Affinity Photo 2.1 (not sure if it is only related to this) copy and paste and export is not consistent

[CyberAngel]

5 minutes ago, Brian_J said:

It doesn’t matter if a layer is selected when you make the selection. It does matter if there’s no layer selected when you copy — if no layer is selected when you copy, there is no change to you’re clipboard, so you’re pasting the last thing you copied correctly. 

And what I said, is that if the layer is selected I get the same results.

Secondly, I am using it without doing much here, so if the layer is being deselected I would question why, as it is the only layer there. 

[Brian_J]

12 minutes ago, CyberAngel said:

And what I said, is that if the layer is selected I get the same results.

If you run through your test again, but this time make sure the layer is selected before copying, you will get consistent results and I think it will clear up some confusion.

If no layer is selected when you copy, you’re not copying anything — it’s like opening a Word document and copying without selecting any text — so when you paste you’re pasting whatever is in your clipboard… which, in the case of your video, is the last thing you copied when a layer was selected.

To reiterate:

• It doesn’t matter if a layer is selected when you make the selection.
• A layer must be selected in order to use a selection to copy from the layer. (Side note: you don’t have to deselect before pasting.)

Believe me, I understand your issue. I ran into this when I started using Affinity V1 apps. What it comes down to is, if you want to make a selection to copy/paste unadulterated pixels, you can’t edit the selection size in the Transform panel or Quick Mask mode.

Hopefully Serif will respond to the bug report you posted and shed some light on the subject.

[CyberAngel]

18 minutes ago, Brian_J said:

Hopefully Serif will respond to the bug report you posted and shed some light on the subject.

Hopefully, the main interest is the extra pixel and feathering. 

[Return]

Here's my file with the rectangle to make a selection.
As you can see it is a clean selection and with the right proportions.
The feathering here is the result of the issue mentioned and linked here.
 

 

testEDITED.afphoto

[CyberAngel]

45 minutes ago, Return said:

Here's my file with the rectangle to make a selection.
As you can see it is a clean selection and with the right proportions.
The feathering here is the result of the issue mentioned and linked here.
 

 

 

testEDITED.afphoto 104.14 kB · 0 downloads

And I have said a number of times, that I should not have to do something like this!

[Return]

Right.
Excuse me for giving a solution but it isn't all about you.
It is actually for development and showing them that the rectangle used in the marquee selection tool is off.
And that a plain vector rectangle is selecting correctly.
They can benefit of this conclusion to get a better approach and make sure this get's tackled and resolved.
This is to help all users so that they will not have this issue in a future build.
 

[CyberAngel]

8 minutes ago, Return said:

Right.
Sorry to give a solution but it isn't all about you.
It is actually for development to show that the rectangle used in the marquee selection tool is off.
And that a plain vector rectangle is selecting correctly.
They can benefit of this conclusion to get a better approach and make sure this get's tackled and resolved.
This is to help all users so that they will not have this issue in a future build.
 

And so does it when it is coded correctly in the first place.

[R C-R]

9 hours ago, Brian_J said:

It doesn’t matter if a layer is selected when you make the selection. It does matter if there’s no layer selected when you copy — if no layer is selected when you copy, there is no change to you’re clipboard, so you’re pasting the last thing you copied correctly. 

That's true but it still does not explain why sometimes there is feathering & sometimes not, since it should be the last thing copied that is pasted every time.

[lepr]

9 hours ago, Brian_J said:

Hopefully Serif will respond to the bug report [CyberAngel] posted and shed some light on the subject.

Well, there has been a response today. A Serif person has agreed the software is in need of improvement to resized Pixel Selection functionality. I think we would all agree to that, particularly in the cases of rectangular and elliptical selections.

Note there has been no acknowledgement of a bug. That is unsurprising since the effects of geometric transformations of a Pixel Selection (which is a raster object that is effectively the same thing as a raster mask) are clearly in complete accordance with Affinity's non-destructive geometric transformations of other raster objects such as masks and Pixel Layers.

 

 

[Old Bruce]

15 hours ago, CyberAngel said:

Before watching this, please take a moment to reread the title of this post, which clearly says that using the marquee tool for copy and paste is not consistent!

This video has proven that I can duplicate 2 of the 3 issues I have experienced, this post has shown the other via an image.

At 4:40 you say "I have literally done nothing different". Yet you have done a couple of things differently. First is that the second time through you did not have the Layer selected when you did the Control + C. So the copy is not made. The clipboard has retained the original copy you made the first time through. The second thing you did is that you had the Layer selected when you repositioned and resized the marquee.
At the 5:50 mark you say "And again it hasn't...." But once again you haven't selected the Layer. So once again you are not making a copy when you hit Control + C. At 6:35 you make a copy but this time you have selected the Layer, so the copy is made.
At 7:37 you again do a Control + C without selecting the Layer.
Starting at 7:55 you make a selection and resize it while you have the layer selected. This having the layer selected while moving and sizing the marquee is what is causing the problem. 
The inconsistencies are in the way you sometimes have the Layer Selected and sometimes you don't have the Layer selected.

To do what you want to do you need to have the Layer selected when Copying. But Not Selected when you are moving and sizing. It would also help you to have snapping on with only Force pixel alignment turned on, nothing else turned on. Under no circumstances should you have Move by whole pixels turned on while you are doing "Pixel Perfect" work.

[Return]

 

Quote

(which is a raster object that is effectively the same thing as a raster mask)

I think it is actually a vector mask.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, lepr said:

Note there has been no acknowledgement of a bug.

But neither has it been said that this is the intended behavior, which does no rule out it being a bug.

