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Good evening,

 

I've been struggling to find the alredy repeatedly mentioned button to convert a curve created with the pen tool into a selection. It is said that this button should be shown in the context toolbar, but I fail to find it. I've wondered if it has been removed with a previous update, since the posts I've been reading on this topic dated back to 2015.
I tried to look around in the right-click menu and other places but I did not manage to solve the problem. Please help :)

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Hi niikage,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Those buttons to convert a path to a selection or to a mask are only available in Affinity Photo (context toolbar), not Designer.

 

Hello and thank you for the welcome aswell as the quick reply  :)

So is there no way to do this in Designer?

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In Affinity Designer on Windows you can create a selection by going to the Layers panel and Ctrl-clicking on the thumbnail of a pixel layer; I presume you can do the same on a Mac by Cmd-clicking. As this only works on pixel layers, it follows that you would need to rasterize a stroke created with the Pen Tool before you could create a selection from it.

Edited by Alfred

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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Hi niikage,

In Designer just ⌘ (cmd) + click the layer's thumbnail to create a selection from it. There's no need to rasterise the layer first.

 

@Alfred

It works for all type of layers (vector, pixel layers, even groups).

 

The Ctrl + click works on all my layers, except on the curve I need.

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In Designer just ⌘ (cmd) + click the layer's thumbnail to create a selection from it. There's no need to rasterise the layer first.

 

Thanks, Miguel. That's how I thought it should work, but when I tested it before posting I didn't get the 'marching ants'. I think I must have clicked on a layer where the visibility checkbox wasn't checked.

 

By the way, marching ants don't display correctly here if I select a diamond shape. As you can see from the attached screenshot, some of the lines flash between solid and invisible instead of toggling between two dashed states.

 

post-8358-0-29702900-1485974363_thumb.png

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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As MEB has indicated, you need to have pixel data to work with, so if your other layer is a vector layer you could rasterize it (or a copy of it) and use it that way. However, if you started by creating a selection from a vector layer and your target layer is also a vector layer, you might want to investigate the 'Combine' and 'Divide' boolean operations.

Alfred spacer.png
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for Windows • Windows 10 Home/Pro
Affinity Designer/Photo/Publisher 2 for iPad • iPadOS 17.4.1 (iPad 7th gen)

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  • 1 month later...

Pen tool selection: it is my preferred way of making the basic selection...but can you tell me why the selection is bleeding both into the subject and surroundings?  The pen tool for selection is supposed to avoid this - or at least did in PS.  I have tried refine edge but to no avail.  I also did as I always do and switched into Q to paint in and out to refine (in this case the bleeding).   But I cannot fathom why I have the problem at all.  A path cannot bleed... even when converted into a selection, I guess???  Very annoying - please advise.  Thanks

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