Hi there! This thread is here for us to discuss the upcoming grid and guides stretch goal from the Krita 2015 Kickstarter before it gets implemented (as discussed on #krita).
In this first post, I want to share some insights into what Photoshop does, what it does well, and where it leaves room for improvement. It’s for reference only. Before making concrete suggestions anyway, I’d need to know what can or cannot be done by the development team.

Here’s a video commentary to illustrate everything written below: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Au0R9xncsM

The most important part with guides and grids is snapping. When you are adding rulers, it is interesting for them to snap to the bounding box of a selection for instance. And vice versa, you mainly want guides so that your selections afterward snap to them, allowing you to restrict your painting or to place a layer with perfect accuracy fast.

What Photoshop does well.

The grid is pretty straightforward but has one important characteristic: beyond snapping (rulers snap on the grid as well), it allows you to add subdivisions which look lighter than the main grid.
When adding rulers manually, Photoshop snaps them to the bounding box of your selection, as well as your document’s borders. A selection can simply be a selected layer by the way, you don’t have to draw a selection with a dedicated tool. If you then resize your canvas, the rulers then stay in place, allowing you to creates precise margins around your document.

Time-saving functionality.

You have a function can create rulers based on any vector shape’s bounding box. In PS, vector shapes are easy to manipulate with precision, so this feature is quite useful. It’s faster than adding rulers manually in most cases.
You also have a layout generator at can create all sorts of multi-rows and columns layouts, and add a margin to your document. In a sense, it allows you to create non-uniform grid patterns. This is useful as a concept artist or when you need to make any kind of flyer, banner… Anything that requires a precise arrangement. This is also useful for comic book artists in particular.

What could be improved.

The ruler layout functions don’t come with icons, although they are for the most part more interesting than manual ruler placement. You have to create your own HTML5 script or to navigate to the view menu to activate them. This makes some functions relatively inaccessible to inexperienced users, and slow to access for advanced users.

To set up/edit the grid, you have to go to the software preferences. If you’re not going to change the grid size all the time, the ability to add or remove subdivisions on the fly is however interesting. In general, I am not too fond of having common settings hidden in menus or accessible using only shortcuts. Sadly, in most software today, we still don’t have command palettes (like you can find in many code editors like Sublime, Atom... or even in Office since the last release ). I’m really ‘s fond of command palettes! But as a replacement option, it’s always nice to have as many options as possible sit at your fingertips.

Ah and a last note: I don’t like or use brush snapping. As far as illustration or game art are concerned, it has never felt useful to me. In Photoshop, the vector toolset allows you to draw precise lines without effort already. Now in Krita, this may be different.

Now it's your turn! Let's develop the discussion and see what comes out of it.

Ok, plus on for that.

I think Krita would benefit a lot from a very familiar and robust Grid/Guides system like Photoshop's.
It's definitely a good thing to be discussed over the course of Krita's development.

One thing I noticed recently: when you move the rulers, they also snap to their previous position. In that instance, they are also tinted red.

EDIT: There's also a guide plugin for PS that's nice, as it arranges a range of features into a single panel. It does but a little more than PS, but at least it's designed around a UI that's like one of Krita's dockers.

Hi guys,

@nathan thanks for starting this topic and thanks for the mentioning the features and stating the basic requirements.
Create guide by percentages
I would suggest along with photoshop we should also look at the guide system in gimp, I liked the fact that in gimp you can create guide by mentioning percentages. like create horizontal or vertical guide at 50% of document.

Precision
Like already explained by Nathan in the video linked above, we also need input option for creating guides precisely, for example to create a guide precisely 1.5 cm from origin, if there is an dialog or input box in tool option it will be immense help.

It would also be helpful to have options or input boxes for changing positions of existing guide, by entering X and Y values manually for precision along with dragging guides by mouse, (In inkscape if you double click the guide you get an option to enter the X and Y position manual)

Option to insert multiple guides at once
A dialog for inserting multiple guides at once . There is a GIMP plugin which is very helpful you can read more about it here. , it gives an option to add guides after every specific unit.
The one shown by nathan in photoshop is also a good example.

Create guide from selection too
Create guide by shape as well as selection, we don't always have shapes but we do have selections often.

Preset system for guide setup
Some other useful guide presets such as golden ratio, rule of thirds etc should be provided by default. It is also better to have a particular guide setup saved as a preset so next time with a click of a button in the preset the guides will appear. This is not there in any other program in my opinion. it would be helpful to create comic pages for me once I set a guide setup according to requirement of particular publishers i can set it up on new page by choosing the saved preset. A option or dropdown in create new document section for this would be great.
This would also give the ability to share common guide among artist through bundles

kamathraghavendra wrote:Create guide from selection too
Create guide by shape as well as selection, we don't always have shapes but we do have selections often.

