I use Animate (standard) and I love it and I love Photoshop. Something I really enjoy in Photoshop is the magic wand tool which will allow me to select a color or everything except the interior of a character and then paint just that area. For example, if I wanted to draw a bunch of green beans. I would use my brush to draw one green bean. Use the magic wand to select all the space except that green bean. Draw a few more green beans (without having to worry about the lines going through green bean number 1), etc. until I had drawn them all. If this were incorporated, I would also hope that a ‘select inverse’ feature would be added as well. The other reason I like the magic wand is that when I get to my coloring stage, I can select all the similar colors and restrict my shading or texture brush strokes to just paint within those areas of color. I know I can use effects to tone my character, but I really miss my magic wand and selection tools from Photoshop.
I just wanted to add that I love being able to work paperless. I do all my sketching in Animate with a 50% opacity brush. Then I make a separate inking layer to draw on top of that with. And I absolutely LOVE the color art sub-layer feature for coloring that inked layer. So, my comments above about the green beans apply to that 2nd step where I do the inking.
It seems to me that a magic wand tool is kind of unnecessary in a vector application, since you can select any object individually, move it up and down within the layer with other objects, clone it, etc, whereas in raster applications like Photoshop or Gimp you need a specialized tool to select an object by its color or outline to isolate it. I don’t remember the specifics (I am fairly new to Animate also), but there are coloring tools that allow you to isolate parts, using a “lazybrush” technique, repaint, etc. in ways that most raster apps can’t do.
I looked and looked for any type of color-only isolation feature but I can’t find it. Here is a simple example I would like to be able to do… Start a new document – at this point only one drawing layer should exist. Now, use the brush to paint a thin vertical line of green right next to a thin vertical line of blue. Now, paint some yellow horizontal stripes on the green line without getting any on the blue. With my current knowledge of Animate, good luck. In Photoshop, I would simply make a selection of the green line and nothing outside the selection would be effected. All the yellow stripes would stay constrained to landing in that selection. I know one way to solve this simple problem in Animate is to use two different layers for the green and blue lines and then use the repaint brush to add the yellow stripes. I do much more complex animations than this, and some type of selection masking tool would be very handy. Or, please help me find the color isolation masking feature in Animate (standard version). Still, I’d like to have a magic wand to select the exterior of the closed lines as I mentioned in the green bean example above. I imagine one reason this is not available is that there is no exterior bounding box in Animate (hence the reason we use the ‘close gap’ settings when we paint bucket areas.) I look forward to continuing to use Animate and I look forward to additional features to help those of us who have Photoshop editing techniques flowing through our veins.
I don’t have Animate so I’m not sure if it’s in it but in Animate Pro or Harmony you can select a color pot and then in the Color View Menu>Colours>Protect Colors so that when you use the Repaint or Repaint Brush tools it doesn’t affect those colors.
In Harmony you have now an invert selection. Sorry not in Animate yet.
Indeed, protecting colours will prevent you from being able to paint on them.
Then, the other thing is, if you’re drawing lines and you want to clip them on another object, you can just overdraw the lines, then you can use your Cutter tool to go back and snip the pieces inside the green bean for example.
~Lilly