The future of selections and masks in Krita

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Tue, 1 Aug 2006, Thomas Zander wrote:

> On Tuesday 1 August 2006 01:00, Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > * difference between masks and selections
> >
> > Actually, there is a relation: both masks and selections (and
> > adjustment layers in my original conception and other property
> > layers such as wetness, height and gravity) are byte-masks
> > that convey a certain property to certain pixels of a layer.
> 
> I'm pretty dissapointed that the nicely started thread so quickly moved 
> into a implementation discussion.

Sorry. I probably shouldn't have taken the time and energy to do a write-up
of what I have had in mind for Krita's selection/masks (whatever they should
be called, I agree with Casper that my terminology is probably confused). 
I thought that would help, instead of relying on other people telling you what
they thought I had in mind.

> There are no usecases shown where your new model has advantages,

True. Insistence on use-cases is something that seems to have happened in
the last week or so; before that, we did without. With is better, of course,
but I haven't had time to write up any use-cases.

>  you just 
> tossed out my usecases as something not relevant (I disagree).  And for 
> other usecases you immediately went into technical details without 
> looking at what people wanted to accomplish, rendering them useless.

Here I disagree: I have in every case rather carefully looked at what
was being done in the use-case, and tried to figure out why that would best
be done using the traditional model you are a proponent of, and trying to 
figure out whether that would be improved. I have not tossed anything out: I have
not said "people will never want to achieve this result". I just disagree
that it isn't possible to give people a better way to achieve that result.

> Needless to say; this will not convince me that your ideas on how to do 
> this are good for Krita and I continue thinking that your solution will 
> add mental friction which will end up hurting instead of benefitting our 
> users.

I must admit self-interest here. I may be stupid (but rule one of interaction
design is 'never make the user feel stupid'), but I have never, even with
the manual in hand, been able to use Photoshop's channels and masks. I still 
cannot figure out what masks can do. Although my Photoshop manual seems to suggest
it's more than just making parts of a layer invisible.

> > This is more or less my original conception: I think it's better than
> > anything that's currently in existence, that it can be made to work,
> > and that it's possible to create a usable user interface for it.
> 
> Interaction design comes _before_ the code is written, not after.

Yeah? I haven't been writing code for this part of Krita yet. If I had,
this discussion probably wouldn't have happened. And I haven't seen an 
interaction design for the traditional way of handling masks either.

Sometimes, an experiment, a prototype is needed because the designers don't
know what's possible and tend to go for the conservative, imitative approach.

In any case, I would be very happy if the issue of selections (global or not),
masks and related things could wait until I return from my holidays. I'm feeling
better already -- otherwise I wouldn't even try discussing this point, which
is very important to me -- and I hope I'll be able to really work on Krita when
I'm back in three weeks.


Boudewijn