.

I saw a video in which someone pressed on something in a stack of icons on the right side of the screen and the names of all the tools were displayed at the same time. This would be useful to me – can you or someone tell me how to get this?

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, RoyMcCoy said:

I saw a video in which someone pressed on something in a stack of icons on the right side of the screen and the names of all the tools were displayed at the same time. This would be useful to me – can you or someone tell me how to get this?

That sounds a little like a feature of the iPad versions that pops up names of the studios & menu items. There is no feature I know of like that for the desktop apps.