ArtPaint's future direction

[humdingerb]

Not sure a ticket is the best place for this discussion, but I'd like to know if @dsizzle has thought about the direction he'd like to take ArtPaint. If there are any plans...

I cannot code well enough to have anything concrete to contribute on that front, I'm just here for the ride and offer unsolicited opinons. :) Besides the various ports of graphics apps that I actually never use, there are WonderBrush and Becasso for Haiku. I use mainly WonderBrush because I like the vectory stuff and the fact that I can manipulate objects after I drew them. I do very few photo manipulation, so WB is and will continue to be my go to graphics app (and I wished it were still under active development). I don't know much about Becasso, but the one feature I know and find intruiging, is how you can create and manipulate selections. You can draw a selection with an airbrush tool. You can apply filters on the selection itself, like blur a selection to 'feather' the edges. Neat.

I see WonderBrush used for drawing and compositing stuff and ArtPaint (and Becasso, if it were further developed) for photo manipulation and digital painting. I don't know if Becasso's handling of selections could be incorporated in ArtPaint (and if it's as good in real life use, besides it being neat...), but other than that It would mean concentrating on:

• useful filters
• touch-up tools (like a dynamic stamp that copies another part of the image)
• brushes
• support for graphics tablets (pressure, pen position etc.)

What are your thoughts?

[dsizzle]

This is as good a forum as any for this discussion!

FWIW "Becasso" definitely has a better name than ArtPaint :rofl:, but otherwise I don't know what it is capable of. I haven't tried WonderBrush nor Becasso. Vector art is interesting but the part of my career that involved artwork was all in 3d, where textures are pixels and not vectors, so I have way more experience with Photoshop vs., say, Illustrator/Inkscape/etc.

Anyway, with respect to ArtPaint and the future, the top areas where I see great gains:

• Layers:
  • The "Change Transparency" function (not the tool) needs to go away and be more easily visible and accessible on a layer/in the layer window. Being able to tweak the opacity of a layer is critical
  • Blending between layers is important, too. Add, Subtract, Multiply, Divide, Overlay, Screen, etc. blend modes need to be set on each layer
  • Masking. Whether it's another layer mode or a sub-layer, some form of masking is critical.
  • Layers that are larger than the canvas.
• Selection: In my experience with Photoshop, making good selections is important for any serious work.
  • Grayscale/fuzzy/alpha selections - currently I believe selections are handled via a monochrome bitmap so a pixel is either selected fully or not. EDIT: the selection bitmap looks to be B_GRAY8 already so it should handle 256 gray values.
  • Painted selections - yes, this is very useful but really needs fuzzy/alpha selections to realize the power.

Secondarily, I agree about brushes and filters, although the add-on list isn't too bad. One notable missing item is "Levels" where you can adjust the brightness/contrast/etc. via histogram. Touch up tools would be nice but idk how hard they would be to implement...there's a whole possible genre there.

Beyond that it depends on energy and time - there's a ton that can be done around color: CMYK mode, 32-bit color, color channels, color curves adjustments, color profiles (sRGB etc).

This is off the top of my head - will think more and comment.

[humdingerb]

+1 to all of the above. Good to see you're seeing ArtPaint in the pixel domain. Haiku could do with something great in that department. WonderBrush being a bit in the middle between vector and pixel.

I'm afraid, Becasso appears to be rather buggy. Anyway, you could give it and WonderBrush a quick try, if only to see how WB handles layer blending modes and opacity. I think it's a good idea to have one menu/slider/etc. that applies to the currently active layer, instead of duplicating those like with ArtPaint's current pop-up menu per layer.

If you try Becasso - warning: it's a bit unpolished and unmaintained - load some photo and then, when you choose the finger-pointing hand, all your drawings with brushes, rects, airbrush, text tool (sadly broken) etc. are creating a selection, also if you apply some filter. You can then copy&paste the thus selected pixels into a new canvas, for example.

And it shows that Becasso has an alpha-channel for selections, so to speak. Hope you don't like that too much and develop Becasso instead... :)

[dsizzle]

Thinking more on this it’s clear that at some point a decision could be made in terms of pursuing painting vs photo editing. I think my list focused more on editing but I see @humdingerb ’s list more clearly now after trying to paint.

Just for fun I tried to follow a painting tutorial on YouTube and it quickly became apparent that there is a lot of work that could be done around painting behavior (like #222) and brushes.

I’ll still probably do some of the layer stuff first because I feel like a lot of the groundwork is in place, but stuff to think about.