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Flood Select Tool not enabling.


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  • Staff

Hi Eyan and Welcome to the forums,

 

Unless i'm missing something, we don't have a Flood Select tool.  In Affinity Designer we have a Flood Fill tool which will work in the Pixel Persona, you just need to make sure you have the layer selected and that it's not locked.  In Affinity Photo, we have a great tool called the Flood Eraser, which will remove a shade of colour, so in this case as long as white isn't in the main image, it would remove the white background in 1 click.

 

If you can confirm which tool it is and if you are using Affinity Designer or Affinity Photo, I'll be able to give you the steps needed in order to remove the background :)

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I should have mentioned that I am trying your Affinity Photo Beta. When I mouse over the tool it shows as Flood Select Tool just bellow the Selection Brush Tool. It looks like a Magic Wand.

 

I am an angry ex CoralDraw 11 user. Many years ago they thought Mac was going nowhere so they dropped all their Mac users like a hot potato. The person or persons who made that decision are today kicking themselves in the seat every morning before their first cup of coffee. We have somehow managed to keep Coral 11 alive all this time but it has finally gotten to the point where it needs to be taken to the cemetery for a tearful goodbye and bury it. If you could somehow get the attention of the Coral Mac users you will be mending a lot of broken hearts. I found Affinity on one of the Coral "begging for Mac version" forums where a few users mentioned Affinity.

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  • Staff

Hi Eyan,

 

My mistake, I missed the Flood Fill Selection tool in Affinity Photo.  I've attached 2 screen recordings, the one shows the Flood Fill Selection and how it should work and the other shows the Flood Erase tool.  To remove the white background from the image, i would suggest giving the Flood Erase tool a go.  Once you have that tool selected, simply click on the white part of the background and you should find it gets removed.  

 

With the Flood Selection brush it will simply select the area, you would then need to hit Delete on the keyboard to remove the selection from the image.  

 

I think i speak for all of the Affinity team in saying that we are glad you have found us.  I'm sure are marketing team will have some tricks up their sleeves for getting ex Corel users over to the Affinity range :)  If you run into any more issues or still can't get the result you are after with removing the background, feel free to attach the image to a reply and i'll be happy to do a screen recording of removing the background using your image so you can see the steps needed.

 

 

 

Flood erase.mov

Flood fill select.mov

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  • Staff

Hi Eyan Page,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Can you check if the mode is set to New (or add) on the context toolbar?

If that doesn't work it would help if you can post a link to the image.

 

[EDIT]

Adding to what stoker said, you can also remove the white background going to menu Filters ▹ Colors ▹ Erase White Paper

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  • 2 months later...

The "Flood Select Tool" (which is what the Tool Tip names it), does not work on an image until I rasterize it, even though it is already "rasterized" as an image. If I use the FST once, and then click off of it, I seem to have to "rasterize" the image AGAIN to get it to get the tool to work on the image. Why is this?

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Are you talking about Affinity Photo? If you place an image in an Affinity Photo document (the label on the layers list reads “Image”), then indeed you have to rasterise the placed image to apply the Flood Select Tool (the label must read “Pixel”). But after having done so you should not have to rasterise it again … you just have to make sure that the pixel layer, you want to apply the Flood Select Tool to, is selected in the layers list. If you “click off it”, as you say, it is most likely that the layer gets deselected in the layers list …

 

Does that help?  :)

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  • 7 months later...

I was wondering if you could help me figure out what I'm doing wrong.  I'm using the beta, and I have a test image with a foreground object on a pure white background.  I want to copy just the foreground object, so I thought flood select was my best approach.  But when I try to use the flood select tool and I click on the image, nothing happens - nothign gets selected.  I've tried every permutation I think of, but it just doesn't seem to work.

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I was also hoping there would be some way to select based on a color range, but the closest match would seem to be "select-> colour range", but that only gives me three color planes, and like so many other things in Affinity Photo, I can't make it actually do anything, like it's a menu item that hasn't been implemented yet.

