AP: Magic wand = Flood Selection Tool?

[VectorCat]

Is the Flood selection tool AP's implementation of a magic wand tool?

 

Is there a tool which behaves a little more...magic-wandy in terms of more fine control, and less all-or-nothing selection?

 

I assume AP has its own way of selecting based on color...thanks for any tips!

 

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I may be making my own discoveries by playing with the tolerance value (which had earlier seemed sort of "all-or-nothing")

[toltec]

Yes, same thing and just as bad.

 

Use the selection brush tool in virtually every case that you would consider using the "tragic" wand. The selection brush/refine edges operation in AP is exceptionally good.

 

If you want to select a colour range use Select Sampled Colour in the Select menu. You can pick a colour and adjust the tolerance. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as good as Photoshop and you can't work on a selected area, just the whole layer. There are workarounds though.

 

There is also an option to select colours i.e. red, green or blue, select tonal range, shadows, midtones, or highlights or by alpha range (transparency).

 

I have found though that in most cases, the selection brush ends up being better. Once you have selected an area, press the "Q" and it launches into Quickmask. You can then paint on the mask to add to or take away. By the time you have fiddled around with the other options, tolerances and ranges, you could have done it with the selection brush and Quickmask. In most cases, anyway.

 

For times when the colour select is needed, like a field of red flowers you want to change to blue flowers it is better to use channels. They don't work in quite the same way as in PS but they are very powerful. 

[VectorCat]

Thanks, I'll practice with those ideas tomorrow!

[R C-R]

If you want to select a colour range use Select Sampled Colour in the Select menu. You can pick a colour and adjust the tolerance. Unfortunately, it is nowhere near as good as Photoshop and you can't work on a selected area, just the whole layer. There are workarounds though.

I am not sure what you mean by that. A selection is a selection, regardless of how it is created, so things like applying filters or adjustments, using a brush, etc. can be confined to just the selected area without affecting the rest of the layer.

[toltec]

I am not sure what you mean by that. A selection is a selection, regardless of how it is created, so things like applying filters or adjustments, using a brush, etc. can be confined to just the selected area without affecting the rest of the layer.

In PS you can roughly draw around an area and crank up the sample colour tolerance to get everything in that area without picking up every bit of red in the image, i.e. outside the selection area. I used to use that quite a bit.

 

In the pic, I drew a selection around the main flower, went to Select Sampled Colour and cranked up the tolerance to get the whole of the main flower. Photo ignored my selection and selected all the colour in the image so it got the small flower and part of the background too. PS would have just selected the bit inside the selection boundary.

 

That really limits the use of the Sampled Colour tool because it will always select too much if you use it on high tolerance settings.

 

But, as I said, there are workarounds.

[R C-R]

In the pic, I drew a selection around the main flower, went to Select Sampled Colour and cranked up the tolerance to get the whole of the main flower. Photo ignored my selection and selected all the colour in the image so it got the small flower and part of the background too.

I don't believe that is how the Select Sampled Colour menu item is intended to work in Affinity Photo. As near as I can tell, it does not have anything to do with any existing selection made with the selection tools, in the same way the Color, Tonal, & Alpha range menu selection options it is grouped with do not.

 

In other words, it is an alternative to using the selection tools, not a supplement that can be used with them. Thus, the tolerance slider affects only whatever is sampled via that menu item. The menu items are treated as a different kind of selection that are entities each unto themselves, separate & apart from the kind selection tools create.

[toltec]

I'm sure Serif would love a sale for every time they heard "in Photoshop I can"

 

It is a very useful feature though and the very first thing I missed and (I think) the only Feature Request I have requested.

 

But as I said, very easy to work around. I draw round the areas I want, duplicate the layer to place my selection only on a new layer and blast it with Sample Selected colour. That does the trick!

 

I shall have to start posting on the Adobe forum saying, "In Affinity I can" ;)