How can I export a circular selection?

[cajhin]

Edit: to answer my main question: I was confused because the Flood Select Tool does not work on Mask layers the way I thought.

A) flood selecting a feathered mask with 0 tolerance does include the fade out border. That makes it easy, the crop tool works etc.

B) flood selecting the black outside of a mask seems to include invisible areas outside the canvas, if the mask was moved earlier. When you invert that, you get a visible selection where you want it, and apparently some invisible selection that messes up all the snapping tools.

Bonus questions 3 and 5 are still not clear to me, but that's not important.

Have a nice day, may the infinitely finicky fairies of Affinity be kind to you

j

 

This should be an easy workflow, but 2h later I still don't get it.

The task:
I have a photo of a person, cropped to remove some background.

The face is nice. I want to make a profile picture from it.
400x400 PNG, with a feathered circle and the corners transparent.

What I have:
A round feathered mask layer on top of the pixel/image layer, face visible, and a lot of transparent area around it. Looks good.
I have an active selection that matches the round mask.

What I cannot figure out:

solved: Q1:
How do I crop the image to the selection/mask?

Thanks a lot.

 

Bonus questions, not that important:

solved: Q2:
What does 'menu > View > Snapping... > Snap to Pixel Selection Bounds' mean in plain English?
For me, it means "Snap the Crop tool to the right edge of the selection, to top edge -100px, don't snap to left and bottom bounds"

still a mystery: Q3:
What does 'menu > File > Export > (PNG), Area: Selection Area' mean?
For me, it means "Export the entire canvas including formerly cropped margins". Maybe it means "Export the selected layer"?

doesn't matter anymore: Q4:
Instead of having the mask as a top level layer (option A), I can combine it with the pixel layer, by either B) dragging it on the pixel layer thumbnail, or C) dragging it on the label ("Background"). Those are two different things, in both cases the description is "Mask" (I think B) results in a clipping mask, but I keep forgetting about it).
Question is: does the position of the mask layer in the layer stack, when everything looks the same on screen, make any difference to the exporting/cropping/selection tools?

open: Q5:
I can right click the Background layer and rasterize it (I keep forgetting I have to do this).
Why can I do this repeatedly? Shouldn't the Rasterize option be greyed out when I already rasterized it, or am I not understanding this?

solved: Q6: to select the visible area (including the feathered fade out), is there a better way than: select mask layer, flood select the outside, invert selection? Ideally, the final selection should be rectangular.

 

Open: extra Bonus question Q7:

when I move the mask layer 20px to the right to adjust the visible area, then there is a 20px unmasked border on the left.

Is there any way to either have a mask that is bigger than the cropped area, maybe infinitely large?

[Lee_T]

Hi cajhin,

Looking at your original question, you might find it's better to use the ellipse tool to draw your circle (you can use the transform tool to size it precisely), add a gaussian blur to the shape, then rasterise it. Once done, you can clip the photo to this shape, and use Clip to canvas with the circle layer to crop the document to the circle area as below:

 

Q2. Snap to pixel selection bounds will allow you to snap to an invisible box around your selection area, this includes the crop tool as shown here:

 

 

You are correct with Q3 that export selection area will export the selected layer only (not pixel selections).

Q5. It's always possible to rasterise/re-rasterise a layer.

Q7. This is a known issue.

 

Lee

[cajhin]

Thank you for the detailed reply.
That works well indeed, and it's a logical concept, easy to remember, even if it is quite different from my old "select, make mask, refine mask, select, crop".

Have a nice weekend

j

 

Proposal
The actual steps around clipping are needlessly difficult to figure out, unfortunately.
It could be much much easier if there was a new context menu entry:
  > Mask to below
  > Clip to below  *new
on the mask layer's context menu.

 

View through newcomer eyes, and why I was confused:

Mask layer is a child of the image layer, but the clipping mask layer is the parent of the image layer.

Dragging the image layer on the clipping layer has two drop targets (icon and text), but no description (e.g. status bar text) what is about to happen. There is no textual description afterwards in the layer panel ('Clip mask'), it just says 'Pixel'.

I would like to use a menu that says "clipping mask something", slow but predictable.
Help says there is "menu > Arrange > Move inside", but you have to move the Background layer on top of the clipping layer first, and I would never have guessed what it does.

It would be straight forward, and easy to figure out and memorize, IMHO, if:

1. you have layer on top of the image, to be used as a mask
2. you right click that layer
3. you choose either 'Mask to below' for a classic mask, or 'Ciip below' for a clipping mask

The 'Clip below' entry does not exist, of course.
I would have allowed me to perform the task reasonably fast, without knowing how it works beforehand.