Fill with Primary Colour and Fill with Secondary Colour

[Bilbo Bowman]

Greetings, I am a longtime Adobe user who is making the shift to Affinity. While I am not nearly as fast using Affinity, things have largely gone pretty well.

I have some frustration regarding Foreground and Background Colours, and Primary Colours and Secondary Colours.

From Affinity's online documentation: 

• Primary Colour-uses the currently set foreground colour from the Colour panel.
• Second Colour-uses the currently set background colour from the Colour panel.

If I have a pixel layer targeted and I want to fill that layer with the foreground colour (AKA, the Primary Colour) I can go to Edit>Fill With Primary Colour or use the keyboard shortcut Option-Delete. When I do so, it doesn't fill with the primary colour at all, it actually fills with the background colour.

Can anyone shed some light on this behaviour? What is the purpose of having Primary Colours and Secondary Colours in addition to Foreground and Background Colours? I feel it unnecessarily complicates things.

 

[carl123]

Forget about which colour well is in front of the other
Forget all about the foreground colour and the background colour
Forget about the fact that hovering over the upper colour well says Set Foreground for the tooltip and hovering over the lower colour well says Set Background
Forget what the help file says
Forget about using logic, intuition, plain-English or how many years of experience you have or how a normal user would expect it to work

You need to learn to speak Affinity...

The upper colour well is always the Secondary colour
The lower colour well is always the Primary colour

 

 

 

[Bilbo Bowman]

Thanks, that is helpful. That's an awful lot to forget however and their own documentation needs to be both correct and clearer than it is now.

I totally disagree with introducing Primary and Secondary Colours into the mix–why complicate things? It makes more sense to stick with Foreground/Background colours and Fill/Stroke depending on what is selected and the front-most swatch is ALWAYS considered to be the foreground colour and the swatch in behind is ALWAYS considered to be the background colour. That is intuitive.

In my opinion, the user experience is every bit as important as adding new features. If Affinity are serious about pulling people away from Adobe, they need a team whose sole purpose is sanding off rough edges, simplifying concepts, and making sure sure existing tools work as advertised. If users get frustrated, they'll go right back to Adobe.

I'm not saying that they have to make Affinity work exactly like Photoshop, far from it! Affinity do some things better than Photoshop. The way Affinity's Gradient Tool works for example, is far better than Adobe's implementation. 

[R C-R]

@Bilbo Bowman, note that the help says "Second Colour," not Secondary Colour." So that is all it is, a second colour you can switch to via the X shortcut or the small switch button in the panel to make it the Primary (current) color & the other one the second (not current) one. So maybe think of the second one as a reserve or alternative color, which I think is what they intended.

And while it is not as obvious as it could be, the tooltips saying "Set Foreground" & "Set Background" just refer to which of the color wells is frontmost (in the foreground in the panel) & which one is behind it (in the background) in the panel.

7 hours ago, carl123 said:

The upper colour well is always the Secondary colour
The lower colour well is always the Primary colour

Not true. Click on the upper one to make it frontmost, or use the X shortcut or the switch button. It becomes the current (Primary) color, the one a brush paints with.

[carl123]

6 hours ago, R C-R said:

Not true. Click on the upper one to make it frontmost, or use the X shortcut or the switch button. It becomes the current (Primary) color, the one a brush paints with.

Alas, we are not talking about the brush and what it paints with

We are only talking about the menu items...

Edit > Fill with primary colour

and

Edit > Fill with secondary colour

[lepr]

7 hours ago, R C-R said:

@Bilbo Bowman, note that the help says "Second Colour," not Secondary Colour." So that is all it is, a second colour you can switch to via the X shortcut or the small switch button in the panel to make it the Primary (current) color & the other one the second (not current) one. So maybe think of the second one as a reserve or alternative color, which I think is what they intended.

 

"Second" without "ary" is a typo in that particular paragraph. No need to develop a fantasy from it.

 

Edited November 23, 2024 by lepr
added screenshot

[R C-R]

8 hours ago, lepr said:

"Second" without "ary" is a typo in that particular paragraph.

OK, but the point remains that the primary is the current color that will be used & the secondary one is a second, alternate color that you can switch to. Doing that makes it the primary. It is a useful function so I do not know why you the OP would want to eliminate it.

[lepr]

1 minute ago, R C-R said:

It is a useful function so I do not know why you would want to eliminate it.

I wrote nothing about eliminating anything. Are you feeling unwell?

[R C-R]

1 minute ago, lepr said:

I wrote nothing about eliminating anything. Are you feeling unwell?

Sorry. I meant that for the OP, not you. Fixing it now.

[Bilbo Bowman]

My apologies for the typo. I get the feeling that for some reason, you are taking this personal.

I'm only expressing my opinion on how Affinity could make the software better and easier to use which will help it gain more new users. I like the Affinity apps, I want them to improve, I want their marketshare to grow. With that said, keeping an open mind where there might possibly be ways to make improvements is a good thing and a valid discussion to have. 

My question remains… How is introducing Primary and Secondary terminology into the mix in addition to using Foreground and Background to describe the very same swatches of any actual benefit to the user? Does it make things easier? Does it allow the user to do something that it otherwise couldn't do if it stayed with the consistent terms of Foreground/Background, and Fill/Stroke like other graphics apps?

I'm not trying to be a smart-ass and it's a legitimate question, I just can't think or any advantage. 

I would respectfully argue that it takes a simple concept and makes it more complicated than it needs to be. In my opinion sticking with Foreground/Background and Fill/Stroke would be an improvement from a user experience standpoint. That's just my opinion. You may have a different opinion and that's okay me.

[R C-R]

4 hours ago, Bilbo Bowman said:

How is introducing Primary and Secondary terminology into the mix in addition to using Foreground and Background to describe the very same swatches of any actual benefit to the user? Does it make things easier?

I suspect it is just because foreground & background can refer to where items are in a photo while primary & secondary are more generic terms. But tat is just a guess.

[Bilbo Bowman]

On 11/23/2024 at 4:10 PM, R C-R said:

I suspect it is just because foreground & background can refer to where items are in a photo while primary & secondary are more generic terms. But tat is just a guess.

Could be.