Color picking with the brush in Affinity Photo

[Aelin]

Hi,

While using the brush tool in other applications similar to Affinity Photo I use a key to quickly color pick and then it swaps back to the brush. This is an essential part of my workflow when painting.

Is there a way to set this up on Affinity Photo? Or is the only option a 4 step process to do this?

Cheers Ben

[carl123]

When using the paint brush on an image you can use the ALT key and click anywhere on that image to switch to that colour for your brush

Is this what you mean?

[Aelin]

*Facepalm*

Yeah, that's it! Thanks, much relief.

[IsabelAracama]

4 hours ago, carl123 said:

When using the paint brush on an image you can use the ALT key and click anywhere on that image to switch to that colour for your brush

Is this what you mean?

Any clue how this is with a wacom stylus? It won't switch back to brush unless I click B on the keyboard. I can't seem to get it right and my workflow for digital painting is a workflow for digital pain. My hands end up a bit broken, really. I hope it's me not getting it yet. I'm quite new painting in APhoto and being used to photoshop, I'm getting a bit of a hard time to make it flow as I'm used to. Thanks!

[carl123]

I use a Wacom CTH680 tablet & Pen and it works fine

Are you using a stylus on some sort of touch screen?

[TRUE]

What is the key command to do this on the Mac? 

[walt.farrell]

53 minutes ago, TRUE said:

What is the key command to do this on the Mac? 

While you have the Brush Tool selected the Status bar (bottom of the Affinity Photo window) will tell you. But from the Help, it's the left-mouse button + the Alt key:
 

Quote

Press the Alt Key and holding down the left mouse button picks up a new color under the brush to paint with.

 

[TRUE]

Thanks. On the mac there doesn't seem to be an alt key and there's no left mouse button. I have fn, control, option and command with a magic mouse (no buttons). Typically I use control or option to activate a left click type function but none of those seem to work when I'm using the brush tool. I hope that helps. Looking forward to finding an answer. 

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, TRUE said:

Thanks. On the mac there doesn't seem to be an alt key and there's no left mouse button. I have fn, control, option and command with a magic mouse (no buttons). Typically I use control or option to activate a left click type function but none of those seem to work when I'm using the brush tool. I hope that helps. Looking forward to finding an answer. 

What does your Status Bar say?

For example, mine on Windows says this while I am using the Paint Brush Tool:

[TRUE]

This helped. Thank you. It's the option key on the mac. I wasn't dragging. Just hovered. Thank you again. 

[Cecil]

AP should recognize the OS and provide the correct ALT or MAC symbol, IMHO.

[TRUE]

Maybe they will. 

[walt.farrell]

47 minutes ago, Cecil said:

AP should recognize the OS and provide the correct ALT or MAC symbol, IMHO.

It would also be nice if the online Help for Photo indicated the correct key. That online Help is supposed to be valid for both Mac and Windows, but it doesn't show a difference for that function. (But since it's right for Windows, I'll probably let a Mac user report the discrepancy    If anyone wants to, it's on this page, in the section on Modifier Keys.)

[Cecil]

37 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

It would also be nice if the online Help for Photo indicated the correct key. That online Help is supposed to be valid for both Mac and Windows, but it doesn't show a difference for that function. (But since it's right for Windows, I'll probably let a Mac user report the discrepancy    If anyone wants to, it's on this page, in the section on Modifier Keys.)

Walt they should just scan the help files to ensure Mac modifier keys are used, when applicable.  No need to report each situation when, I think, they could do scan to review/change all.  This should also apply to the instructions, bottom left of page for modifier keys.

[h_d]

2 hours ago, TRUE said:

On the mac there doesn't seem to be an alt key and there's no left mouse button.

The "alt" key on a Mac is sometimes labelled as the option key, especially on more recent UK keyboards (and probably European as well - I believe it's always been "Option" on US models, but don't quote me). My 2012 MacBook Air has alt, my 2018 MacBook Pro has option. Both are UK models. So if Apple themselves aren't consistent, what hope is there for the rest of us? 

"Left-click" and "right-click" are Windows/PC-based terms. "Left-click" on a Mac equates to an ordinary single click on a standard Apple mouse or trackpad. "Right-click", or secondary click, is control-click with mouse or trackpad. With a trackpad, you can also use a double-finger click as a "right-click". These last two are defaults and can be reconfigured in System Preferences. 

As far as I can see the online Help page linked by @walt.farrell uses the modifier key symbols (⌘ for command, ^ for control and ⌥  for alt or option) rather than describing them by name:

 

And the MacOS tooltips don't use the names either:

. 

[walt.farrell]

54 minutes ago, h_d said:

As far as I can see the online Help page linked by @walt.farrell uses the modifier key symbols (⌘ for command, ^ for control and ⌥  for alt or option) rather than describing them by name:

Interesting. Here's what I see:

So they've done something to automatically show the proper keys for picking the color.

But note that it ends up showing the wrong keys on the Mac view of the page for the "(Windows)" information, and it shows the wrong keys on Windows for the "(macOS)" entries.

