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Mac and Affinity noob needs help. Simple stuff...


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I feel slightly ashamed amidst all the deep and profoundly professional questions around this place, but I'm running into issues I'm not understanding. They just worked on Windows...

 

 

I'm just a casual user of photo software, making invitations for my kids birthdays that I print on photo paper, used to do some posters for my band. Nothing fancy and small files and jpg usually give a fantastic result. A friend had given me an old Photoshop version. I think it was CS3. Loved that.

 

Questions:

- I found a nice jpg of a treasure chest for my daughters pirate party. Opened that in Photo. I would like to add a parchment scroll sort of graphic, so I found a jpg of one and dragged that into the open project and it added it in its own layer. Now I can move and resize it, but I can't do anything else. The scroll needed the brown background removed. The flood select tool doesn't do anything. Painting on it creates a new layer but doesn't show. changed color, checked all opacity and it would not show. I don't see why?

 

- I tried to rasterize the scroll jpg. That gave me the opportunity to do some editing, remove the backgound. Is there another way? After I rasterize it the scroll is no longer resizable, or it will be very blotchy. Is there another way to do this? open it in another tab in Photo, delete the background and then copy it into the invite file. To be honest I never did this in PS, so I don't know if that was possible in there.

 

- I opened the scroll in another tab. flood selected with tolerance of 2 the background, it being tan brown the selection included some of the scroll itself. I inverted the selection and tried to add the outside parts to the selection with the elliptical selection tool. But it seems when over selected area it changes into a move tool and moved the selection instead of adding to it. (?). I then tried the selection brush tool that worked much better, but more like a magical wand kind of way, selecting similar pixels more than just the brushed-over bits. (?). In this case that worked fine, but how do I just paint a selection?

 

 

AND  A BIG ONE:

- How do I make effects visible!?! After removing the bg as I said above I tried to apply some glow in the layer fx and I'm not seeing anything happen. Same goes for the text I typed in another layer. Glow and such make it blend nicely and gives it a solid look, but I'm not seeing it. Checked color, opacity, overlay, size, etc.

 

- In PS I could add effects to text, see it and still edit the text afterwards. Is that possible in Photo?

 

 

Lastly: In above invitation I have a bit of text. Party details. Affinity gets really slow with editing text. Like type a letter... Wait for it... There it is.

I know Photo is not a word processor, but I have a brand new MB Pro. Medium 13" model, the 256 SSD. Shouldn't it be a bit faster? I don't remember this from my 7 (almost 8!) year old Win7 laptop (came with Vista) running either free Paint.net or PS CS3. It rendered the layer fx, smoke and glow, almost real time as well.

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Ah!

Found the fx problem. It was blend mode (default is screen, which doesn't show up on my... screen?  ?!?), combined with a very low starting setting on the glow radius. You really havee to crank that to get into visible range. Oh well. Finished the invitation. Learnt something! All good!

 

I hope the little lady likes it.

 

I am exstatic that Photo does apply fx to text! That alone is worth the entrance fee! As long as it doesn't get as expensive as PS, that is...

 

BTW! Sliders on the fx dialogs react very slowly and jarringly as well.

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Hi DutchDude,

 

I'm glad have you have resolved the issue with the FX on text and also completed your 1st project.  

 

I would suggest reading the Help topic on blend modes as it explains what each one does and makes it a little easier to understand them.  Screen will give a mixed blend of the layers on screen and as such not always show the effect you are after.  If you set the blend mode to Normal then you have full control of the FX you apply to that object and should see the results you are looking for.

 

I personally can't see an issue with the sliders on the FX dialogs, they are reacting just fine for myself.  Which effects did you apply to the text? 

 

The reason you need to rasterize the picture of the parchment scroll is because its being placed as an image layer within the program, however once you have rasterized it you can edit as normal.

 

 

If you run into any more issues, please do let us know and we will be happy to help.

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I did check the blend mode, but probably the radius was too small. I cought it later.

 

I applied only glow. just click on the slider and drag, it would often not move at all, but maybe I missed. I was looking at the picture. If it does move it lags a bit behind the cursor.
Not a problem. Just odd.

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