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My issues go deeper - even when I use the selection brush to tediously select an image (the only selection tool that seems to function in the beta), once I've completed the selection, I can't seem to actually cut and paste the object.  How in Affinity Photo does one clip out part of one photo and deposit it in another photo?  That would be a great tutorial.  Also would be good to "feather" the selection, i.e., make the alpha transparency gradually fall off.  Any help would be appreciated.  I really which flood select worked.  That would make my life much easier.

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  • Staff

Hi jdiamond,

If you try to create a selection on a Image layer and copy/paste it, it will copy the whole layer. To work at a pixel level you must first convert the Image layer (look at the label in parenthesis after the layer's name in the Layers panel) to a Pixel layer, right-clicking on it in the Layers panel and selecting Rasterise.

Same for the Flood Select Tool (make sure you're working with a Pixel layer), but in this case you can either click a colour on canvas and select a tolerance from the context toolbar or simply click and drag over the area you want to change the tolerance.

 

To feather a selection go to menu Select ▸ Feather... or Refine Edges... which has a feather slider too.

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Thank you so much for the reply. :)

 

I wonder if in the general documentation if there is a way to highlight these subtleties of basic Affinity use?  Like a basic tutorial to explain how Affinity thinks about basic operations?  Anything to make it easier for new users to assess the features of the program.  For example, there are many people waiting on my word as to what features Affiinity Photo has, and it hasn't been easy for me to determine that in a practical way.

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Hi jdiamond,

If you try to create a selection on a Image layer and copy/paste it, it will copy the whole layer. To work at a pixel level you must first convert the Image layer (look at the label in parenthesis after the layer's name in the Layers panel) to a Pixel layer, right-clicking on it in the Layers panel and selecting Rasterise.

Same for the Flood Select Tool (make sure you're working with a Pixel layer), but in this case you can either click a colour on canvas and select a tolerance from the context toolbar or simply click and drag over the area you want to change the tolerance.

 

To feather a selection go to menu Select ▸ Feather... or Refine Edges... which has a feather slider too.

This is a whole aspect of Affinity photo that I need to understand better.  I will dig in some more.  Thanks again for your assistance.  :)  I admit it's been a frustrating experience trying to figure all this out.

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This tip has really helped me a lot! :)

 

Is it a fair analogy to say that the right click->rasterize command for a layer is analogous to clicking on the check mark in Photoshop after doing an edit?

Thanks again.

 

- Jeff

 

P. S.  The other big tip that I came across was that the perspective transform is actually a "filter", which is why it was hard to find.

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  • 10 months later...

I am having problems with both the flood select and flood erase tools. I click either from the tool bar, set the tolerance, uncheck contiguous and then when I click in the selected layer nothing happens. But if I click and drag I notice the tolerance changes. I've tried many things to "defocus" the tolerance widget, including restarting the app, but no luck. This is with Affinity Photo Mac v1.5.1.

 

BTW, thanks for giving us a viable option to Photoshop! I bought it on a whim, tried it for a few simple things, and over the last year have completely converted. After an initial getting-to-know you phase it's been great. Please feel free to crank up the price 5 or 6 times, turn that into a subscription, drop customer support, release our credit card numbers to the web, bundle it with a bunch of stuff we don't want, and make it buggy. That'd be swell.

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  • Staff

Hi dgerton,

Welcome to Affinity Forums :)

Make sure you have the correct layer selected and that it's a pixel layer. You can identify which type of layer you are working with looking at the label between parenthesis after the layer's name in the Layers panel.

If it's an (Image) layer type you must convert it to a (Pixel) layer. To do it right click on the layer in the Layers panel and select Rasterise.... You can then use any pixel based tools you want like the ones you are trying.

Image layers only lets you edit them at a global level (scale, rotate, skew etc). They retain all original image data but they can't be edited at a pixel level. Pixel layers act as generic pixel containers (layers) where you can perform any pixel based operations.

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  • 1 year later...
On 6/26/2015 at 1:01 PM, Eyan Page said:

I can not get any reaction from the Flood Select tool. It is as if it has been disabled.

Trying to remove a white background from an image. 

 

Thank you.

Go to Layers Panel> Right Click the image you want your selection to happen, and then rasterize. You can now use the Flood Select Tool.

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