The concept of child layering is one of my favourite things about the Affinity apps so I'm glad to see a more in-depth explanation and how it relates to and differs from masking.
The subtle difference between the graduated line of the mask layer drop target vs. the solid line of the clipping drop target when positioning live filter layers is easy for a novice to miss, especially since Affinity Photo doesn't seem to provide any tooltip help for what is going on. Thank you for clearing that up.
You did your best to explain these concepts, but I regard the user interface itself as inherently confusing. The user feedback on whether he or she is about to end up with a mask layer or a clipping layer is quite subtle for a beginner to notice: little icons and horizontal dividing lines. For beginners, a better way to be sure you're getting a mask layer, not a clipping layer, is to right-click on the layer you want to act as a mask (a white circle in your case) and select "Mask to Below" from the pop-up menu. That makes the object layer a mask of the layer immediately beneath it.
Tip: If you want to move image inside the circle while it would stay in place, you need to drag circle on the icon of your image layer and check "Lock children". After that you will be free to resize and move your image layer
Masking is the same as a layer/vector mask in Ps, Child layering like shown in the first example can be used in a similar way to a clipping mask in Ps but is much more flexible IMO
Looks like there could be a bug in Photo's compositing code. Check 1:52, where the circle and the background are still white. You'll see there's a slight line in the bottom right corner. So it's appearing as if the alpha for the clipped circle is calculated, then overlayed atop the Rock Planets, then that uses the alpha again to overlay over the white background. Though there could be something else causing it, but it certainly creates an effect that suggests the Rock Planets layer's internals are not being composited correctly prior to compositing over the background. Anyway, hopefully that's enough detail to give you engineers and idea where to look to resolve this.
A group will composite as passthrough for adjustments/live filters if it does not contain any content layers (pixel/image/vector layers). When you put a content layer into a group, the group will then composite based on that content and its alpha. You can stack groups if you want to mimic PS behaviour: for example, put a group of adjustments inside another group. In that top level group, you can then put your content layers into that. The child group with the adjustments will still render independently (on layer content beneath), but it can also be above content layers in that top level group and affect them as well. When I'm back off holiday I will do a tutorial on group structures and how they function within the Affinity apps. Hope the above helps!
You did a lot of describing, but not much demonstrating! TD. You had WAY TOO MANY layers involved in order to figure out what was going on! This area of masking, and where exactly you drag items is REALLY confusing!
I congratulate you for the new tutorials where the image of the person who is explaining does not appear, since this image distracts and covers part of the program's interface. Congratulations!
I have had Affinity suite for some 5 years but am only a casual user and I feel I shall never grasp masks / clipping. EVERY YT tutorial I have watch start well with the standard 2 layer then throw a mask between them and the play time starts and all is well. Then comes the time to actually use them in the real world in your own project with many layers and that's where the nightmares start. Some masks you can get at once placed, some you placed before seem to be embedded in the layer and can't be deleted/modified the layers panel is just a juggle to use in trying move these around, sticking/jumping ending up everywhere you don't want them to be, yes, I know in this vid you made it look like there is absolutely no issue at all, but in reality and in the real world this is far from the case. I see you used a graphic circle and call it a mask ????, it's either a graphic or a mask, or can you use anything as a mask ??. I thought the layer stack was top down, but that all seems to change if more than one of the layers has a mask, have no idea if clipping ? rather than masking is supposed to do the same. I have spent countless hours playing and watching YT vids with no full and clear understanding. One example is using a mask on a Recolor layer, if the mask is edited there is no change to the area of the Recolor layer, so how then can that be a mask, or should it be clipped, or both, is that possible. I end up with some layers where the layer and mask ? are independently highlighted by clicking on either, and then other identical looking pairs where you click on any one, mask or layer and they both highlight ?, can't separate them. I really cannot get to bottom of this and the crazy thing is I use top flight 3D cad modeling design s/w regularly and have full command/confidence in what I and it will be doing. This declaration is to not show any cleverness hear, quite the opposite, it's just to show I am quite at home with a mouse and s/w but clearly a complete dunce when it comes to Affinity Photo and Layers/Masks/Clips. Can you recommend ANY source or YT video either Affinity created or user created that you can direct me to that absolutely nails this subject without leaving the little bits out that will fox you when a real project is used. Thks in advance & Kind Rgds. confused / perplexed.
