Bug 389555

At the moment this is more of a problem looking for possible solutions than an actual proposal. (Maybe (special) layers overall need a lot of work with how they interact and work)

I'm doing some manga scanlation editing and I'm working on coming up with a structured workflow. I'm using one transparency masks to erase out text and another to erase out blemishes that remain after some filtering. I just have a plain white layer as a background.

What I'd like is to be able to have different colored high contrast highlighting to audit what I've done using the transparency masks. At the moment my solution only works with one color, so I cant really have an overview showing the different edits I did with different layers.

I'm very impressed with the special layers for nondestructive editing that Krita provides, though somewhat lacking in polish at the moment.
My current solution is that I added a sharp red colorize mask to the background layer, for which I enable and disable the visibility if I want to emphasize erased areas. So this shows through the transparent areas.

I tried messing around with various variations on cloning transparency masks xor converting layer clones to transparency masks, but neither of these seems to work as I want.

Cloning a transparency mask results in cloning the parent of the transparency mask, not the individual transparency mask (there also seems to be some odd-ish refresh behavior here which I will open a bug for soon). Alternatively, if I create a separate layer that I clone and convert to a transparency mask, the conversion results in the relationship with the original layer not being preserved and losing the data, just being a completely empty transparency mask.

Turning something into a mask, or turning a mask into something, would I think exhaustively cover the possible ways to do this via layers, so something would have to be done about at least one of these for this to work. Alternatively maybe the color that can be assigned to a layer in the right click menu could be used for something like this, but I think that would be less flexible.

I will attach an example once I can get my colorize mask working properly again. I think something might have broken when I updated to master. I'm probably abusing is as well.