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Crashes in color picker on 1.7.1/Select sampled color


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I used the color picker to sample a small patch (17 x 17)  of grass, then did a Select Sampled Color..., then clicked Cancel.  Here are the crash reports.

Affinity Photo_2019-08-08-125016_RRL-MacBookPro15.crash

Affinity Photo_2019-08-08-125120_RRL-MacBookPro15.crash

Affinity Photo_2019-08-08-125933_RRL-MacBookPro15.crash

I canceled because the selected stuff was not the color I had sampled.

Richard Liu

MacBook Pro 16" 2021 M1 Max | macOS 12.3.1 | BenQ SW271 | Affinity Photo 1.10.5

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I was just going to send this:  "No, sorry, I just tried on a document that I happen to have open.  I could not reproduce the crash."  Then I decided to sample a 17 x 17 px patch, and it promptly crashed when Select Sampled Color... .  Then I opened a document that I had previously saved (i. e., it isn't new) consisting of a single Background pixel layer and performed the same experiment.  Affinity Photo did not crash.

Richard Liu

MacBook Pro 16" 2021 M1 Max | macOS 12.3.1 | BenQ SW271 | Affinity Photo 1.10.5

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Here's a Quicktime screen recording using the beta:  https://drive.google.com/open?id=1B_KnZ6GP5HroqGMpWR_FxAuS1Hjzsj-N

Doesn't crash, just doesn't do what I expected.  I use the color picker to pick one pixel of a bluish color, as evidenced by the color picker in the Color panel.  When I Select Sampled Color Affinity Photo Beta selects what looks like shades of white or grey, but nothing around the selection point.  Even with a tolerance of zero I would have expected that at least the point at which the color picker was clicked appear in the selection.

Let me digress here for a moment.  In the past few days I've been under pressure to develop and edit some photos.  In my opinion, I'm not doing anything that should challenge Affinity Photo's capabilities, and I don't think I'm using any features that weren't already present in version 1.6.  Yet time and again operations have failed to work in, or even crashed, 1.7.1.  And I waste a lot of time ... using the production version.

  • If something fails to work that I have never tried before -- Affinity Photo is the first such program that I have ever used, and I've been using it for less than one year -- I initially assume that I am to blame, i. e., that the feature does not work the way I expect.  I waste a lot of time trying to get something to work that, finally I conclude, is broken, or at least worth posting in the Affinity forums.
  • In more obvious cases I don't waste a lot of time concluding that something is broken.  I waste it instead finding a solution, preferable a work around in 1.7.1, but as a last resort using the current beta.

I don't mind contributing my time to testing betas when have the time.  But I have the impression that things are broken in 1.7.1 that were not broken in 1.6, meaning that there isn't really a reliable fallback when I'm under pressure.  I understand the special challenges that the Affinity products face, particular on Apple platforms.  Apple, it seems, is always diddling with the graphics in their devices, and things that used to work in one version of macOS don't in another, or, sometimes do, only differently.  So, whereas a developer might decide only support the latest major version of macOS, a user, for the same reason, might decide to delay adopting it.  Metal, though supported in macOS 10.13 and 10.14, seems to be the cause of some problems in 1.7.  And then there are the usual requests for improving how some layers work.  Even assuming you agree, how should that be done while retaining compatibility with previous versions of the layer?  Nobody is going to thank you when he/she opens a favorite .afphoto file to find that the document look quite different, and then has to hunt down the layers responsible for the new look and tinker with their controls.

Nevertheless, I would urge you to consider not implementing any new features in 1.8 but instead increasing stability, speed, and generally getting things like printing to work as well as they should.  I believe Apple did something similar with Snow Leopard.

Richard Liu

MacBook Pro 16" 2021 M1 Max | macOS 12.3.1 | BenQ SW271 | Affinity Photo 1.10.5

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  • Staff

Thanks. That's not a bug. You're not using that tool correctly. 

To create a pixel selection from a sampled colour:
  1. Select the pixel layer containing the colour to be sampled.
  2. From the Select menu, choose Select Sampled Colour.
  3. Click on the colour to be sampled.
  4. Adjust the settings in the dialog.
  5. Click Apply.
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Thanks.  I had tried that initially, but noticed that, even before I had clicked on anything in the selected layer, a selection was already being displayed ("marching ants").  Clicking the Deselect icon didn't clear it; on the contrary, the program seemed to be cycling through selections.  I decided then that I was doing something wrong.

Now I see that, if I click anyway, it clears the selection and selects areas of the same color as the point on which I clicked.

  1. Why is it displaying a selection even before I click anywhere on the image?  I spent most of my energy trying to clear that stupid selection.
  2. Why do I not have full functionality of the color picker when selecting the color?

Surely this isn't the point of having a color picker.  The "Select Sampled Color ..." dialog should preselect the color picker, just as other dialogs (in Develop) select the gradient tool or the paint brush.  A prompt to drag it over a point of the desired color and click would also be helpful. 

Richard Liu

MacBook Pro 16" 2021 M1 Max | macOS 12.3.1 | BenQ SW271 | Affinity Photo 1.10.5

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  • Staff

This selection is created by a "filter", and you cannot deselect it. 

16 hours ago, Richard Liu said:

Why is it displaying a selection even before I click anywhere on the image?  I spent most of my energy trying to clear that stupid selection.

By default it samples white. Because of the nature of that tool, you cannot have no selection active, so it must sample something. 

16 hours ago, Richard Liu said:

A prompt to drag it over a point of the desired color and click would also be helpful. 

There is one at the bottom left of the screen. That tooltip always tells you how to use the current tool. :)

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50 minutes ago, GabrielM said:

By default it samples white. Because of the nature of that tool, you cannot have no selection active, so it must sample something. 

If I recall correctly, the cloning tool operates differently.  Even though one could argue that, by its very nature, a source must be selected, it does not just select, say, the upper right or left corner of the image, depending on the side of the road on which drivers of the locale configured in the OS drive.  If one attempts to click somewhere on the image without having used Option-Click to set a source, a very prominent warning from the Cloning Brush appears in the top right corner of the screen in addition to the still visible discrete prompt in the lower left corner.  There is nothing inherently "right" about selecting white; it would be "righter" to select the color of the color picker if one must be selected by default.

I wouldn't be making such a mountain out of this mole hill if it weren't for the fact that the behavior and even the wording in the Select drop down are so misleading that I spent lots of time trying to figure out what I was doing wrong.  After all, although the "..." in "Select Sampled Color..." indicates that I might have to do something after clicking the item, a selection immediately appeared, the Deselect did not work, and "Sampled" is, after all, past tense, so, I thought, perhaps I must first sample the color.

Richard Liu

MacBook Pro 16" 2021 M1 Max | macOS 12.3.1 | BenQ SW271 | Affinity Photo 1.10.5

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