New document menu improvements

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cestarian
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New document menu improvements

Post by cestarian » Tue Jun 27, 2017 4:27 am

There's some things I'd like in the new document menu that are bugging me. Besides color profile selection and 8/16-bit color mode which already have their own threads.

The first very basic thing I would like for it to do is to remember last settings, in other words if I create a 4096x4096 300dpi document, the next time I open this menu I want it to default to 4096x4096 300dpi settings for the new document, humans are creatures of habit, artists will typically start out with the same document size ;) it's a small and easy feature, but you wouldn't believe how much nicer it would be to have it, the pain in the neck of having to click and select all these 3 boxes and input your desired canvas size and dpi every single time you're starting to work is way more than I expected it to be, it's actually annoying, you can't start working because you need to take 5 seconds to do this shit :shock:

So
#1 Always remember last settings and default to them for the next document.

As someone who comes over from Krita, Krita happens to have a lot of nice options for this actually, and there are two of them I do miss that most programs don't have.

#2 Select background color before you start

White canvases are cancer, the first thing I do when I open a new document is select the fill tool and change the background layer's color :roll: every time. I usually like to start gray. If you want to make this feature even cooler, you could also add an option to not only select background color but also select a pattern (so you can start with for example a paper texture and a light brown canvas for a papyrus look if that's your thing, or something like that, it'd be cool, trust me.)

#3 Canvas size presets

In krita (and photoshop) there's a drop-down menu above the image size (w/h) settings which will allow you to select from a list of pre-defined presets, Krita will even allow you to create a new custom preset with the press of a button which I use a lot. Maybe you can do one better, add all the formerly mentioned features and make it so that when a preset is saved, all these things get saved along with it instead of just the size ;)

That's about the gist of it, oh wait.

#4 Move the enable large canvases setting to the new document menu.

I mean if you're gonna have that setting, at least put it where people will need it, it's infuriating to try to make an 8k canvas only to get an error message, so for the love of all the gods either move this setting over, or just change it into a warning instead of an error (you're programmers, you know what I mean), make sure that the warning also has a "Do not show again" tickbox. Limits and restrictions like this are annoying, but replacing limits with warnings is quite ideal, I mean you tell people "You shouldn't do this" but they still have the option to do it anyways, even if they know they shouldn't be doing it, maybe they'll behave next time and go down to 7000x7000. :P

That's all I have to say, these things may sound like details, probably mostly because they're all easy to implement, but it's actually pretty important, mostly for psychological reasons. :ugeek:

I mean think about it, a good morning sets the stage for a good day, a bad morning can rub you wrong for the entire day even if it wasn't such a bad day at all. This is sorta similar, you want everything from the moment the program is launched up till the moment the painting start to be as streamlined as possible :mrgreen: so please, do this.
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support
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Re: New document menu improvements

Post by support » Sat Jul 01, 2017 2:24 pm

#4 Move the enable large canvases setting to the new document menu.
This option require to restart the Paintstorm and works with a little different way (with more chance to glitch)
cestarian
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Re: New document menu improvements

Post by cestarian » Sat Jul 01, 2017 11:50 pm

Allright, I guess you should maybe just fix that stuff and make it able to do large canvases by default instead of moving it to a new menu then. But I hope you'll do all t hat other stuff ;)
Jher451
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Re: New document menu improvements

Post by Jher451 » Thu Oct 05, 2017 3:27 pm

I agree with the new document issue of always having to reset the image size. Drives me crazy. Another really weird problem is sometimes while importing an image, the proportions will switch and completely squish the photo you are trying to work with. This happens often while importing a photograph. I use Paintstorm as a tool for creating my tattoo stencils and I import photos as reference almost every time I use it. This issue is an annoying problem which can be avoided by altering the proportions in the photo library first, but again, kind of annoying.
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support
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Re: New document menu improvements

Post by support » Wed Oct 11, 2017 10:02 am

Jher451 wrote:I agree with the new document issue of always having to reset the image size. Drives me crazy. Another really weird problem is sometimes while importing an image, the proportions will switch and completely squish the photo you are trying to work with. This happens often while importing a photograph. I use Paintstorm as a tool for creating my tattoo stencils and I import photos as reference almost every time I use it. This issue is an annoying problem which can be avoided by altering the proportions in the photo library first, but again, kind of annoying.
I know about this issue on iPad with vertical photos. Are you talking about iPad?
cestarian
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Re: New document menu improvements

Post by cestarian » Mon Oct 16, 2017 10:03 pm

Woohoo, you created canvas size presets, that's nice, creating new docs is a lot more streamlined now.

But we still can't choose the starting background color (I know it defaults to transparent which pretty much visually translates to white) you could just add an option to select "transparent" or "solid" color on first layer (defaulting to transparent) then have a color setting. Ideally I'd like to see a color option for both, for transparent that would mean how transparent is visually represented (I'd normally prefer to have a 50% grey visible background regardless of whether it is transparent or solid, because the white is sorta intense for the eyes to look at for long durations you know :P ) and for solid it would do the obvious thing of setting the first layer's fill color, I don't really care if that also affects how transparency is represented or not in that scenario.

Now that we have presets and the program seems to remember the last preset at least, I guess we have #1 covered. except for one issue, I noticed that the program only saves the width and height/size but it forgets the resolution setting, I normally set it to 300 but if I try to create a new document it defaults back to just 72. This behavior strikes me as odd in more ways than one and hope it will be fixed soon :)

Overall I'm pretty happy with the changes done in 2.03 to the new documents menu so good job :) this is much nicer now.
Jher451
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Re: New document menu improvements

Post by Jher451 » Tue Nov 20, 2018 7:19 pm

The photo import issue has been fixed for a while but now I’m having trouble creating any file in 300dpi (on my iPad Pro 2nd gen 12.9”) I can’t open a new file in 300dpi even at 8.5”x11”which is how I almost always created them in the past. I get a warning that says “Too large document. Canvas should be no more than 36Mpix (6000x6000, 7000x5000 and etc.)” I used to always open files of that size and now for some reason it will not let me. Any help??
Jher451
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Joined:Thu Oct 05, 2017 3:20 pm

Re: New document menu improvements

Post by Jher451 » Thu Dec 06, 2018 8:13 pm

support wrote:
Jher451 wrote:This issue is an annoying problem which can be avoided by altering the proportions in the photo library first, but again, kind of annoying.
I know about this issue on iPad with vertical photos. Are you talking about iPad?

Yes I only use paintstorm on iPad. I use photoshop on my computer.
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