Krita UI, painting&sketching

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Monday 28 August 2006 12:24, Ilmari Heikkinen wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Bart Coppens asked me to post these to the mailing list as well, so here
> goes.

Thanks!

> Maybe I'll try doing one of those too and write down the findings :)

That would be great.

> Basic painting:
>
> [ui issues]
> - ctrl-+ & ctrl-- default zoom controls too far from usual hand
>   position. As replacement, z and shift-z would be one possibility.

We might want to add two shortcuts for zooming, since we cannot disregard the 
KDE standard shortcuts.

> - no "press down - pan around"-key (e.g. MMB in GIMP)
>   makes pan take more actions than optimal
>   ("drag with MMB" vs. "space down&up, LMB drag, space down&up.")

We might want to dedicate MMB to this, but that should be coordinated with the 
other apps in KOffice, for consistency's sake. (I tried to do what Photoshop 
did, spacebar down, LMB drag, spacebar up, but Qt fought me all the way!)

> - tool shortcuts spread all over the keyboard (instead of being in the
>   vicinity left hand home), makes head-up operation difficult (not
>   looking at kb when changing tools and navigating the image)

Good point. We just allocated the shortcuts based on a mnemonic for the name 
of the tool. Here again, I suspect we might want two shortcuts per tool: one 
for right-handed people like you, and one for left-handed people like me.

> - last used brush and blendmode not remembered on restart

That should be doable. I don't think I want to save all tool settings between 
sessions, though, we tried that years ago and it was very confusing (for us, 
that is, we didn't have real users then :-).

> - "Paint direct" somewhat confusing term, usually called "Incremental"

Done for 2.0.

> - can't do brush selection by "mouse down, move to brush, mouse up",
>   need to click outside to apply selection

Casper noted already that htis was fixed, but I see another problem: now we 
don't show the brush preview, but the name in the tiles. What we should do is 
on mouse-over change the name we already show in the header of the brush box, 
and just show the brush shape in the tiles. There's another problem with the 
current scheme, and that's in the autobrush settings, where it's hard to 
change more than one number before the popup disappears.

> - clear to bg color (backspace) doesn't work if there's no selection

Is this a safe function to enable when there isn't a selection? I'll put it on 
the todo so we can see it work.

> [enhancements]
> - default set of brushes doesn't go large enough (30, 60, 100, 150, 200,
>   300 would be nice)
>
> - selection of rectangular brushes and texture brushes lacking

Yeah, our brushes are really lacking. We're still using the old Gimp brushes 
from the nineties. One problem is that the current Adobe Photoshop brush 
format is locked, just like the latest Photoshop file format. We really could 
do with some nice brushes, either plain or animated. Maybe we can do a 
contest for a new brush set for the release of Krita 1.6 on the dot?

> - Tablet pressure curve control would be great (
>   http://www.portalgraphics.net/en/images/pro-oc4-menu02-2.gif
>   the curve control box in bottom right.)
>   It is an editable curve that maps the pressure value read from the
>   tablet (x-axis) to what is sent to the brush (y-axis.)
>   E.g. hard pencil has pressure curve like _/ (have to press hard to
>   make dark, easier to sketch), ink brush like /" (easy to make dark
>   strokes.) Most useful as per-brush setting.

I believe Bart did just that little thing for you :-). And, hey! Sudden two 
out of three paint strokes with the moubxadsqse don't work anymore :-(.

> - Another nice thing would be the ability to constrain brush movement to
>   cardinal directions / path / perspective guide by e.g. pressing down
>   shift when drawing. Use case similar to using a ruler when drawing on
>   paper.

Hm, yes, that's a nice feature request. Sounds like something for Cyrille to 
me, he's our grid (and file format) guru!

> - numbers controlling brush opacity would be nice too (1 = 10%, 2 =
>   20%, ...,  0 = 100%)

You mean as shortcuts?

> [bugs]
> - brush outline is left behind if switching tools with keyboard

Bwah, I cannot test that right now: somehow I'm not getting any outlines 
anymore.

> - at high tablet pressure and pressure controlled size, the brush grows
>   larger than the brush bitmap, which leads to pixelation.

Noted.
> Layers:
>
> - new layer button shows menu of adding different sorts of layers, but
>   layer palette has lots of free space. moving the buttons to the
>   palette would take one search+click away and make the UI more visible
>
> - creating new layer shows a layer dialog, this is needed maybe 1% of
>   the time. Better just create a new layer directly and let user summon
>   dialog afterwards if needed

I'll give both these points a try.

>   ( hmm, seems like can't change colorspace of layer after creation? )

Layer/Convert Layer type -- but that's a pretty expensive operation.

> - can't lock alpha channel of layer from editing (which makes eraser on
>   bg layer a bit useless)

Ah, you want to erase to the background color on the bg layer, right? What 
would be more useful? To be able to lock the alpha channel, or to have an 
option, erase to bg color, for the eraser paintop.

> - Adding mask to layer doesn't make any visible change to GUI, causing
>   confusion. Mask editing commands hidden in the "layer -> mask"-menu.
>   Better solution would be to have mask visible in layers-palette a la
>   GIMP, mask editing in layer context menu and "add layer mask"-button
>   in layers-palette.

Yeah, masks and their user interface were subject to rather heavy discussion 
just before I went on holiday :-). See the current implementation as 
proof-of-concept...

> Random nits:
>
> - zoom center not remembered after zooming out of image (zoom to some
>   place in a corner, zoom out to see whole image, wheel zoom back in)
>
> - wheel zoom zooms towards image center, not cursor

I think these are, implementation-wise, very related points. We'll stick them 
on the to-do.

> - splitting the view very slow for some reason

I hope that's better with KDE4, because there doesn't appear to be much that 
we can do about it right now.

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt 
http://www.valdyas.org/fading/index.cgi
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 191 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://mail.kde.org/pipermail/kimageshop/attachments/20060828/290b1ae7/attachment.pgp