Help request: Editing Masks

[Dik Takken]

On Sun, 29 Jul 2007, Cyrille Berger wrote:

> Well that's how quick mask works in the gimp and photoshop as well. Unless I
> have missed something. In fact the biggest problem about intuitivity with
> masks in krita is that don't really appear in the UI. That's what we are
> working on for the next version, having mask visible in the layerbox, that
> way it will be very clear wether the mask is a children of a layer or is in
> the layer stack.

A clear graphic representation of how everything is tied together would 
certainly help :) Drag 'n drop of layers would be awsome.

>> So, how can I duplicate a selection or a mask to another layer?
> You can't yet. It's one of the biggest problem currently. The goal is to make
> it possible to easily drag and drop mask and selection in the layerbox. But
> your comments seems to indicate we are on the right track for next version ;)
> Even if that mean that currently you can't make your work correctly :(

:(((

That's a pity. I need 16-bit color depth, Cinepaint is too unstable to 
work with, DigiKam is not suitable for this kind of job, and Krita is 
still missing some key features...

I would be delighted to try Krita 2.0 once it becomes anywhere near 
usable. Nice to hear that the selection/masking features are being 
extended :)

Just some curiosity: Are selections and masks both internally 
being implemented as grayscale layers? Then you could allow the user to do 
anything with them that you could do with any other layer: Painting on it 
would result in painting a selection. Blurring would expand it. Using the 
Levels tool could make the edges of the selection more sharply defined. 
Converting between a selection layer, mask layer and a normal layer is a 
matter of changing a flag. The actual pixels can be left untouched. The 
painting of selection/mask layers can be done by a special painter, you 
could actually see the selection change in the filter previews while you 
are working on a selection layer, see the mask when working on a mask, or 
the image itself when working on a normal layer. But maybe this is all too 
'weird' and complex from a users perspective.. :)

I think hacking on Krita would be a a lot of fun, but unfortunately I have 
hardly any spare time at the moment.. :((

Cheers,

Dik