Masking

[Alan9940]

It's kind of funny how difficult it is to learn a new photo editor after 15 years of Photoshop! :)

 

OK, let's say I create some sort of adjustment layer and want a hide all (black) mask allowing me to paint with white to reveal those parts of the layer I wish to show through... This simple thing seems more difficult than it should be in Affinity Photo or, more likely, I don't understand what I'm doing! :)

 

I created a curves adjustment layer affecting the entire image. Now, I wish to hide that layer with a mask so that I can paint back the areas I wish revealed. The only way I could find to create a hide all mask is Layer>New Empty Mask Layer. This does seem to create a hide all style mask, but it shows what looks like transparency. Yes, I can grab the brush a paint on it, but how does one see where you're painting? If you uncheck layer visibility of the mask layer, you can now see where you're painting, but the changes aren't visible to you reactivate the mask layer. Then, if you want to adjust opacity, for example, of the layer below you can't see how that masked layer relates to the entire image!

 

Is creating a hide all mask, and then painting back what you want that difficult in this software? It can't be this difficult...

 

Thanks, again, for any help provided.

 

Best regards,

AlanH

[Justin]

The empty mask layer needs to be a child of the adjustment layer, so once you have created the mask layer you need to drag it onto the adjustment layer. Probably the mask layer should be automatically created as a child of the adjustment layer, but that's not how it is at the moment.

 

EDIT: Alternatively, go to the channels panel and invert the first channel of the adjustment layer and then paint on it directly.

 

Cheers

Justin

[Alan9940]

Hello Justin,

 

No, not what I would call intuitive, but it works nonetheless! As long as I know I can do what I want and how I'm a happy camper!! :)

 

Thanks for the tip.

 

Best regards,

AlanH