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Hi all!

First of all, thanks in advance for reading and helping me out, if you can. I have been using Designer for a little bit more than a year now, but I never got to use Photo a lot. I recently came back from holidays and wanted to extract a person from a picture with Affinity Photo, and I'm having trouble with something that should be super easy, and I want to understand why is this happening and how to fix it.

The problem is that after using the flood and wand selection tools, I have my desired outline selected, but when I copy and paste (cmd + c and cmd + v), the pasted image is like with a "weird opacity". I don't know how to solve or configure this, and I'm not too technical on image editing either (so apologies for the non-technical terms).

I just want a simple selection and copying/pasting whatever is inside, in full, without opacity variation and without copying things outside the outline. I also used selection refining without any good results. It ended up removing selection I wanted, adding unwanted one, even while adding with the refine brush and removing with the modifier, it did whatever it wanted, so I went manually with the wand, varying sizes and snapping configurations.

Here is an example for you to see what I'm talking about. The first one is the original image with the selection I want to copy and the second one is how it looks when I paste/mask it. If you see, the light/shadow areas are all wrong (like "low quality") and it even adds something outside the outline for whatever reason. Tried googling and searching with no solution :(

1004383529_ScreenShot2019-04-29at10_12_09AM.thumb.png.8642743f13d09cbb8a5287b4ed04c246.png

853194217_ScreenShot2019-04-29at10_12_25AM.thumb.png.a740a311cf945b2483250559d04f2d18.png

Thanks all for your help!

 

Edited by creatinglightly
Not 100% clear what app I was referring to
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I cannot explain why, but have you tried inverting the pixel selection, then just deleting the now-selected background?

John

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Well I tried it from a copy I made of your picture and it worked as expected.

Can you post the picture without the outline selected then I can show you what I mean.

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Hi creatinglightly :)

2 hours ago, creatinglightly said:

using the flood and wand selection tools, I have my desired outline selected

For the selection you're making I'd recommend using the Selection Brush Tool as using flood/wand selections will select like-pixels by colour, rather than edge detection. It looks as though the colours in the arm are close to some of the tones in the pebbles and this is my you're selection has 'mist' around it.

Try deselecting and using the Selection Brush Tool, as this will use edge detection to select the arm only :)

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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45 minutes ago, John Rostron said:

I cannot explain why, but have you tried inverting the pixel selection, then just deleting the now-selected background?

John

Thanks for replying, John. I inverted it and deleted the inverted selection, but as I expected, it deleted also things within my desired selection (that "lower opacity" part within the arm).

26 minutes ago, AffinityJules said:

Well I tried it from a copy I made of your picture and it worked as expected.

Can you post the picture without the outline selected then I can show you what I mean.

 

24 minutes ago, Dan C said:

Hi creatinglightly :)

For the selection you're making I'd recommend using the Selection Brush Tool as using flood/wand selections will select like-pixels by colour, rather than edge detection. It looks as though the colours in the arm are close to some of the tones in the pebbles and this is my you're selection has 'mist' around it.

Try deselecting and using the Selection Brush Tool, as this will use edge detection to select the arm only :)

Jules, Dan, thanks for replying. I guess I just messed up the selection by using Selection Brush Tool -> Refine (changing parameters to test, without understanding too much) -> Selection Brush Tool in add mode and that made the whole process mess up.

By doing as Dan suggested (deselecting and using the Selection Brush Tool from scratch) it appears to be working as expected.

I'm sorry about the noise, but I tried to follow the official tutorials in selection and refining and got into this problem. I believe that refining this is "easier" than refining hair, but I don't know actually how it's coded.

Just to clarify and be able to close the thread: am I correct if I think that I could "loosely" select the whole arm with the brush tool , then refine (both by just touching the refine button and applying and using the refine brush to add/remove sections with different brush sizes) and call it a day? Because that is what (I think) I've done, but the result was not the expected one.

Thanks again to all for taking the time to read and reply.

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1 minute ago, dutchshader said:

@Dan C why are there no marching ants around the selected parts outside the arm?

Yeah! That also is super weird, because I would think that the selection would copy/mask everything inside the marching ants and leave the other pixels out, but it did not and it just is weird. But I wouldn't call it a bug, but more probably a PICNIC (Problem in chair, not in computer) haha.

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1 hour ago, dutchshader said:

@Dan C why are there no marching ants around the selected parts outside the arm?

Because the marching ants only include the part of the selection where the pixels have 50% opacity or more? Pixels with lower opacity may be selected, but will be outside the marquee.

Edit: not quite right. See Alfred's post below. It's about pixels bring partially selected.

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1 minute ago, walt.farrell said:

Because the marching ants only include the part of the selection where the pixels have 50% opacity or more? Pixels with lower opacity may be selected, but will be outside the marquee.

Ok, i did not now this, but is there a reason why the marching ants behave like this?

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41 minutes ago, walt.farrell said:

Because the marching ants only include the part of the selection where the pixels have 50% opacity or more? Pixels with lower opacity may be selected, but will be outside the marquee.

It isn’t about the opacity of the selected pixels, it’s about the degree of selectedness. In the screenshot below, I set one square to 70% opacity and the other to 30% opacity. I then made a rectangular selection which I feathered by 80px: as you can see, the marching ants overlap both shapes but do not form a rectangle.FA0C279F-FAD1-4C34-BD2D-6FA8CCE3188D.thumb.jpeg.69b84c0f613bc7207d4c0b482e4254be.jpeg

In the next screenshot you can see the effect of copying and pasting the selected region.AA1347DA-5893-4B1E-B95C-A41AD2530A40.thumb.jpeg.926b4ac2e430d70eb4c262c3c23e7bb2.jpeg

The 70% opacity and 30% opacity regions are both enclosed by the selection marquee, but the extremes of the feathering (less than 50% selected) are outside the marquee.

Alfred spacer.png
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Thanks for all the answers!

I will probably have to do some homework to understand feathering and other selection settings, though! I was sure it was my problem and not the app's haha.

What I still don't get completely is the following doubt I wrote about before:

3 hours ago, creatinglightly said:

Just to clarify and be able to close the thread: am I correct if I think that I could "loosely" select the whole arm with the brush tool , then refine (both by just touching the refine button and applying and using the refine brush to add/remove sections with different brush sizes) and call it a day? Because that is what (I think) I've done, but the result was not the expected one.

Thanks!

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10 hours ago, creatinglightly said:

Just to clarify and be able to close the thread: am I correct if I think that I could "loosely" select the whole arm with the brush tool , then refine (both by just touching the refine button and applying and using the refine brush to add/remove sections with different brush sizes) and call it a day? Because that is what (I think) I've done, but the result was not the expected one.

That's certainly the workflow I'd use, to find out more about refining selections check out our following video!

 

Please Note: I am now out of the office until Tuesday 2nd April on annual leave.

If you require urgent assistance, please create a new thread and a member of our team will be sure to assist asap.

Many thanks :)

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4 hours ago, Dan C said:

That's certainly the workflow I'd use, to find out more about refining selections check out our following video!

 

Thanks! Yeah, that's the one I followed originally, but I must have messed up somewhere xD

Thank you all for the replies! I consider it a good welcome to the forums. I'll stick around. Have a great week y'all!

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