Yup, this would combine well with the "Select opaque pixels" -> you can draw some precise raster shape, select opaque pixels and generate guides.

kamathraghavendra wrote:Preset system for guide setup

Why not, but having a collection of template kra docs also works in that case. It's not something I've ever missed in PS, despite my work requiring to do precise layouts - the pb is that you rarely need the same guides and setup (unless you're a webdesigner maybe?).

Why not, but having a collection of template kra docs also works in that case. It's not something I've ever missed in PS, despite my work requiring to do precise layouts - the pb is that you rarely need the same guides and setup (unless you're a webdesigner maybe?).

yeah having guides saved in template is also cool. I thought of a use case where comic artist need same set of guides for bleed and margin etc throughout the project . These setup also change according to publishers, various publishers have different bleed and margin setup.

Actually, guides will automatically be saved in templates if we're just going to make them save into *.kra files(which we are), because templates are just *.kra files that are easy to access from the new image menu

For reference, here's the task: https://phabricator.kde.org/T114 & https://phabricator.kde.org/T109

Amongst which was the following consideration:

Coming up with nice way to mass-delete these, or generate them. (For example, a really common usecase of guides is printing bleeds. So you'd want to be able to generate four rulers, which have certain margins from the canvas edge, in inches or mm. People who do a lot of printing may want presets here so they can switch between formats(though arguably these could make templates for this purpose).

With that in mind, while the ideas in this thread aren't bad, I would like to see more problems that you are specifically trying to solve with the suggestions.

So these are the following requirements I can deduce:

• Having horizontal and vertical guides to solve the problem of aligning objects.
• Having grids with subgrids(like we have already, btw) for the above problem where we want a grid, but it's way more efficient to let the computer generate a grid.
• Snapping of the bounding box of the layer(how is this communicated to the user), the selection, or the transform to grids or guides.
• Generating guides. Conventionally we add guides by dragging from the canvas ruler(this behaviour is in Karbon, Inkscape and GIMP). We want to generate guides by Margin, for printing bleeds, or by selection/layer/vectorobject bounding box.
• When dragging out guides, these should try to snap to document/layer/selection/vector object bounding box. (Also grid?)
• Grid docker with configurable grid presets for simplicity to the user.
• Ability to input a precise value for a given guide.(On canvas GUI maybe? Or guides/assistants/grids visible in the layer docker/some kind of organiser tool)
• Units in %, px, cm, inch and all that jazz for respectively, screen design and print design.
• Template *.kra files as resources that can be bundled for sharing grid/guides/assistant setups.

Now my question is: how do you envision using grids and guides in your workflow?

For example, I would like to use guides as bleeds and margins for comics. Therefore, I need a generation tool, and the ability to snap vectors to guides.

For grids, I would like to use this for tile-sets. Isometric and Orthogonal grids where I can snap layers and selections with the move-tool to the grids would be really useful. How would we configure isometric and orthogonal?

But here's an example to consider: We don't need the freehand brush tool to snap to guides and grids, but I imagine we would like the geometric(ellipse, rectangle) tools to snap?

Thanks for the feedback @TheraHedwig. Here are some notes regarding what I use grid and guides for:

Guides
I use guides to segment my documents, to place and align objects accurately as fast as possible. The goal is also to avoid having to use any dialog. I setup the doc so that I almost never have to go back to the transform dialog and use manual input once the document is setup. With snap happening in all directions (in PS, guides snapping to the grid, to the document borders to create a margin, to the layers' BBox and to selections…), as well as a shortcut to toggle snapping on/off, you can rely on them and work on the canvas most of the time. In PS, the transform box also snaps to guides, making it easy to scale something until you reach a delimiting guide (very useful for vector shapes and text).

As a game artist, I use guides (+ align tools):
- To place UI elements precisely in relationship to one another. In the example below, there's a margin for the document + the box around the lifebar makes it easy to add a margin inside the lifebar and create the fill asset.

- To lay down assets for a presentation.

- Another use case in PS is to define text containers. You can limit text to a box, which you can delimit with the help of guides.


In games, we also have to define a range of margins around the documents to account for the various screen ratios we design our games for. And we have extra margins around and inside GUI elements as well.
Ah and guide layout generators help with menus. When you need multiple buttons with even margins (it's just like webdesign!).
Lastly, laying out assets precisely in a PSD mockup allows us to then export the assets and generate a JSON file that stores the position of every element on screen.

Grids
The main reasons I use the grid for is when creating tile sets. But I also use them from time to time to snap guides, when I just need a few guides at specific positions. Grids are also useful with snapping off, to get a sense of your objects' position on the canvas. Especially with games, as your characters often have to fit certain sizes but can be a bit wider or taller than the standard size at times.
Now that you mention it, isometric grids could be both useful and pretty unique. Making isometric pixel art can be a real pain because of the lack of grid generators for it. You always have to make one by hand, and it can be a pain to generate pixel perfect grids (i.e. exactly 80*40 cells or what-not).

Is it better that way, or does it still lack details/more concrete use cases?