• Brush selection:
  
  • Is focused on paintops rather than the brushes (presets) themselves, for artists the brushes are more important
  • It takes quite a few steps to select an other preset, that could be optimized
• Assistance is totally unintuitive, without instructions from outer you won't know what that feature does.
• The Flake-Stuff is pretty useless most of the time, but tend to confuse the users (because there are a lot docks which simply make no sense to them). In my opinion most flake stuff should be simply removed. The remaining options should be put into the tool options rather than an own dock.
• Gradient and Pattern are only used by a minority of tools, as such they should be put into the options of those tools.
• Shouldn't the mirror settings be global options instead of tool options? (As it can be applied to all tools)

• Brush selection: well I personnally agree, but other disagree, I guess it is an area where we would need to do user testing
• Assistance: we talked about it on IRC, but the goal is ease of use, I would be open to suggestion that makes it easier to learn as long as the ease of use remains
• If by "flake stuff" you mean things like "stroke properties", then I also agree, that said there were talked about doing exactly that for calligra-wide
• Well gradient and pattern are not used by the "pixel brush" paintop as well, and maybe other will follow
• mirror option: so is opacity, and by global, you mean persistant when switching tools ?

• Brush selection:
  
  • Is focused on paintops rather than the brushes (presets) themselves, for artists the brushes are more important
    

You have separate button for preset selector. You can turn on show all and then the paintop is selected according the preset.

It takes quite a few steps to select an other preset, that could be optimized

Yes, any idea how?

Shouldn't the mirror settings be global options instead of tool options? (As it can be applied to all tools)

Mirror settings works only with Paint tools, tools that uses paintops. It will be removed from gradient tool and some other tool I can't remember now.

If by "flake stuff" you mean things like "stroke properties", then I also agree, that said there were talked about doing exactly that for calligra-wide

Ay, but I also mean the flake tools like "Connect shapes" or the "Gradient Editing tool". They are pretty useless, except maybe the tools to directly create an path.

It takes quite a few steps to select an other preset, that could be optimized

Yes, any idea how?

An dock containing the brush presets. Thats the way it is done in MyPaint and GIMP efficiently. And I am quite sure it would work that way in Krita, too.
I also had an idea for an more radical change in the interface but screwed it for now. (Putting the presets directly in the toolbar instead and removing the paint-op and preset-chooser. + Some little more changes)

Shouldn't the mirror settings be global options instead of tool options? (As it can be applied to all tools)

Mirror settings works only with Paint tools, tools that uses paintops. It will be removed from gradient tool and some other tool I can't remember now.

Sorry for my bad reasoning, the much better reason which I had forgotten to tell is that one usually want either everything beeing mirrored or nothing beeing mirrored. Not that the one tool does that and the other one not.

Spell wrote:

• Brush selection:
  
  • Is focused on paintops rather than the brushes (presets) themselves, for artists the brushes are more important
  • It takes quite a few steps to select an other preset, that could be optimized

I think it's quite simple to select another preset. There is a preset chooser, usually takes just to clicks to select a preset. Adam was working on a docker, so it could become just one click.

Another alternative would be to put them into the palette that you get on right click.

Spell wrote:

• The Flake-Stuff is pretty useless most of the time, but tend to confuse the users (because there are a lot docks which simply make no sense to them). In my opinion most flake stuff should be simply removed. The remaining options should be put into the tool options rather than an own dock.

I'm against removing the flake functionality. The biggest problem at the moment is that we have no way to switch between pixel and vector functions, so they are mixed a bit. Could be solved by adding workspaces.

Spell wrote:

• Gradient and Pattern are only used by a minority of tools, as such they should be put into the options of those tools.
  

Gradient and Pattern are currently used by 11 tools and also by the actions from the edit menu. Either indirect as input for the brush or directly as fill setting.

Spell wrote:

• Shouldn't the mirror settings be global options instead of tool options? (As it can be applied to all tools)

That could be a similar button as the erase mode, just with two buttons. In cases where mirror isn't supported it could be turned off.

