How to move blue box around the thing I want to move

[kylehumfeld]

I'm somewhat new to Affinity Photo, and I'm having some trouble with it. 

I copied a simple image from the web into a new document, and after some struggle, found that I needed to rasterize the pasted image to get it to be interactable by the magic wand.  Doesn't make any sense, but sure whatever, lesson learned.

Then I got rid of the part of the image I didn't want, resized the result, and copied the (now much smaller) pixels into an image I was already working on, which has a bunch of layers and various regions (it's got a bunch of sprite art on it for a 2D game I'm working on). 

The result, however, is useless.  It pasted into the top left corner of the master image, and it's got a phantom blue box around it (but not with its same dimensions, weirdly enough) that appears sometimes.  When I try to move the block of pixels around to the place I want to put it, everything outside of that phantom blue box vanishes.  I can drag it back in, and most of the time all the pixels are there, but sometimes the pixels that used to be outside of the phantom box are gone, presumably having been cropped forever.

This is incredibly frustrating - this should be a simple thing, I want to move some pixels I've pasted into a large document to the place I want them to be.  But I can't interact with the phantom blue box, and I can't move my pixels outside of that box.

I can't find anything about this on the internet, because I don't know the actual terms for any of this, as you may have gathered by now.

Any help you can offer would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

[Dan C]

Hi kylehumfeld,

Welcome to the forums

Could you please provide a screenshot or screen recording of this phantom blue box (if possible) and include your layers panel in the screenshot, with the newly pasted layer selected? This isn't something I've heard of before from your initial description!

 

[kylehumfeld]

Weird, I just tried to do it again this afternoon after putting it down overnight, and that didn't happen again.  I did manage to figure it out before stopping yesterday, though, by rasterizing the pasted layer.  That jogged it out of the state that it was in, assuming that it wasn't something weird like I pasted it into a region of a sort that I don't know about that doesn't allow pixels within it to leave it. 

There's much more about APhoto that I don't know about than that I do.  For example, it took me an hour or more yesterday to figure out that Magic Wands don't work unless you rasterize the layer you're trying to use them on, which makes zero sense, but now 'rasterize' will be my go-to first-try solution to any weirdness the program throws at me (I thought I understood what rasterization was, but this leads me to believe that that's not the case).

Thanks for the reply, maybe someone else in the future will stumble upon this and it'll help them.

[R C-R]

7 hours ago, kylehumfeld said:

For example, it took me an hour or more yesterday to figure out that Magic Wands don't work unless you rasterize the layer you're trying to use them on, which makes zero sense, but now 'rasterize' will be my go-to first-try solution to any weirdness the program throws at me (I thought I understood what rasterization was, but this leads me to believe that that's not the case).

In Affinity, there is a difference between a "(Pixel)" & an "(Image)" layer. (Pixel)" layers are already rasterized at the document's pixel resolution, as you would expect, but "(Image)" layers are a special type of layer that allows images to be placed in a document while retaining that image's native (pixel) resolution independently of the document's resolution. The second note in the Place images help topic explains more about this, but the short version is "(Image)" layers need to be rasterized (to convert them to the document's resolution) to use some tools with them.

[kylehumfeld]

Very helpful explanation, thanks for taking the time to explain it to me!