The Tutorial videos.

[Philip Thorpe]

Hello. Firstly, i wish to state that there is often a difference between a given tutorial video and practice. The tutorials give the impression that it is all so easy and straight forward. It is not.  I use a Mac with the latest update. The tutorial gave me the tip of activating my mouse to use it as a zoom incorrectly informing me that i find this under Edit-Preferences. You don't. You find it under Affinity Photo-Preferences. So it is activated but does not zoom when i scroll. Then i watched a video how by clicking on Selection Brush Tool he drew around the edge of a bird, tiny dots appearing as he made his way around. No such dots appear on my image when i click on Selection Brush Tool. So by now i am more than sceptical of the tutorial videos. My  next exercise  was quite simple. I have a photo of the moon against a black background. I want to change the background to a shade of blue. So how do i do this? Thanks for any advice. 

[firstdefence]

20 minutes ago, Philip Thorpe said:

I use a Mac with the latest update

Do you mean the Mac has the latest update or Affinity Photo has the latest update?

1. From the Layer menu, create a fill layer: Layer: New Fill Layer
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2. Change the colour of the fill to a blue of your liking, I used #000422 using the RGB Hex Slider option.
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3. In the Layers Panel I changed the Fill Layers Blend Mode to Lighter Colour.
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[Philip Thorpe]

Thanks for the explanation. The update refers actually to both. Having a break right now so i will let you know how it went.

[Dazzler]

1 hour ago, Philip Thorpe said:

... incorrectly informing me that i find this under Edit-Preferences. You don't. You find it under Affinity Photo-Preferences.

There are probably a few differences between Mac and PC. On PC it is indeed under Edit > Preferences. There are also other preferences that may have made a difference in how things are appearing. It is frustrating when you are learning this stuff, and often involves a little bit of playing around with the tools and looking in the manual.

With the selection brush you should indeed see dots (aka marching ants!) as you make the selection, however if the area that has automatically been selected as your paint the selection happens to go beyond the outside of your viewport then you may not see them. Also, check you are on the correct mode at the top where the tool options are ... you should have 'Add' depressed (darker), not 'Subtract'. Subtract is used to take away from an existing selection, so if you start with that you won't be seeing anything happen as there is no selection to take away from.
 

To remove the black background from a moon picture you can use the Selection Brush Tool, which should work nicely with a clean background, then use the selection as a mask to make the outside transparent, or firstdefence's method is a good and fast workaround where you know the colours aren't too varied. It can fall over in other situations though, so it's a good idea to persevere with learning the selection tools and they will come in handy later for other subjects where you don't have that consistency of colour in the background. You can start to see the problem on the dark side of the moon as that method actually turns the shadow into the blue colour, which may not be what you want. A third method is to draw a shape (circle in this case) over the object, get it aligned (you can turn the opacity of the shape layer down to make it more transparent so you can see it's alignment over the subject) and then convert the shape to a selection by holding CTRL (CMD on MAC) and clicking on the shape layer picture in the layers panel. That will give you a perfect circle selection that will include the shadow of the moon. Selecting the moon layer and pressing CTRL(CMD) + J will duplicate the selection area into a new layer, so you'll end up with just the moon on a layer. You can now turn off the original moon layer and you should have a moon on it's own layer with no background. You can then put whatever you like behind it on another layer.