Specify selection size

[Jeff Laing]

17 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

That won't be obvious unless you tell Affinity to display it as transparent, but it will be empty nonetheless. 

How do I do that?  I can't see any option to mark the background as transparent?

I appreciate that it was my lack of experience with Affinity that had me messing with "no layer at all" - mildly surprised that "New Document" didn't give me something but that's understandable.  However, as soon as I added a Pixel Layer, I expected it to be fully populated until I added a mask or something to indicate that it was in fact sparse.

[Jeff Laing]

19 minutes ago, anon2 said:

Draw a vector Rectangle object with the required size then press cmd-enter to convert it to a vector Curve object. Position duplicates of the Curve where required. Select a Curve, activate Pen Tool (P) then click the Selection button in the context toolbar to create a pixel selection from that Curve.

Wow, I wouldn't ever have gotten there by myself.  Thanks, I'll give this a try when I get a chance.

[walt.farrell]

39 minutes ago, Jeff Laing said:

How do I do that?  I can't see any option to mark the background as transparent?

I appreciate that it was my lack of experience with Affinity that had me messing with "no layer at all" - mildly surprised that "New Document" didn't give me something but that's understandable.  However, as soon as I added a Pixel Layer, I expected it to be fully populated until I added a mask or something to indicate that it was in fact sparse.

In Photo:

In Designer or Publisher it's under File > Document Setup..., then in the Color tab.

 

[walt.farrell]

59 minutes ago, Jeff Laing said:

Start from this

Copy Merged / New from Clipboard results in this

 

Thanks. Interesting. I don't get that with my files.

I notice you said "Copy Merged". I don't think I have a Copy Merged. Did you mean "Copy Flattened"?

For me, New from Clipboard gives me a document that is exactly the size the Transform panel said. Assuming it's not a Mac problem, I wonder if it's something to do with the structure of your document.  What does the Layers panel show?

[lepr]

31 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks. Interesting. I don't get that with my files.

I notice you said "Copy Merged". I don't think I have a Copy Merged. Did you mean "Copy Flattened"?

For me, New from Clipboard gives me a document that is exactly the size the Transform panel said. Assuming it's not a Mac problem, I wonder if it's something to do with the structure of your document.  What does the Layers panel show?

I don't think you're doing the vital resizing step that produces the result that Jeff and I get. See my earlier explanation of what the software is doing (i.e. resampling the pixels of a raster object which defines the selection) when the Transform panel is used to resize a pixel selection.

[walt.farrell]

6 minutes ago, anon2 said:

I don't think you're doing the vital resizing step that produces the result that Jeff and I get.

I created a rectangular marquee selection, resized it, did Edit > Copy Flattened, then Flie > New from Clipboard. I believe that's exactly what Jeff said he did.

In any case, I don't see how your explanation would account for the width being exact, but the height being 2px larger.

[lepr]

2 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

I created a rectangular marquee selection, resized it, did Edit > Copy Flattened, then Flie > New from Clipboard. I believe that's exactly what Jeff said he did.

In any case, I don't see how your explanation would account for the width being exact, but the height being 2px larger.

If you only resize the height, the width won't be changed.

[walt.farrell]

19 minutes ago, anon2 said:

If you only resize the height, the width won't be changed.

I resized both. The new file had exactly the dimensions I specified in the Transform panel.

[Jeff Laing]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

In Photo:

In Designer or Publisher it's under File > Document Setup..., then in the Color tab.

 

I see it now - being in the Document menu, I took that as an Edit, not as a View Option. Something like "Make Background Transparent" - I expected the menu options that control visibility to be over in View and labelled "Show <something"

Anyway, I'll keep that selected from now on

[Jeff Laing]

1 hour ago, walt.farrell said:

Thanks. Interesting. I don't get that with my files.

I notice you said "Copy Merged". I don't think I have a Copy Merged. Did you mean "Copy Flattened"?

For me, New from Clipboard gives me a document that is exactly the size the Transform panel said. Assuming it's not a Mac problem, I wonder if it's something to do with the structure of your document.  What does the Layers panel show?

Maybe this is a Windows / MacOS thing?

[walt.farrell]

11 minutes ago, Jeff Laing said:

Maybe this is a Windows / MacOS thing?

I guess it must be. Thanks. (I'm assuming you're running 1.8.2; I suppose older releases might have had that worded differently.)

[walt.farrell]

53 minutes ago, anon2 said:

I don't think you're doing the vital resizing step that produces the result that Jeff and I get. See my earlier explanation of what the software is doing (i.e. resampling the pixels of a raster object which defines the selection) when the Transform panel is used to resize a pixel selection.

What I wasn't doing was using a pure pixel image.

If I make a rectangular marquee in a just-opened JPG or PNG file, resize the marquee width and height using the Transform panel, and then Edit > Copy Flattened, and then File > New from Clipboard, I get a new document that is 2px bigger in both width and height than I specified.

[lepr]

On 3/19/2020 at 11:26 PM, walt.farrell said:

What I wasn't doing was using a pure pixel image.

That shouldn't (and, for me using the Mac software, doesn't) have any bearing on the state of the re-sized pixel selection; a pixel selection is independent of objects/layers in a document.