This is some extremely bad UX design, and the fact that so many commenters are confused by it even after seeing a demonstration is good evidence that Affinity should rethink this.I can drag a layer onto another layer, and with the difference of just a few horizontal pixels with very subtle visual feedback, end up with essentially completely opposing results. In both instances, the layer I dragged gets nested within the parent layer and makes them nearly indistinguishable from each other except for the reversed behavior. Photoshop has had this figured out for ages. The layer on top is what you see, the layer below clips it. The entire paradigm of layers is that things are layered on top of other things, so things further up should be visible on top of things below them. Affinity Photo 2 has made layers act sort of like groups, so that masks and adjustment layers draw on top of the layer ABOVE them... sometimes. If you happened to drag them onto just the right place. It's unintuitive.
...and that thin gray line??? I never even noticed it before watching this video. Huge accessibility issue, the layers above the line behave so differently, they need to be waaay more clearly differentiated.
Serif would argue that's a feature, not a bug. Instead of explicitly declaring a layer as a mask layer, in Affinity Photo, a layer can act as an image layer, a clipping layer, or a mask layer depending on how you place it in the layer stack in the Layers panel. So you can turn a clipping layer into a mask layer (or vice versa) or turn a simple image layer into either type of layer (or vice versa) solely by manipulating the layer stack. You can even make a whole group of layers act as a mask just by dragging the group to the icon of some other layer. That's very powerful and very flexible, but you need much better user interface feedback to keep track of what's going on. Either tooltips or a ChatGPT type assistant so you could point at a layer and it would tell you how it's functioning in the layer stack
@@stevenlitvintchouk3131 the second it even occurs to someone that an app needs chat gpt integrated for the user to be able to figure out what is going on, you KNOW that's bad UX design
Most of your videos are really good. But this one just confused me even more. In the first section, when you drug the circle onto the thumbnail of other layer, you implied that the circle layer was a child when you talked about dragging that circle "out of the parent stack." In this case the circle was acting as a "mask" but, you did not show any behavior that made it appear to be a "mask" to me. It just looked like the same white circle in front of the picture. Later, when you drug the white circle onto the name of the layer with the picture you explicitly said that the white circle was now a child of the layer with the picture. You then specifically said that because the white circle was a child it was a clipping layer. In most of the English speaking world, when something is "the doing thing," it is "doing" something to something else. But, not in this case. In this case, the clipping layer is the layer being clipped by its parent layer. When you move the child layer and it cannot exist, or does not display outside of the bounds of the parent layer that means that the parent layer is doing the clipping. In addition, you say that the circle layer is the clipping layer because it is a child of the picture layer. But you also implied that it was a child of the picture layer when it was a mask! So what gives? Are you being imprecise in your language usage, or are the terms that have evolved for all of these actions, within the graphic arts software industry, just so utterly confused that they make no sense, but y'all just continue to use them as if they do make sense and as if they aren't utterly contradictory to your usage of other terms or the same terms in other situations???????
Video eine Katastrophe .... da nicht in Deutscher Sprache. Warum gibt es nicht mal einen Untertitel in mehreren Sprachen wählbar. Man zahlt Geld für Programme die man aber nicht einsetzen kann, da es keine Videos der jeweiligen Sprache zu Erklärung gibt. Hier geht es nicht un WhatsApp & Co. sondern um viele Euros und die sind einsetzbar da man es nicht versteht was gezeigt und in englisch erklärt wird. Traurig und mehr schade - dann sollte man das Geld komplett zurückzahlen. Bei mir über 400 EUR!
The concept of child layering is one of my favourite things about the Affinity apps so I'm glad to see a more in-depth explanation and how it relates to and differs from masking.
The subtle difference between the graduated line of the mask layer drop target vs. the solid line of the clipping drop target when positioning live filter layers is easy for a novice to miss, especially since Affinity Photo doesn't seem to provide any tooltip help for what is going on. Thank you for clearing that up.
You did your best to explain these concepts, but I regard the user interface itself as inherently confusing. The user feedback on whether he or she is about to end up with a mask layer or a clipping layer is quite subtle for a beginner to notice: little icons and horizontal dividing lines.
