Masking areas based on lasso & pen paths

[johnsawan79]

I'm working on jewelry products. In photoshop I use to mask to remove the backgrounds (cut out) using either lasso tool or the pen tool. The usual workflow would be applying a mask to a layer, select the mask layer, make an area selection using a lasso or a pen path converting it into a selection with the specified feather radius & fill it with pure black to hide or white to reveal the masked areas. I'm not able to do that in Affinity Photo, is this possible with AP? Would really appreciate if you could kindly give an idea how to achieve this or would really appreciate adding the same feature too for easy masking of objects.

[MEB]

Hi johnsawan79,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

In Affinity Photo you can use the Pen Tool to create the path then convert it to a selection pressing the Selection button on the context toolbar. To feather it go to menu Select ▸ Feather, then click the Mask Layer button on the bottom of the Layers panel to create a mask from the current feathered selection. Alternatively, after you convert the path to a selection you can also go to menu Select ▸ Refine Edges, and set the Output dropdown on bottom to Mask, and use the Refine Selection options to work/refine the selection. 

Here's a video tutorial about Cutting Out that may also help. Additionally check the video tutorials from the section 4. Selections and Masking from the In-house Affinity Photo Video Tutorials thread.

[johnsawan79]

Hi johnsawan79,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

In Affinity Photo you can use the Pen Tool to create the path then convert it to a selection pressing the Selection button on the context toolbar. To feather it go to menu Select ▸ Feather, then click the Mask Layer button on the bottom of the Layers panel to create a mask from the current feathered selection. Alternatively, after you convert the path to a selection you can also go to menu Select ▸ Refine Edges, and set the Output dropdown on bottom to Mask, and use the Refine Selection options to work/refine the selection. 

Here's a video tutorial about Cutting Out that may also help. Additionally check the video tutorials from the section 4. Selections and Masking from the In-house Affinity Photo Video Tutorials thread.

Hi MEB, I get what you mean, but its a time consuming process having to go through several steps just to mask. I work on cut-outs particularly jewelries where I have to remove their backgrounds, in Photoshop its just a matter of applying a layer mask & hide background by defining areas using either lasso or pen tool filling it with black to hide away the unwanted portions. In Affinity photo's case its counter productive, its time consuming to go through all the several process just to get something done supposed to in a matter of 1-2 seconds.

 

The most annoying part is that the feather radius has to be re-set again & again since its not able to keep my last input values. Please also note that the masking I'm working on requires me to mask areas bit by bit as an example, like spaces between stones in a big jewelry set, opaque areas of the jewelries, hundreds sometimes thousands of them & requires precise shape selections which cannot be achieve by a selection brush tool since jewelries tends to have lots of reflection & color bleeds due to its reflective surface characteristics. I'm sure this is not just in jewelries but to anything that requires precise cutout. I hope affinity photo team will reconsider easy options for cutout like able to mask areas by just filling it with black or white either lasso or pen, also enable keeping feather radius values throughout the session. It would also be nice to have right click options for selection types specially for pen tool (i.e new, add,sub, int. also stroke, feather radius etc...) same for other tools as well. I would also like to to raise the issue regarding lasso tool where I'm not able to add selection from inside the marching ants,  I checked all the possible modifiers but none of them was able to give the results needed, subtracting from inside & out works OK though.

 

I really want to move to Affinity since Adobe is so expensive I just cant afford it and hoping affinity photo will be even better than Photoshop with the help of the all beta testers.