AP: Ritson Macro “Colour Ranges to Masks” – please explain

[LenC]

Or point me to some text or video. I understand and can make use of the Channels to Mask Layers macro, and I would think the Colour Ranges to Masks would do the same thing, which it doesn’t. Can someone explain the steps used in the macro and what the resulting mask is useful for? For that matter, is it possible to display the steps of a macro other than when creating one?

[firstdefence]

4 hours ago, LenC said:

is it possible to display the steps of a macro other than when creating one?

You can edit a macro by right-clicking on a macro in the library, this will open the macro for editing in the Macro Panel. Any entry with a cog to the right will invoke an option i.e. a slider to alter a setting. 

[LenC]

Thanks, I should have thought to try that. Perhaps the busy @James Ritson could say a little about my first question.

[v_kyr]

If you are looking after what Color Ranges does at all ...

• Selection by Colour Range with Affinity Photo

[LenC]

Thank you for pointing out this video at Dave Straker's InAffinity YouTube channel, previously unknown to me, which has a large number of videos that I intend to explore. As he demonstrates, the menu Select .. Colour Range .. operation selects less than the full individual color channel. Thus selecting R, G, and B "ranges" individually and adding them does not give a full RGB image. The nature of the algorithm or result is not discussed in the online help topic Selecting Colours, which discusses app user choices more than app developer ones. The related Select .. Select Sampled Colour comes with tolerance and colour model options, showing that this operation is not as precisely defined as the channel masking one.

In terms of practical image operations, I repeated the sky darkening operation I use with both a blue channel mask and with the select blues mask and found the results much more comparable than in my initial experiment that led me to the original post. No further help needed for now.