I agree with the idea of adding (easily switchable) workspaces , like in blender, to arrange the dockers.

I've been suggesting the "Presets in a docker" idea on and off for a long time. Remember, while changing between presets may "only" be two clicks, this is an operation which artists often use with extreme frequency. It's also not just about the number of clicks themselves, but continually having to hit small spaces a long way from where your cursor is. Multiple clicks on small spaces a long distance from the cursor all adds up to a lot of slow down on the most commonly used function of the whole app: painting.

To this end, I'd recommend having a presets docker (as suggested above) with the size of the displayed previews in the docker adjustable and also having at least some (last used / favourites) in the Quick select palette.

Personally I don't see the need for completely different workspaces in Krita to account for vector stuff. Just make the paint tools be at the top of the toolbar (as they're by far the most commonly used), grey out tools that aren't currently usable (ie vector edit if you're on a paint layer) and give a tooltip to greyed out tools that explains why (ie "To use shape tools, select a shape layer in the layers docker.") Workspaces make sense in Blender where there is a much higher level of complexity and workflows that tend to be very stage oriented (ie model -> unwrap -> texture -> light -> Animate -> composite). To switch between paint and vector tools it's just overkill that slows the user down. If I'm painting and I want to draw a curve, I just want to click the "Draw shape" tool and draw, or at least click a layer, then the Draw shape tool, not click on the workspaces dropdown, then click on Shapes workspace, then click on the "Draw Shape" tool and then get to draw...

As to dropping shapes altogether, it seems to me that being able to draw and edit your own is useful, the text shapes (text / artistic text) are useful. The rest... meh. This may not fit with the rest of Calligra philosophy, but personally I would choose to drop the "Add shapes" docker and just have Text / Fancy text as tools in with the other Shapes tools. That's where people expect to find them, anyway.

One other idea that's a little more unusual, but I feel would be intuitive to users is to have paint / shape tools, when used on an incompatible layer, to simply create a new layer on top. For example:

1. The users top layer is a paint layer and the next layer is a shape one
2. User has the top (paint layer selected)
3. User wants to create a curve shape so they click the "Draw Curve" tool or whatever it's called.
4. When they click to start drawing, Krita automatically creates a shape layer on top of the layer stack and adds the curve there. Layers can always be combined later (at least they should be able to... haven't tried merging shape layers...)

For the workspaces I was more thinking about dockers than tools. There are lots of docker, but the screen space is limited.

For the tools I think that most of the flake tools are not needed anymore. For consistency it would be better to have e.g only one path tool etc.

After a text tool was added (Adam was planning to add one) you probably won't use the "Add shape" docker anymore. Unless you insist on the flower shape it might be possible to remove it

Krita already creates a new layer if you use a flake tool. Also Krita tools insert shape when working on a shape layer.

I have just enabled the preset docker.

Sweeeeeeet! It's testing time!

slangkamp wrote:I have just enabled the preset docker.

thanks..
iirc it still needs work..

Hi,
I just discovered this Preset docker, very cool!

Maybe you could add an option to see only the presets from current brush engine? Personnaly I prefer not to see the presets from other brush engines, as it's harder to navigate in it to find the preset I want. But I can understand that some people will prefer having all of them, so a switch option for this would be useful.

By default the preset docker should only show the presets for the current brush engine. There is a checkbox "show all" that shows all presets. If that doesn't work, it's a bug.

slangkamp wrote:By default the preset docker should only show the presets for the current brush engine. There is a checkbox "show all" that shows all presets. If that doesn't work, it's a bug.

I seriously don't think so, for the artists it doesn't matter which technice (paintop) the brush uses as long as the result is correct. If we really need an way to manage the brushes than we should implement some reals system for that, like the tag filter in MyPaint. Imho the paintop selection doesn't even need to be in the main-window, it would fit better in the brush options. (As the paintop is useless without the options.)

Tagging and organizing resources like brush presets is one of the google summer of code projects we're dangling in front of the student's noses. It mayn't sound as sexy as hard-core graphics coding, but if we get a good proposal for that, well, it would sure be top on my shortlist!