Staff MEB Posted October 21, 2014 Staff Share Posted October 21, 2014 slv987, I'm afraid i haven't used the best words to explain it. When i said white is converted in transparent i meant visible (it's "transparent" because it lets you view what's behind it). Whereas black would be invisible because it makes everything below the mask opaque (i.e. not visible). Let me try to explain that in other words: when you create a mask you're defining the areas that will be visible and invisible. A totally white mask means everything below is visible (as if it was transparent). A totally black mask means everything below is invisible (as if it was opaque/protected/don't let you see trough). Let's forget the grayscale for a moment. So in your example the white part you're converting to a mask will make the objects below visible - that's why you see the pink color. The black "texture" present in your sample image will make everything below it invisible. That's why you don't see anything of the pink. It was blocked. Opaque here means you can't see the objects below. They have disappeared through transparency. This is how most raster software works, notably Photoshop. Try it there: - Create a new transparent document - Drag an image to the middle - Create a layer mask (Photoshop will create a white mask by default so your image will continue visible) - Pick a round brush, hardness 100%, color black and click once on the mask (basically painting a black circle on the mask) - That black circle will make that area of the image opaque/protected thus invisible for you (you will end up with a transparent hole in the image where you painted the black circle in the mask.) This is exactly how Affinity behaves now. See linked screenshot for an example. Take a look at the little masks preview in both programs in their respective layers panel... What you're looking for is slightly different i think.. Check the attached .afdesign file. Change the color of the object. Is that what you want to achieve? tiff.afdesign A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
slv987 Posted October 22, 2014 Share Posted October 22, 2014 slv987, I'm afraid i haven't used the best words to explain it. When i said white is converted in transparent i meant visible (it's "transparent" because it lets you view what's behind it). Whereas black would be invisible because it makes everything below the mask opaque (i.e. not visible). Let me try to explain that in other words: when you create a mask you're defining the areas that will be visible and invisible. A totally white mask means everything below is visible (as if it was transparent). A totally black mask means everything below is invisible (as if it was opaque/protected/don't let you see trough). Let's forget the grayscale for a moment. So in your example the white part you're converting to a mask will make the objects below visible - that's why you see the pink color. The black "texture" present in your sample image will make everything below it invisible. That's why you don't see anything of the pink. It was blocked. Opaque here means you can't see the objects below. They have disappeared through transparency. This is how most raster software works, notably Photoshop. Try it there: - Create a new transparent document - Drag an image to the middle - Create a layer mask (Photoshop will create a white mask by default so your image will continue visible) - Pick a round brush, hardness 100%, color black and click once on the mask (basically painting a black circle on the mask) - That black circle will make that area of the image opaque/protected thus invisible for you (you will end up with a transparent hole in the image where you painted the black circle in the mask.) This is exactly how Affinity behaves now. See linked screenshot for an example. Take a look at the little masks preview in both programs in their respective layers panel... What you're looking for is slightly different i think.. Check the attached .afdesign file. Change the color of the object. Is that what you want to achieve? Thank you, I guess I'm not really sure that what I'm trying to accomplish is a mask. I just thought that the Rasterize to Mask was the solution for what I was trying to do. I think your attachment is what I'm looking for but I can't figure out how to do it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Staff MEB Posted October 22, 2014 Staff Share Posted October 22, 2014 There's two situations here: 1. Convencional masks created from grayscale images (they use greyscale information to create an opacity mask) - That's what available in AD and works like in Photoshop. White becomes visible, gray becomes semi-visible, black becomes invisible. 2. 1 bit tiff images - those don't contain transparency information per si. They are just simple 2 color images: black and white (no shades of gray). If we "apply" tradicional mask logic conversion (as in point1) to a 1 bit tiff image, the white would become visible and the black would become invisible. In this particular case (1 bit tiff), there's no point in having the white as the visible part, because it usually corresponds to the background of the image. What we want is the positive part of the image (i.e. the black) as visible - because that's the actual content we want to manipulate. So when you currently use 1 bit tiff and apply the Rasterize to Mask command in AD you will end up with a negative mask - since AD is applying the same logic it uses for grayscale's images (the point 1 above). To prevent this attach an invert adjustment to the 1bit tiff first and only then Rasterize to Mask. You will end up with the result you want - that is the black is now the visible part in the opacity mask. Illustrator and Indesign speed up this process by automatically making the black part of 1 bit tiff images the visible part and the white parts transparent because that's usually how we want to use them. That's the reason why you don't need to invert the mask in those programs. What needs to be implemented in AD is that "exception": 1bit tiff images (black and white) should be automatically inverted when we perform a Raster to Mask command. Grayscale images should be treated like they are now (as described in point one). A command to invert a mask would also be helpful. Hope this make things more clear. A Guide to Learning Affinity Software | Affinity Quick Reference Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
andym Posted October 22, 2014 Share Posted October 22, 2014 Improvements / Features / Fixes - SVG clipboard support (outbound). Thanks - a handy timesaver. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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