Affinity Photo V2 - crashed when duplicating a brush for editing, no brushes are available now across all 3 programs

[DaveCSmithson]

Hi, I'm running on iMac (Monterey (12.4), all Affinity apps are the latest versions

I tried to duplicate a brush in Affinity Photo v2 to edit it when the system completely froze, left it for 30 mins and the beachball was still spinning, so had to force quit photo.

As a result after the restart no brushes were available (both the defaults and purchased brushes) in either Photo or the pixel persona in Designer. I looked on the forum and a couple of people running windows had experienced the same problem (not resolved), so followed the recommended steps ie. uninstalling and re-installing etc.

After the re-installation I still have the same problem, no brushes available in Photo or pixel designer (vector brushes still available). In designer the brushes have a lock item against each collection (see screenshot) but in Photo they are all missing.

One thing I did check as recommended, the file 'raster_brushes.propcol' file is huge (3.13Gb) I have brushes totalling around 700mb I have purchased, so I don't know how large the default Affinity set.

Thanks for any help, as you can see I am just limited to vector work at the moment!

Dave Cockerham

[walt.farrell]

I think you already asked this (or something very similar), a couple of hours ago. Generally it's best to stay in the same topic, not post multiple topics.

But as you've asked again: The usual "fix" is to completely reset your brushes, raster and vector, across all three applications. You can do that by making sure none of the V2 Affinity applications are running, then starting one of them. Usually I would recommend pressing Ctrl before starting the application, but several Mac users have suggested that it is necessary to first start the application, then quickly press and hold Ctrl before the application starts.

You'll get a Clear User Data dialog, where you can uncheck the first 3 items and check Reset Brushes. Then press Reset. Then you'll need to reinstall any vector or raster brushes you've manually installed or edited.

However, as a less drastic approach, I wonder if simply renaming the raster_brushes.propcol file would work. I've never tried that as a fix, but if it works it would save you from having to reinstall the vector brushes, too.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

Usually I would recommend pressing Ctrl before starting the application, but several Mac users have suggested that it is necessary to first start the application, then quickly press and hold Ctrl before the application starts.

For Macs, you do not have to do that if for instance you are starting the app via the Finder & hold down CTRL while you double-click on the app in the root level Applications window, or click & hold on the app's Dock icon (if you have it there) until the popup menu opens & then hold down CTRL while choosing the "Open" option from that menu.

[DWright]

The default size for the raster_brushes.propcol is 17Kb and as @walt.farrellsuggested if you rename or delete this file the next time that you start Affinity Photo 2 this file will be recreated with just the default brushes.

[DaveCSmithson]

Thanks for all the help guys, problem resolved

Regards, Dave C