Since the soft airbrush is based on the Pixel Brush engine, I guess it's the problem in the engine itself.

As you can see... As I spread the brush on the canvas, it feels like a reptile skin. I've never seen anything like this in any other painting applications, even in gimp :





It's not that much of an issue for me(for now). It'd be great if you consider fixing this after all the current bug fixing and rebuilding krita is once done.

I do think it's not the most urgent, but not a 'little problem' either. As an artist, I strongly think that this is the last big problem that should be changed(at least for the next many years) in the krita's basic brush engine behavior besides the polishing and optimizations.

These are problems caused by an 8 bit canvas, and there's very little we can do about it. I suggest you try using a 16 bit canvas for now.

If you are working on a complex many-layered document and can't afford to convert the whole thing to 16-bit (in my case its due to lack of RAM and/or lack of beefy CPU), you can convert specific layers to 16-bit while the document itself and the rest of the layers remain as 8-bit. You can then convert the 16bit layer back down to 8bit when you are done.



1) select the layer you want to have smooth air brush in
2) It's in Menu bar -> Layers -> Convert -> Convert Layer Colour Space
3) in Depth dropdown select 16bit integer/channel option
optional 4) make sure the Profile option stays the same as the document's color profile for expected results

I'm not so sure if the 8-bit canvas is the only issue. GIMP by default uses 8-bit canvas too. And I haven't observed a (default) airbrush as rough as krita's in less sophisticated software like MyPaint or Medibang, though I'm not sure what their default channel configuration is like. Other simple software like SAI and AZPainter specifically describe themselves as being 16bit/channel only, so naturally they have no issues.

Wish report for smooth Airbrush: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412756 -

And Dmitry was already playing with dithering with nice results: https://pasteboard.co/IBaGYKn.png

tymond wrote:Wish report for smooth Airbrush: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=412756 -

And Dmitry was already playing with dithering with nice results: https://pasteboard.co/IBaGYKn.png

Hope you don't mind me asking. Is the solution 1 in the bug report faster/less complicated to implement than the others?
If so I'd like you to solve the problem that way... I don't see any problem with not being able to get the smoothing effect for build up brush mode and I even think it's ok to remove the mode itself. The main purpose of the mode is already perfectly achievable with flow option and the other side effects are either achievable or presumably very rarely used by the users. (Maybe you can conduct a survey about this to see if it's the case.)

It's your decision in the end. But if this is about dev trying to solve the problem in the hard way for the build up mode, I really hope you don't. I think it's not worth it. ;-;