[Jeff Laing]

16 hours ago, anon2 said:

That shouldn't (and, for me using the Mac software, doesn't) have any bearing on the state of the re-sized pixel selection; a pixel selection is independent of objects/layers in a document.

I don't think Walt is saying its not a problem, just that he didn't immediately see it when I described the symptoms and it took a while to work out what was different about us; I messaged him privately (because my "newly post limit" ran out quite quickly)

I'm not surprised that people haven't noticed it before,  I did some experimenting with lower-resolution PNGs and at times it was hard to reproduce - it was only in the images that I was actually working with for real that it manifested easily, and it could be worked around with a little care.  I think that 600DPI might aggravate it, or perhaps using a single pure pixel layer but still using "Copy Merged/Flattened" - I'm going to leave it to the experts who can look inside the software rather than try to guess.

I'm not sure if posting here counts as an official bug report or there is some other place that you go to report these sorts of issues.

[lepr]

3 hours ago, Jeff Laing said:

I don't think Walt is saying its not a problem, just that he didn't immediately see it when I described the symptoms and it took a while to work out what was different about us; I messaged him privately (because my "newly post limit" ran out quite quickly)

I'm not surprised that people haven't noticed it before,  I did some experimenting with lower-resolution PNGs and at times it was hard to reproduce - it was only in the images that I was actually working with for real that it manifested easily, and it could be worked around with a little care.  I think that 600DPI might aggravate it, or perhaps using a single pure pixel layer but still using "Copy Merged/Flattened" - I'm going to leave it to the experts who can look inside the software rather than try to guess.

I'm not sure if posting here counts as an official bug report or there is some other place that you go to report these sorts of issues.

 

I posted about this issue a year or two back. However, I deleted all my posts last year and only recently started posting again, but that's another story.

There are bug report forums at this site, but the current result of resizing a rectangular pixel selection is a consequence of the designed app behaviour rather than a bug. You could start a new thread in this feedback forum, requesting that the app use an alternative method for calculating a resized pixel selection in the special case of a rectangular selection.

 

[walt.farrell]

6 hours ago, Jeff Laing said:

I'm not sure if posting here counts as an official bug report or there is some other place that you go to report these sorts of issues.

Bug reports are made in one of the Bug Reporting forums, Jeff.

 

[MEB]

This issue is now logged. Thanks all.

[Nitin Jain]

Hi,

i haven’t read all replies but guess have the solution. Just keep the transform tab open while creating the marquee and you will be able to see the exact size of the selection

[lepr]

On 3/23/2020 at 11:53 AM, MEB said:

This issue is now logged. Thanks all.

Using AP 1.8.4, I see that selection resizing has been changed with nearest neighbour resampling now being utilised, and so selection edges do not become fuzzy. Thanks.

[Alfred]

On 3/22/2020 at 9:39 AM, anon2 said:

I deleted all my posts last year

.. removing many useful contributions in the process, and often making the affected threads hard to follow. I hope you don’t do that again!

[kassi]

I have exactly the same problem. I open a scanned image (TIF) and select a rectangle 292 x 292, then copy and New from Clipboard.

What I get is a 295 x 296 pixel image with a transparent "frame" I don't want.

I only have 1 layer and I have no idea which setting I have to change to enable "copy the selection as the selection and not as the selection plus something on top".

My first "workaround" was to not select and copy but use the crop tool, save as new, back-back-back to go back to the original image in order to extract the next piece from the scan. However this is also too annoying and time consuming, so I found one task I actually can't properly perform in Affinity and I have to go back to Photoshop to do it in an efficient way. :-(

If I wouldn't have to straighten the image due to inaccurate scan, I would use Apple Preview to extract rectangles from the image although I can't enter fixed rectangle size there.

 

[Alfred]

27 minutes ago, kassi said:

I have exactly the same problem. I open a scanned image (TIF) and select a rectangle 292 x 292, then copy and New from Clipboard.

What I get is a 295 x 296 pixel image with a transparent "frame" I don't want.

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @kassi.

It sounds as though the selection was slightly feathered. Try again, making sure that the feathering amount is set to zero.

[lepr]

On 9/6/2020 at 10:19 AM, anon2 said:

Using AP 1.8.4, I see that selection resizing has been changed with nearest neighbour resampling now being utilised, and so selection edges do not become fuzzy. Thanks.

And now in AP 1.9.x, the return of fuzzy.

[kassi]

19 hours ago, Alfred said:

Welcome to the Serif Affinity Forums, @kassi.

It sounds as though the selection was slightly feathered. Try again, making sure that the feathering amount is set to zero.

It is actually set to 0 - if you mean the value in the toolbar.

[se_]

I have the same issue on 1.9.2. The feather value seems to be ignored when a selection is transformed. It's more noticable when the pre-selection is very small and the transformation increases it substantially. I don't know if that is intended behavior, but I made a bug report.

I also agree with @HaDAk that this workflow is needlessly roundabout. I constantly have to make a bogus pre-selection and re-enter my desired selection size for every image I want to crop. And when I missclick I have to re-enter it yet again. This should be an option that can be set before doing any selecting and the set value should be stored until changed.

Edited July 18, 2021 by se_