Force active (foreground/background) color to be universal instead of tool-based

[M-Tee]

My workflow has me quickly alternating between the paintbucket and pixel brush tools. I frequently press X to toggle between foreground and background color, but find it annoying to toggle from one tool to another and suddenly my active color has changed as well (as active color seems to be connected to tool). Is there an option where I can disable this?

(Currently in Affinity Photo, btw)

[M-Tee]

Also, to not have it be document-based. Is there a faster way to open a second document, sample a color, and then use that color in the first document than making a swatch?

[walt.farrell]

50 minutes ago, M-Tee said:

My workflow has me quickly alternating between the paintbucket and pixel brush tools. I frequently press X to toggle between foreground and background color, but find it annoying to toggle from one tool to another and suddenly my active color has changed as well (as active color seems to be connected to tool). Is there an option where I can disable this?

I think you need to learn to switch tools, and then toggle the colors.

19 minutes ago, M-Tee said:

Is there a faster way to open a second document, sample a color, and then use that color in the first document than making a swatch?

If you sample a color in one document, and switch to another document, you should find your sampled color in the color sampler in the Color panel:

If you click on that, it should transfer to the active color well to its left, where you can use it immediately.

[M-Tee]

7 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I think you need to learn to switch tools, and then toggle the colors.

Kind of frustrating to both a) significantly increase my keystrokes for performing a task and b) maintain constant mental awareness of whether foreground or background is active at a per-tool level. 

9 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

If you sample a color in one document, and switch to another document, you should find your sampled color in the color sampler in the Color panel:

 

Thanks! 

[R C-R]

There is no option to prevent the Fill Tool from automatically switching the foreground & background colors from what they are for the paint brush immediately after using the X key toggle. This has been requested for a long time but Serif seems to think it is how it should work. Annoying, is it not?

[M-Tee]

Extremely.

I'm not realistically going to remember the current foreground/background setting for two independent tools that I'm using interchangeably.

I can't build a habit to press X every time, because it will invert desired to undesired.
I can't hold alt and sample the fresh color every time (because alt to sample works for the paintbrush, but arbitrarily not for the paint bucket.)

What I can do, is every time I swap tools, hold "I" to sample, release I, then swap tools, I guess?

Still, for something that I'm doing probably no less than 50 times a coloring session, it's quite the hassle.

[R C-R]

5 minutes ago, M-Tee said:

Still, for something that I'm doing probably no less than 50 times a coloring session, it's quite the hassle.

The only thing I can suggest is to try to use one of the tools as many times in a row before switching to the other & using that one as many times in a row as you can, but I understand this is at best a lame workaround that forces a workflow that is far from optimal & may not even be possible.

[M-Tee]

I'm literally: draw a border, (if its big enough) fill it in, draw a border, fill it in, draw a border, fill it in. Sometimes I'm doing it with color A, sometimes with color B (whatever two colors I'm delineating a border between). My only real workaround has been to stop using the paintbucket tool altogether and rely on brush thickness to fill in everything by hand.

It's frustrating because Affinity's Pixel tool is far better than Photoshop's (by allowing hard-edge pixelized access to all brushes); but its paintbucket implementation feels like a tool that's not actually intended to be used, but is kept for legacy purposes or something.