Inpainting brush and clone brush suddenly won't work

[Mindalorian]

I think I messed up the settings some how. I can no longer use the inpainting brush to erase things or the clone brush to cover things up. I tried rasterizing the picture and tried changing the option at the top from "current level" to "current level and below" but neither of these attempts solved the problem. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. If no one knows what I should do, I'd also be grateful if someone could tell me how I could reset the entire Affinity Photo program back to their original settings.

[R C-R]

The Inpainting Brush Tool does not erase things, nor does the Clone Brush Tool.

[Ron P.]

@Mindalorian, Welcome to the forums

What are you seeing happen when you use these tools? Is it possible for you to attach a screen recording showing us?

 

@R C-R, The OP may interpret what those tools do as erasing parts of an image. FWIW, I also look at them doing that, especially the Inpainting brush. I use it to remove blemishes on faces, tree branches in landscape photos, and more. We know the tech side is, it replaces pixels with surrounding pixels, giving us the appearance of removal or erasing. Clone Tool, again uses sampled pixels from somewhere to coverup what we don't want seen. So I think it's easy for people to use erase to explain what they want done.

[R C-R]

5 hours ago, Ron P. said:

@R C-R, The OP may interpret what those tools do as erasing parts of an image.

Perhaps, but erasing & replacing are two entirely different things.

[Ron P.]

15 minutes ago, R C-R said:

Perhaps, but erasing & replacing are two entirely different things.

Perhaps, not. You replace something, with something else, directly on top, and, that bottom thing is gone, not seen anymore. So it's erased.

 

[R C-R]

3 hours ago, Ron P. said:

So it's erased.

You said it yourself: It is replaced, not erased. If it was erasing anything it would leave nothing there but that is not what it does.

[lepr]

[Mindalorian]

On 9/6/2024 at 3:15 PM, Mindalorian said:

I think I messed up the settings some how. I can no longer use the inpainting brush to erase things or the clone brush to cover things up. I tried rasterizing the picture and tried changing the option at the top from "current level" to "current level and below" but neither of these attempts solved the problem. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. If no one knows what I should do, I'd also be grateful if someone could tell me how I could reset the entire Affinity Photo program back to their original settings.

Maybe erased was a bad choice of words. I meant that they don't function as they used to. I when I use the inpainting brush and smear an orange over the element I want to conceal, it doesn't work. I see the orange line, but the element I'm trying to remove or hide remains unaffected.

[dominik]

25 minutes ago, Mindalorian said:

Maybe erased was a bad choice of words. I meant that they don't function as they used to. I when I use the inpainting brush and smear an orange over the element I want to conceal, it doesn't work. I see the orange line, but the element I'm trying to remove or hide remains unaffected.

It is hard to tell what you are doing without seeing your screen. Make sure you do not have any selection active. If you try to inpaint outside a selection it won't work. To deselect a possible selection hit CTRL+D (on Windows).

Also make sure you are on the correct layer. You can check this by looking at the layers panel. Sometimes we accidentially activate an adjustment layer and inpainting will not work there as expected.

Another reason might be that your inpainting brush is set to transparent or part of transparent. Then the effect is reduced. Check the tool bar for any settings up there.

d.