BTW, in my experiments I have been careful about not having a layer selected when transforming the marquee selection but I still get different results when I then select a layer, copy what's in the marquee, & then paste it. Sometimes it has partially transparent edges & sometimes not, even though according to the Transform panel everything is perfectly pixel aligned.

Just compare the results of my two files based on the OP's test document. In particular, in the first one there is no reason that there should be any partial transparency in the pasted layer.

[Brian_J]

18 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I still get different results when I then select a layer, copy what's in the marquee, & then paste it. Sometimes it has partially transparent edges & sometimes not

The larger the variance between the initial Marquee selection and the final selection that has been edited in the Transform panel or using Quick Mask mode, the larger the feathering. Could it be that in situations where you don't see feathering (transparent edges) the amount you transformed the selection was fairly small?

We may be talking about different issues — whether a layer is selected while making the selection has no affect on the issue I'm referring to.

[lepr]

18 hours ago, walt.farrell said:

In that case, after the marquee selection is Transformed (by the Transform panel), how would one see the effect of the changes to that transformation matrix?

I get the impression here and elsewhere that you and some other people have a mistaken idea that the marching ants in some way are the Pixel Selection. Actually, the ants are just a visualisation aid drawn in the view so you can see where a Pixel Selection exists, or more precisely, those pixels of the Pixel Selection which have a value of greater than 50%.

The Pixel Selection's transformation matrix describes the geometrical relationship of the Pixel Selection's raster grid to the document raster grid, therefore a change to that transformation matrix changes the extent of the Pixel Selection in the space of the document. The software provides us with two visualisations of the extent of the Pixel Selection: marching ants in the 'normal' view, and several choices of overlay in the view of Quick Mask mode.

The attached video has not been faked, so it either demonstrates witchcraft or shows that a Pixel Selection is a raster grid plus transformation matrix.

 

 

 

 

 

 

[R C-R]

7 minutes ago, Brian_J said:

Could it be that in situations where you don't see feathering (transparent edges) the amount you transformed the selection was fairly small?

No. As I was experimenting, I tried both large & small transforms to the marching ants selection & got different results on different tries. But the important thing to consider here is in all cases, according to the Transform panel everything involved (the marching ants selection, the layer I was copying from, & the position on the document I was pasting to) were in every case perfectly pixel aligned -- IOW, there were no fractions showing at all in the Transform panel, even when the pixel decimal places was set to 4 or more.

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, lepr said:

The Pixel Selection's transformation matrix describes the geometrical relationship of the Pixel Selection's raster grid to the document raster grid, therefore a change to that transformation matrix changes the extent of the Pixel Selection in the space of the document.

But if the pixel selection (for clarity's sake, generally referred to as the marching ants pixel selection) encloses only pixels on some selected layer that are 100% opaque, why is it that if everything is pixel aligned there is sometimes a transformation that results in partially transparent pixels when the copy from that layer is pasted, also to a pixel perfect location in the document?

[lepr]

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

But if the pixel selection (for clarity's sake, generally referred to as the marching ants pixel selection) encloses only pixels on some selected layer that are 100% opaque, why is it that if everything is pixel aligned there is sometimes a transformation that results in partially transparent pixels when the copy from that layer is pasted, also to a pixel perfect location in the document?

To ensure I (and others) do not misunderstand you, please post a document with embedded history which demonstrates an occurrence which is puzzling you.

[Brian_J]

23 minutes ago, R C-R said:

No. As I was experimenting, I tried both large & small transforms to the marching ants selection & got different results on different tries.

Interesting. I get very predictable results. We must be doing something differently.

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, lepr said:

To ensure I (and others) do not misunderstand you, please post a document with embedded history which demonstrates an occurrence which is puzzling you.

I did not include the history, but back on page 3 I included my test with added paste.afphoto file that shows lots of transparency around the edges. Compare that to my Test v3 file from this post where I got different results.

[R C-R]

3 minutes ago, Brian_J said:

Interesting. I get very predictable results. We must be doing something differently.

Do you always get partial transparency when everything is pixel perfect according to the Transform panel?

[lepr]

10 minutes ago, R C-R said:

I did not include the history, but back on page 3 I included my test with added paste.afphoto file that shows lots of transparency around the edges. Compare that to my Test v3 file from this post where I got different results.

It would really help if you create a new document with history. Would take only a couple of minutes to do that.

[R C-R]

9 minutes ago, lepr said:

It would really help if you create a new document with history. Would take only a couple of minutes to do that.

test 4.afphoto shows partial transparency in the pasted layer but I believe I was careful to keep everything pixel aligned, so I do not understand where the partial transparency is coming from or needed.

[Brian_J]

13 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Do you always get partial transparency when everything is pixel perfect according to the Transform panel?

Yes. For all the tests I've performed over the past few days, everything is pixel aligned according to the Transform panel and I get predictable results.

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, Brian_J said:

Yes. For all the tests I've performed over the past few days, everything is pixel aligned according to the Transform panel and I get predictable results.

Thanks, but not really an answer for what I was asking, which is do you always (or never?) get partial transparency even if nothing copied has any partial transparency & everything is pixel aligned?

[Brian_J]

4 minutes ago, R C-R said:

test 4.afphoto shows partial transparency in the pasted layer but I believe I was careful to keep everything pixel aligned, so I do not understand where the partial transparency is coming from or needed.

The results you get in the test 4 file is exactly what I would expect. That's the issue with copying using a selection that has been transformed.

I'd be interested to see a file that includes history where the outcome is different... i.e., there's no feathering; because I've never experienced that.