Note
Archived discussion. This page is a verbatim copy of a thread from
community.ansel.photos, the Ansel community forum, which ran from March 2023
until it was taken offline in June 2025 after the site was compromised — a counterfeit
site had been planted inside the forum software, so the whole thing had to come down.
The original address was https://community.ansel.photos/view-discussion/ctrl-key-doesn-t-work-for-selecting-shapes.
You can check this copy against the snapshot in the Internet Archive.
Answers may refer to older versions of Ansel, and image attachments did not survive the shutdown. Current discussion happens on GitHub Discussions .
Posted by koslowj on 2025-01-20.
In version 43e3443 the retouch module shows another small problem: in order to repeatedly use one of the given shapes, one is supposed to press Ctrl when selecting the shape. Presently this does not work anymore.
Replies
Aurélien Pierre — 2025-01-20
It’s not a problem, the special behaviours triggered by “silly key shortcut + mouse click” regarding masks are being removed. Since masks are supposed to be drawn, and drawing devices are Wacom tablets but not keyboards, those silly modes are migrated to a toolbar that will be clickable with a pen.
koslowj — 2025-01-21
I’m not quite convinced. General masks, OK, but having to use a Wacom tablet just for efficiently fixing some blemishes in a portrait or dust spots that require just circular shapes seems overkill. Can the user at least re-create those short-cuts?
Aurélien Pierre — 2025-01-24
Wacom tablets are only a particular kind of pointing device. Pointing devices should not require keyboard interaction for typical user events. Here, the Ctrl+click feature is well hidden to users, and is used as a workaround for lack of proper mask GUI allowing to quickly toggle ON/OFF the mask editing mode.
Retouch masks are general masks. There is only one library for all masks in the software. But the continuous editing mode is a special case inside a special case, inside generic masks. Special cases are being removed, because they are a liability (plus the code has been copy-pasted everywhere, it’s a mess).
Masks are currently being reworked entirely. See https://github.com/aurelienpierreeng/ansel/issues/418
Translated from English by : Aurélien Pierre, ChatGPT, Claude, Claude (Anthropic). In case of conflict, inconsistency or error, the English version shall prevail.