[h_d]

They're doing something clever with browser/OS detection. I guess if you're on a Mac you'd be less likely to take in the Windows info, and vice versa - except in the context of this thread  - so the general reader would probably not be bothered about discrepancies in the description of the "other" OS. 

[walt.farrell]

8 minutes ago, h_d said:

They're doing something clever with browser/OS detection. I guess if you're on a Mac you'd be less likely to take in the Windows info, and vice versa - except in the context of this thread  - so the general reader would probably not be bothered about discrepancies in the description of the "other" OS. 

Originally they did not have the sections tagged with (Windows) or (macOS), but now that they do their browser/OS detection is getting in the way of displaying the proper information.

[R C-R]

2 hours ago, h_d said:

The "alt" key on a Mac is sometimes labelled as the option key, especially on more recent UK keyboards (and probably European as well - I believe it's always been "Option" on US models, but don't quote me).

I use an older Apple US aluminum wired keyboard, very similar to this one, except that among other minor labeling differences the option key has "alt" in tiny letters on the top right above "option" & there is no ⌥ symbol at the top left. Some Apple & third party ones have all three labels, some just one or two.

Regardless, the status bar on Macs always displays the standard symbols Apple has used for the 4 modifier keys for decades rather than the text version, as does the built-in & online (for Macs) Keyboard Shortcuts help topic. The advantage of this are that no translations are needed for different languages & because they use just one character space more info can be shown on the status bar on narrower workspace windows.

Since all of these 17 symbols appear in any Mac app's menus that use the standard Mac OS API for menu items & have a keyboard shortcut that uses them, it is worth the effort for every Mac user to learn them -- it is not just an Affinity thing.

[h_d]

50 minutes ago, R C-R said:

The advantage of this are that no translations are needed for different languages & because they use just one character space more info can be shown on the status bar on narrower workspace windows.

Quite. But @walt.farrell is correct in pointing out that in the Windows online help, the Mac modifiers are wrong or confusing: there's one wrong symbol, specifically \ instead of ^ for control;  there's alt instead of the ⌥ symbol, which may flummox people with option on that key; and the last line uses Ctrl when it should use the ⌘ symbol or quote Command.

My point is that only a vanishingly small number of Windows users are going to bother with the MacOS shortcuts. Life's too short...

[mikerofoto]

6 hours ago, TRUE said:

Thanks. On the mac there doesn't seem to be an alt key and there's no left mouse button. I have fn, control, option and command with a magic mouse (no buttons). Typically I use control or option to activate a left click type function but none of those seem to work when I'm using the brush tool. I hope that helps. Looking forward to finding an answer. 

Go in your setting / mouse / and enable right click with your mouse. 

 

[R C-R]

10 hours ago, h_d said:

They're doing something clever with browser/OS detection.

Whatever they are doing, there must be more to it than simple browser detection. I say that because in Safari on Macs, the "Develop" menu can be enabled via a checkbox in Preferences > Advanced. One of its items is "User Agent," which allows Safari to identify itself to servers as other browsers. Among them are Microsoft Edge & Firefox & Google Chrome for Windows. But it does not matter which user agent I choose because I always get the Mac help pages with the modifier key symbols instead of the Windows text.

I wish that instead of (or in addition to) whatever 'clever' things they are doing, they gave us an option to serve either the Window or Mac versions. This would be really helpful for those of us who work only on one or the other OS & are trying to supply or quote the correct info in forum replies for each OS. It could be implemented something like language detection is now -- while it automatically serves the language version based on IP address (or whatever), we still have the option via the popup menu to get any of the other 9 supported language versions.

As for the wrong key errors, to be fair about it there are 10 language versions & apparently for at least some of the topics different ones served to Windows & Mac users, so I guess that means up to 20 versions per help topic to check for errors. Considering that there are hundreds of pages, three apps, & lots of updates to keep track of, I am surprised that what is probably a relatively small documentation staff has not let a lot more errors go unnoticed.

[Lorox]

On 8/2/2018 at 11:30 AM, IsabelAracama said:

Any clue how this is with a wacom stylus? It won't switch back to brush unless I click B on the keyboard. I can't seem to get it right and my workflow for digital painting is a workflow for digital pain. My hands end up a bit broken, really. I hope it's me not getting it yet. I'm quite new painting in APhoto and being used to photoshop, I'm getting a bit of a hard time to make it flow as I'm used to. Thanks!

Hi Isabel,

I guess this been solved meanwhile, but I just encountered the same problem (although with a cheap but usable Gaomon graphics tablet). While using the brush I was used to just hold the ALT key and click on an area on the canvas in order to pick that colour to the brush (or rather as the new current foreground colour) – that's been the way to go in Photoshop for ages...

As this didn't seem to work in Affinity Photo I was quite irritated at first but then it turned out that in Affinity Photo you have to actually (and noticeably) DRAG(click) the stylus (or the mouse) – doing a click while remaining stationary doesn't do anything.

Cheers
L.

P.S.:
Keep up those nice YouTube videos you do. These have been helping me quite a bit while getting into the Affinity apps.