For beginners, a better way to be sure you're getting a mask layer, not a clipping layer, is to right-click on the layer you want to act as a mask (a white circle in your case) and select "Mask to Below" from the pop-up menu. That makes the object layer a mask of the layer immediately beneath it.
"inherently confusing", I'm glad I'm not alone.....
THis is sooo helpful, i continuously come back to this channel and learn something new. THanks James!
I am going to have to watch this again 2 or 3 or 5 or 6 times and do what you do to hopefully understand. I am totally confused.
Tip: If you want to move image inside the circle while it would stay in place, you need to drag circle on the icon of your image layer and check "Lock children". After that you will be free to resize and move your image layer
wow, completely new to this concept, I need to rewatch all these! Thank you very much!
I am even more confused about this than I was, so is masking actually the same as clipping in PS. Very difficult to understand this.
Masking is the same as a layer/vector mask in Ps, Child layering like shown in the first example can be used in a similar way to a clipping mask in Ps but is much more flexible IMO
this is a great technique, although can you also do that with a kbd shortcut
i like to use CMD+SHIFT+M for masking
Looks like there could be a bug in Photo's compositing code. Check 1:52, where the circle and the background are still white. You'll see there's a slight line in the bottom right corner. So it's appearing as if the alpha for the clipped circle is calculated, then overlayed atop the Rock Planets, then that uses the alpha again to overlay over the white background. Though there could be something else causing it, but it certainly creates an effect that suggests the Rock Planets layer's internals are not being composited correctly prior to compositing over the background. Anyway, hopefully that's enough detail to give you engineers and idea where to look to resolve this.
So...... It seems as if the only effective difference between clipping and making is which thing is doing the clipping and which thing is clipped.
How to make adjustment layer in a group act outside the group (like PS). ? Basic functionality for photographers
A group will composite as passthrough for adjustments/live filters if it does not contain any content layers (pixel/image/vector layers). When you put a content layer into a group, the group will then composite based on that content and its alpha.
You can stack groups if you want to mimic PS behaviour: for example, put a group of adjustments inside another group. In that top level group, you can then put your content layers into that. The child group with the adjustments will still render independently (on layer content beneath), but it can also be above content layers in that top level group and affect them as well.
When I'm back off holiday I will do a tutorial on group structures and how they function within the Affinity apps. Hope the above helps!
Clear as mud
"Dropping a layer onto the thumbnail of another layer is a masking behaviour " - this seems not true for the iPad version, is that right?
Really good tutorial. Cheers :)
This concept in AP is the most difficult. In PS its more intuitive, but I don't like adobe so that's why I'm here.
You did a lot of describing, but not much demonstrating! TD. You had WAY TOO MANY layers involved in order to figure out what was going on!
This area of masking, and where exactly you drag items is REALLY confusing!
I congratulate you for the new tutorials where the image of the person who is explaining does not appear, since this image distracts and covers part of the program's interface. Congratulations!
I have had Affinity suite for some 5 years but am only a casual user and I feel I shall never grasp masks / clipping. EVERY YT tutorial I have watch start well with the standard 2 layer then throw a mask between them and the play time starts and all is well. Then comes the time to actually use them in the real world in your own project with many layers and that's where the nightmares start. Some masks you can get at once placed, some you placed before seem to be embedded in the layer and can't be deleted/modified the layers panel is just a juggle to use in trying move these around, sticking/jumping ending up everywhere you don't want them to be, yes, I know in this vid you made it look like there is absolutely no issue at all, but in reality and in the real world this is far from the case. I see you used a graphic circle and call it a mask ????, it's either a graphic or a mask, or can you use anything as a mask ??. I thought the layer stack was top down, but that all seems to change if more than one of the layers has a mask, have no idea if clipping ? rather than masking is supposed to do the same. I have spent countless hours playing and watching YT vids with no full and clear understanding. One example is using a mask on a Recolor layer, if the mask is edited there is no change to the area of the Recolor layer, so how then can that be a mask, or should it be clipped, or both, is that possible. I end up with some layers where the layer and mask ? are independently highlighted by clicking on either, and then other identical looking pairs where you click on any one, mask or layer and they both highlight ?, can't separate them. I really cannot get to bottom of this and the crazy thing is I use top flight 3D cad modeling design s/w regularly and have full command/confidence in what I and it will be doing. This declaration is to not show any cleverness hear, quite the opposite, it's just to show I am quite at home with a mouse and s/w but clearly a complete dunce when it comes to Affinity Photo and Layers/Masks/Clips. Can you recommend ANY source or YT video either Affinity created or user created that you can direct me to that absolutely nails this subject without leaving the little bits out that will fox you when a real project is used. Thks in advance & Kind Rgds. confused / perplexed.
