As my copy of CS6 steadily gets older and starts getting more and more bugs that I simply cannot afford to repair (seriously who can afford to RENT photoshop?), I sought out a replacement program and Krita came highly recommended by my community.

It LOOKS pretty decent. Similar functionality to photoshop, menus in roughly the places I expected them to be..... but the tools. OH LORD the tools.

I have been staring cross-eyed at the settings menu for about an hour now and I am no closer to figuring this out than I was when I started. The tutorials seem to be written from the point of view of someone who is already familiar with everything so it was very little help. What I am trying to do is twofold.

First, I need to move some stuff in my top toolbar around. Namely, shunt the opacity and size sliders so they are visible at half-screen without having to go menu diving. I found the setting area to move stuff around but some of the things that are actually ON the toolbar are not on the list in the settings. I managed to find the gradients and patterns... the brush settings are up there and accounted for.... but the blending mode, though visible on the bar itself, are not actually in the settings menu so I can shift them over. Not to mention there is no trace of the eraser on the settings menu, though why it is in the toolbar and not in the sidebar with the brushes where it would make sense in the first place is a complete mystery to me. Also the opacity, flow and size bars appear to either not be there at all in the settings or they are labeled differently? I mean, I have a brush slider options 1 and 2... I guess those are it? I really don't know at this point. I was hoping to shuffle these toolbar things around so it would work more like the workspace I have spent years with. It's all muscle memory at this point and I feel like I am going to trash my drawing trying to remember where stuff is lol

Second, I am finding no option whatsoever to change the order of the tools in the right-hand dock. The color picker alone, I spent a while looking for until I realized it was on the top toolbar (id like to move THAT down to the bottom of the right-hand dock too if I could). Pretty much the last place I expect to find it. I love that there are so many new tools to play with, but at this rate, my commissions are going to take twice as long because I am wasting a ton of time just trying to find a specific tool. I usually have the tools I use most frequently lumped together at the top for easy access but now they are quite literally scattered not only all over the dock but apparently all over MULTIPLE docks.

I mean, I imagine over time I could memorize where things are on this if there is absolutely no option to move anything within the docks, but it would kinda suck to have to start all over again after spending so many years memorizing something different, ya know?

You were right about Brush Option Slider 1 and 2 (and also 3, which you can add from the list on the left). Those are indeed Opacity and Size (and also Flow, you can select those by pressing the tiny downwards triangle on the right end of those sliders). Move those further to the top in the list and they'll appear further to the left in the menu.

The Blending Mode dropdown is what's called "Brush Composite" in the list, so you can move that around, too.

Eraser Mode (along with alpha lock and resetting the brush preset to its pristine state) is part of the "Painter's Tools" entry.

The reason why Eraser Mode is not in the toolbox is because it's compatible with not only the brush tool. It acts much more like a composite mode/blending mode. You can use it together with Line, Polygon, Dynamic Brush, Bezier Curve etc etc tools like that. Some brush presets also give you an eraser "directly".

I'm not sure what you mean by "the right hand dock", but i assume you mean all the dockers. You can move every docker to the left, top, right, or bottom in its own place, or drop it onto another dock that's already there so it'll turn into tabs. It's important that you have Settings -> Show Docker Titlebars enabled so that you have something to actually grab. When you have that turned on, there's a little bar at the top of every docker that has a down-triangle (to hide the docker temporarily), a lock icon (to make it unmovable and unclosable), the name, a pop-out button (to turn a docker into a free-floating window), and a close button (to remove it from your current workspace).

Please also take a bit of time to explore the other dockers that are available. There's multiple color selectors, palette, histogram, channels, history of brush presets, reference image docker, grids and guides, ...

Also, in Settings -> Configure Krita -> Shortcuts you can select a photoshop-compatible keyboard shortcut scheme if you want to.

Regarding dockers and such, please also check the button at the top right, a window with a downward-pointing triangle, which will allow you to save your current setup of dockers and such under some name, and also to check out some pre-defined workspace layouts. This is also the easiest way to get at all the animation tools (so you don't have to turn all the dockers on individually)

Lastly, the right-click popup palette will show brush presets that belong to a tag that you can set by clicking the window icon at the bottom right (left of the > button). Right-clicking any brush preset in the Brush Presets docker (i recommend this over the list that you can get from the toolbar at the top) lets you manage what tags a brush preset belongs to. You can use the "new tag" thing at the bottom to create your own tag for the right-click palette, for example.

I hope that helps, and don't hesitate to ask more, but I hope you can get some more good info from the krita documentation: https://docs.krita.org/Main_Page

bah i meant left-hand dock. the one with all the brushes and lines and whatnot. (sorry im a little derp today for some reason.)

