This often happens to me: I am drawing for several minutes, and suddenly realize that I am drawing on wrong layer.

How can I transfer brush strokes to other layer, and avoid total redrawing and loss of time? This is quite frustrating, that computer with gigabytes of memory can't log/remember my moves and actions.
There are lot of semi-transparent pixels of brush strokes mixed with background (example: shadows/highlights on hair, anti-aliased border of line art, clouds/fog on scenery), so I can't just select strokes by color.

That's not a matter of memory -- we do actually have a strokes recorder in Krita, but of developer time. I think many people fail to realize that Krita isn't developed by dozens of full-time developers in air-conditioned offices somewhere in California, but by one full-time, one part-time developer and a bunch of awesome volunteers. What you say would be wonderful, and technically it's mostly possible already, but to make it actually work in practice needs work. My estimate would be about two months of full-time work. And that's why this feature doesn't exist yet.

Use R+Click maybe for layer select?

Hi Boudewijn,

Thank you for your explanation! (but there are also people who realize the quality of the work done with so little resources, this is really impressive!).
It seems to me that "drawing on the wrong layer" is one of the most common mistake on any painting program, it also plagues tutorials by great artists, so there should be a fairly high motivation to mitigate the problem. Worse than what was described, sometimes you realize it too late and the history cannot help you, so you close Krita hoping that you did not save while destroying some important layer.

There are many easier ways than recording strokes to alleviate this issue. Here are two ideas that seem more realistic.

The first solution would just be to commit the last (n) change of active layer to the history, each with its current snapshot of the painting.
So if you realize that you were destroying your line layer, at least you just lose your last minutes of work.

Another way is the following: every time you switch the active layer, the layer saves a copy of itself before you started modifying it. If you realize you are drawing on the wrong layer, you can either revert the state of the layer to the latest snapshot, or create a new layer from the latest snapshot.

Would one of these work?

Well, either would work, but it'd have the same problem as using undo: you cannot replay your strokes on the layer you intended to change.

boudewijn wrote:Well, either would work, but it'd have the same problem as using undo: you cannot replay your strokes on the layer you intended to change.

True, but that would already be a huge help.
Right now when that happens if no action but painting occurred, you have to try every potential action in the history trying to guess where you changed layer, which is long and painful... and in some cases, you just close Krita hoping you didn't save in between, because you're past the history limit.

At least, I wished many times this feature existed. I can't speak for all artists, but I'm pretty sure having that would already been a huge improvement other nothing at all.

Btw, even the recording feature wouldn't salvage all mistakes: every stroke that interacts with the layer would react differently when transferred on another layer; e.g. when using a smudge brush.