This is some extremely bad UX design, and the fact that so many commenters are confused by it even after seeing a demonstration is good evidence that Affinity should rethink this.I can drag a layer onto another layer, and with the difference of just a few horizontal pixels with very subtle visual feedback, end up with essentially completely opposing results. In both instances, the layer I dragged gets nested within the parent layer and makes them nearly indistinguishable from each other except for the reversed behavior.
Photoshop has had this figured out for ages. The layer on top is what you see, the layer below clips it. The entire paradigm of layers is that things are layered on top of other things, so things further up should be visible on top of things below them. Affinity Photo 2 has made layers act sort of like groups, so that masks and adjustment layers draw on top of the layer ABOVE them... sometimes. If you happened to drag them onto just the right place. It's unintuitive.
...and that thin gray line??? I never even noticed it before watching this video. Huge accessibility issue, the layers above the line behave so differently, they need to be waaay more clearly differentiated.
Serif would argue that's a feature, not a bug. Instead of explicitly declaring a layer as a mask layer, in Affinity Photo, a layer can act as an image layer, a clipping layer, or a mask layer depending on how you place it in the layer stack in the Layers panel. So you can turn a clipping layer into a mask layer (or vice versa) or turn a simple image layer into either type of layer (or vice versa) solely by manipulating the layer stack. You can even make a whole group of layers act as a mask just by dragging the group to the icon of some other layer. That's very powerful and very flexible, but you need much better user interface feedback to keep track of what's going on. Either tooltips or a ChatGPT type assistant so you could point at a layer and it would tell you how it's functioning in the layer stack
@@stevenlitvintchouk3131 the second it even occurs to someone that an app needs chat gpt integrated for the user to be able to figure out what is going on, you KNOW that's bad UX design
pfff ... am I the only one here who doesn't understand this?
Most of your videos are really good. But this one just confused me even more. In the first section, when you drug the circle onto the thumbnail of other layer, you implied that the circle layer was a child when you talked about dragging that circle "out of the parent stack." In this case the circle was acting as a "mask" but, you did not show any behavior that made it appear to be a "mask" to me. It just looked like the same white circle in front of the picture.
Later, when you drug the white circle onto the name of the layer with the picture you explicitly said that the white circle was now a child of the layer with the picture. You then specifically said that because the white circle was a child it was a clipping layer. In most of the English speaking world, when something is "the doing thing," it is "doing" something to something else. But, not in this case. In this case, the clipping layer is the layer being clipped by its parent layer. When you move the child layer and it cannot exist, or does not display outside of the bounds of the parent layer that means that the parent layer is doing the clipping. In addition, you say that the circle layer is the clipping layer because it is a child of the picture layer. But you also implied that it was a child of the picture layer when it was a mask! So what gives? Are you being imprecise in your language usage, or are the terms that have evolved for all of these actions, within the graphic arts software industry, just so utterly confused that they make no sense, but y'all just continue to use them as if they do make sense and as if they aren't utterly contradictory to your usage of other terms or the same terms in other situations???????
Video eine Katastrophe .... da nicht in Deutscher Sprache. Warum gibt es nicht mal einen Untertitel in mehreren Sprachen wählbar. Man zahlt Geld für Programme die man aber nicht einsetzen kann, da es keine Videos der jeweiligen Sprache zu Erklärung gibt. Hier geht es nicht un WhatsApp & Co. sondern um viele Euros und die sind einsetzbar da man es nicht versteht was gezeigt und in englisch erklärt wird.
Traurig und mehr schade - dann sollte man das Geld komplett zurückzahlen. Bei mir über 400 EUR!