- I get that I can move the individual docs around, but is there any way to organize the icons INSIDE the docks? Like, if I want to put the multi-brush tool directly next to the normal brush tool, is there a way to do that?

- so essentially..... there is no actual eraser tool in this program? Just some sort of blending tool that can sometimes erase if you program it correctly? I saw another post saying that you had to set it to erase literally every single time you use it and that seems a little..... excessively complicated. I have no idea how to set up a brush to act like an eraser so I guess I will have to play with that and try to build my own go to eraser tool or something? Yeah, I dunno. we shall see.

- I also ran into a weird hiccup with my tablet. The icon for the cursor vanishes when I move it over the drawing area. I have to sort of guess where my cursor is. And even then, any lines I make are not visible unless I click a different layer and then click back. I'm not sure what is causing this but all my drivers are up to date and the canvas is the only area of the program where the cursor vanishes. I also noticed that clicking to turn a layer invisible doesn't seem to actually make it invisible. It's still totally there up front. Do I have to turn it invisible AND drop its opacity to 0 before the layer hides?

It does sound like you will have to disable opengl. If that fixes the display issues, please tell us exactly which brand and model your system is, which gpu you have and what the driver version is. We've seen several issues like this reported before, but none of the developers have hardware where it happens, which makes finding a workaround for buggy display drivers impossible.

You might also find this page useful: https://docs.krita.org/Introduction_to_ ... _Photoshop

aemidaniels wrote:- I get that I can move the individual docs around, but is there any way to organize the icons INSIDE the docks? Like, if I want to put the multi-brush tool directly next to the normal brush tool, is there a way to do that?

Unfortunately no. It may change in the future but now you have to get used to current order, I guess.

aemidaniels wrote:- so essentially..... there is no actual eraser tool in this program? Just some sort of blending tool that can sometimes erase if you program it correctly? I saw another post saying that you had to set it to erase literally every single time you use it and that seems a little..... excessively complicated. I have no idea how to set up a brush to act like an eraser so I guess I will have to play with that and try to build my own go to eraser tool or something? Yeah, I dunno. we shall see.

Yes, there is no eraser tool. But there is eraser mode (which is actually just another blending mode). Just hit "E" and you current brush will act like an eraser, then hit "E" again and it will paint (much more comfortable than PS eraser tool, imho). Some brushes works in eraser mode by default.
Also there is a way to make it more handy. First set "Temporally save tweaks..." in the brush settings. Then find "Switch to previous preset" button in the hotkeys settings and set something more comfortable for you (I use "F" key). And now select brush preset and then preset for erase, "F" key will toggle between these two presets. I find this button extremely useful if many situations, I wish more programs have something like that.

aemidaniels wrote:- I also ran into a weird hiccup with my tablet. The icon for the cursor vanishes when I move it over the drawing area. I have to sort of guess where my cursor is. And even then, any lines I make are not visible unless I click a different layer and then click back. I'm not sure what is causing this but all my drivers are up to date and the canvas is the only area of the program where the cursor vanishes. I also noticed that clicking to turn a layer invisible doesn't seem to actually make it invisible. It's still totally there up front. Do I have to turn it invisible AND drop its opacity to 0 before the layer hides?

Known problem, its some of the nvidea driver settings. There is a video about that. It's on russian but I hope you will understand what to do:
https://vk.com/video179624538_456239058

Ah, I didn't know it was nvidia _settings_ -- could you help with doing a little write-up for the faq? Do we know which nvidia cards, drivers and settings are involved so we can try to add a warning messagebox to Krita?

About nvidea. I actually know almost nothing about it, just remember I've seen something like that in the FAQ of the vk group so I posted video. Also no idea how to translate these settings correctly because I have AMD gpu. I guess we need someone with nvidea...

I am SO GRATEFUL that the menus in that video were all in the same places on my laptop! So often I am on a different system so I have to go hunting, and with it all in Russian, there would have been no hope to find anything lol

But it worked! I have a cursor again and the marks are showing up perfectly! I highly recommend that video to whoever is having this issue. (Though scroll with your wheel. Don't grab the scroll bar like I did or you will accidently switch videos. I spent a solid minute wondering what a BBC documentary had to do with my problem before I realized what happened.)

Thanks to you guys, I also have the eraser mostly puzzled out to the point where it is at least functional (thanks for the keyboard shortcut you have no idea) and although I'm a little grumpy about the fact that I can't reorganize the tools around in their dock, I suppose I can live with it for now lol

I don't know if this will ever really replace Photoshop for me, but it is great to have a choice in things now. Thank you for putting up with my noob-ness!

Ah... If you made it work with info from that video, could you please help out by writing a paragraph we could add to the faq? That would be a big help!