Constrain Brush to Straight Line

[tcoursey]

I'm a Photoshop user, but have gotten irritated by the bogged down app for the last few years.  I found this app and am loving it so far.  Only used it for an hour but hey!

 

I'm trying to use the brush tool with SHIFT to constrain in the hor. or vert. but that apparently is for drawing a straight line from the last point the brush was.  This would be fine except to do a pure vert or hor is hard with this method.

 

Is there a key or alternative way to draw a straight line with the brush tool?  I know I could use a line tool.... *shrug*  Thanks!

[toltec]

No, it's a matter of clicking once at the start point, then shift clicking at the end point to get a straight line, but you can''t constrain it.

 

 

[tcoursey]

So how would you go about making a vertical or straight line in AP?  This seems very basic in other programs.  Maybe there is a different approach in AP?

 

Sketchbook allows a ruler that constrains in any angle, snapping at right angles etc.  Photoshop allows similar but not visual ruler...just vertical and hor plus angles (as I remember).

 

Starting in a spot and then trying to line that up to be perfectly vertical and pressing shift hoping you got it pixel perfect is not doable...

 

Hopefully this could be added in the future...

[gdenby]

Hi, tcoursey,

 

Affinity Designer has a pen tool that will draw with constraints, and/or snap to grid, object geometries, etc. The stroke can be changed to a "vector brush," instead of a pen line. Documents can be passed back and forth between Designer and Photo. At present, Photo has a pen tool, but it doesn't use the vector brushes. and the bitmap brushes can't be applied to the pen line.

 

You could also draw a thin rectangle, rotate and size it as you like, and add a bitmap fill.

[toltec]

6 hours ago, tcoursey said:

So how would you go about making a vertical or straight line in AP?  This seems very basic in other programs.  Maybe there is a different approach in AP?

 

 

You can use the Pen Tool to draw perfectly straight lines at any angle and it can be constrained to the grid. You can also modify it at any time and can be resized without loss of quality and you can size or position it using the Transform panel. It is a lot more sophisticated and versatile than a pixel brush.

 

If you want, it can be rasterised to turn it into pixel data.

 

[R C-R]

53 minutes ago, gdenby said:

At present, Photo has a pen tool, but it doesn't use the vector brushes. and the bitmap brushes can't be applied to the pen line.

But in Affinity Photo a line made with the Pen Tool in line mode can be rasterized or rasterized to a mask (available on the Layer menu). So there are several ways you can apply a pixel brush to it or a layer masked by its raster mask.

 

@toltec beat me to it!

[toltec]

Not as fast as you used to be 

 

[R C-R]

Just now, toltec said:

Not as fast as you used to be 

Who is?   

[tommy_g003]

As I just posted in a similar thread, this missing feature has put this potential customer off buying Affinity Photo, and it's a shame because I was super-excited to have found an otherwise great alternative to Photoshop.  To be clear, this needs to work like Photoshop whereby you can hold the shift key to constrain a painted line to be horizontal or vertical as you are painting it.  And no the pen tool is not a valid substitute. And no the 'shift-click-to-continue-the-previous-line' functionality is also not a substitute.

[Ron P.]

On 10/27/2018 at 9:49 AM, tommy_g003 said:

As I just posted in a similar thread, this missing feature has put this potential customer off buying Affinity Photo, and it's a shame because I was super-excited to have found an otherwise great alternative to Photoshop.  To be clear, this needs to work like Photoshop whereby you can hold the shift key to constrain a painted line to be horizontal or vertical as you are painting it.  And no the pen tool is not a valid substitute. And no the 'shift-click-to-continue-the-previous-line' functionality is also not a substitute.

Serif AP is not alone in this. It appears for now just the "high-end" programs are able to do this. Paintshop Pro does not, but PhotoPaint does. Affinity Photo is more in line with Paintshop Pro, while Photopaint, part of Coreldraw Suite, is more like PhotoShop and Illustrator.

[royalcrown28]

On 10/29/2018 at 6:46 AM, Ron P. said:

Serif AP is not alone in this. It appears for now just the "high-end" programs are able to do this. Paintshop Pro does not, but PhotoPaint does. Affinity Photo is more in line with Paintshop Pro, while Photopaint, part of Coreldraw Suite, is more like PhotoShop and Illustrator.

IDK, blackink does this, and its created by a small independent team. Their solution is actually better than photoshops bc it lets you choose which angle to lock to in addition to vert horz just by holding shift. But yeah... pen tool isn't enough for me right now... I don' just need perfectly straight lines, I need perfectly vertical lines right now, and this is a real setback not having an easy solution to achieve that. But its not like this is a "premium feature" that only top notch programs would have. Locking to x/y axis is something a freshman could implement. It just slipped under the radar when they were making this I guess. Hopefully it comes soon. Not even being able to draw my 2 point perspective grid is pretty annoying though. There isn't even a Line Tool as a fallback.

[Alfred]

1 hour ago, royalcrown28 said:

There isn't even a Line Tool as a fallback.

 

[William Overington]

On 2/9/2018 at 8:19 PM, tcoursey said:

I'm a Photoshop user, but have gotten irritated by the bogged down app for the last few years.  I found this app and am loving it so far.  Only used it for an hour but hey!

 

I'm trying to use the brush tool with SHIFT to constrain in the hor. or vert. but that apparently is for drawing a straight line from the last point the brush was.  This would be fine except to do a pure vert or hor is hard with this method.

 

Is there a key or alternative way to draw a straight line with the brush tool?  I know I could use a line tool.... *shrug*  Thanks!

Would the answer be to ask the Affinity team to add a patch to Affinity Designer such that holding down the CTRL key when using the brush will produce the result that you want?

William

 

[Triglav]

Hey, I know this is a year old topic, but I'm amazed that this hasnt been resolved already. 

The brush tool needs a angle-constrained option from the last point of last stroke; modified by ctrl key. 

Example: touch starting point; shift-ctrl to the next point; choose the snap-angle you want (I'd recommend going by 15degrees , but 45 is a must); touch end point and see a drawn line; release shift-ctrl. Voila. 

I keep trying to come back to affinity from gimp   for a year now and it amazes me that this functionality isn't programmed yet. 

Cant work without this and changing tools while drawing just to get straight lines, makes me rather use other software  

[anniefarbs]

I see these questions and answers are from 2018....so maybe with the updates it will allow me to use a tool to make a straight line..I restore old and color old photos ..sometimes houses are included in these photos with trims that need to be colored in straight lines. What is the procedure for doing this. I have looked at tutorials and holding Shift key and click does not work. Hope someone can help me. I am a new user just now getting used to doing layers..so a real newbie

 

[narrationsd]

Well, it's only in reading above that I _found_ the pen tool in Photo, which is indeed what I needed in annotating a screenshot using some lines.

What's below illustrates the frustrating results when trying to use the brush constrain. Imagine it more as actually happens in trying to do a vertical line. 

- first you figure out how the thing 'works', from an initial point

- then you make an initial point, and try to locate vertically from it, click. 

- you get a vertical all right, with a 'hook' at the top, because you weren't perfectly aligned. Or worse -- if you didn't 'clear' from an earlier attempt.

 

What could you actually do about this? Perhaps, put the pen tool just under the brush tool, so it was a bit more evident??

I'm stopping short of suggesting you import the ability from the pen tool, but you could think about it....

I've usually found things I like, Affinity now for several  years mostly replacing use of CS6, but this one, I could see being in the way of the ease that sells your efforts...