The future of selections and masks in Krita

[Bart Coppens]

On Tuesday 01 August 2006 17:23, Casper Boemann wrote:
> Further we asked ourselves when do you actually want to reuse a selection
> and the answer is for protecting pixels, Cyrille said (and I follow him)
> that he often protects pixels in different layers (right now he does that
> with selection ofcourse)
I think I can agree there.

> But to me this suggests that we should take the write protecting out of
> selections and into "edit masks". Now for all intents and purposes this
> will give us exactly what boud wants but just not calling it selections,
> but "Edit masks" (or some other name if you like)
Won't that just move your 'hell' (I wouldn't call it that) from selections to 
masks? Furthermore, how would you differentiate between edit masks and a 
global selection (yeah I know, implementation detail, but still).

> This will allow us to have a single global selection (good for consistency
> with other apps) and still have all the things you want. In fact apart from
> taking the cut/copy and "source for transform" out of it, and a namechange
> it is _exactly_ what you want.
Yeah, but will the selection tools edit only the selection (like edit tool), 
and not the edit mask? Because then we'd have an extra step to take to have 
this edit mask filled with the similar color selection tool.

> Now selection (which no longer act as write protection) and is global are
> no longer needed for longer than the actual period of time. This allows us
> discard the selection when changing layer.
I'm quite sure that I actually know of a tutorial that made use of the fact 
that your selection remains after switching layers. But I can't remember what 
it did at all. Even without that, I'm not really convinced of this, though.

> Actually I want it to be so that selecting a layer (clicking in the
> layerbox) is the same as making a selection. You effectively select the
> entire layer. This also handles the ambigiouty of Select All / Deselect.
> There is no longer such thing as deselected. You have always selected
> either a layer or a subpart of a layer.
I must agree, this is an interesting reason to do it.

> Now in case the problem of loosing selection (which changing layer does) is
> too big a problem I imagine a scratchpad of masks, where selections are
> automatically stored when "loosing" them so they can be retrieved when
> needed. This would even allow several different masks (which can be
> converted into a selection) to be kept at hand.
Like I said, I really like the idea of a scratchpad in any case. This sounds 
like something most people can use.

Bart