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Is there a solution for the Flood Select problem where the tool selects the whole picture instead of for instance the sky...? There's a big contrast in brightness and yet Flood Select ( the magic wand) cannot find the borders.....

I bought the program this afternoon, so maybe it's my lack of understanding things...

Cheers, Willem.

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One thing you may not understand: the tool has two modes of operation.

1. If you click on the image it will choose similar colors to your click point based on the tolerance setting.

2. If you click and drag it will set the tolerance to include everything you dragged over, and then select pixels with color values within that enlarged tolerance.

-- Walt
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Thanks for your answer, walt.farrell.

No matter how I set the tolerance (or if I don't set the tolerance) wherever I click or drag on the image, the whole picture (rectangle) gets selected.
Sometimes the selection is spot on, but most of the time it isn't.

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i really believe the flood selection tool needs a lot (not a bit) of refinement and even an overhaul.
Guys (talking to Devs), at this stage you should come up with something like subject or area selection that will help us to quickly select a precise area on a picture (cloud, sky, a person etc.) with great ease and intelligently calculated by the software then we can just move on masking or deleting or simply undoing the selection (for fun).

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  • 4 weeks later...

I am new digital editing, but agree that the Flood Select Tool could be enhanced. I am taking a photo club course and ran across a problem with the homework. During class the teacher used Photoshop-Magic Wand which worked to select the sky in the attached photo, but I can't do the same with Affinity Flood Select Tool. I attached is a small section of the original photo to demonstrate. The photos have a grainy sky (I expect due to reduced size). While the Affinity Flood Select Tool seems to “find” and band all the the discontiguous sky regions, there are dark pixels on the white bands, which I’m guessing are out of tolerance. Then the marching ants border the whole picture rather than the sky regions. Admittedly the pixel values vary significantly but even raising the tolerance to 100% will select birds and bushes before all the sky pixels, per quick mask.  Thanks

Screen Shot 2018-11-16 at 10.33.02.png

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17 hours ago, BeauRX said:

I am new digital editing, but agree that the Flood Select Tool could be enhanced.

I agree that it could be enhanced/improved but I suspect that for it to be made 'smart' enough to select the desired areas of very noisy or grainy images like yours, it would mean a disproportionally large amount of Serif's limited developmental resources would have to be devoted to that project, delaying the development of other much needed improvements.

For example, I have been comparing the "Quick Select" feature of Pixelmator Pro to the Flood Select Tool of Affinity Photo. It does (usually) work better for things like this because it is based on machine learning, trained on reducing the analysis of hundreds of machine-identifiable points of similarity in 20 million (!!!) photographs into an algorithm that approximates how humans identify objects of interest in photos.

So while I don't doubt that Serif could develop something similar, it doesn't seem likely that it will happen anytime soon.

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  • 2 years later...

Hello, 

Let me start my question by stating that I have used the flood select before without these difficulties; now something is different and I hope you can help me sort it out. But first let me state how it has worked for me before: I simply took the flood select tool (working on background pixel level) , dragged it across my sky, left to right, and it did a beautiful job of differentiating the separation between the clouds and the blue sky. 

Now initially and for a very brief interval, it selects and separates clouds from blue sky (exactly as described above), but it holds very briefly. After or as the initial selection disappears, other areas are selected without any input from me, crossing the horizon line and  into the foreground selecting trees or whatever and even sometimes running to the perimeter of the photograph and selecting the full frame,  

And now I am reading online post about the process and hearing about rasercize the image and working from another layer; maybe I'm not the sharpest tack in the box but I do not recall doing that before when this process  was working. At any rate, I am here to learn and not to complain that what I am doing should be working, so please tell me as best you can what is wrong and how to redirect it?

PS: After writing the above, I have rastercized the background pixel layer and set the source to 'All Layers', and to my surprise, because it seems completely counter-intuitive, I am able to select the sky with reasonable accuracy; however when I attempt to select more clouds with a different tonal level the computer crashes or reverts to selecting unwanted areas across the horizon. 

I am running a 64 bit very clean computer that very seldom stalls, just thought I'd mention it because I just read that Affinity has had issues with flood select from their end.
Thank You and Regards -- -- Tom Hagood 

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