Bug 442287

SUMMARY

It would be useful if Krita's fill layers were more like Fire Alpaca's 8 bit layers.

Like this: https://i.imgur.com/45hO0E1.mp4

PROBLEM

Currently, to change a fill layer's color in Krita the following steps are necessary:

1. open the layer's properties dialog.
2. click on the color button in the dialog.
3. click on a color.
4. click OK, now you can see the color changed.
5. click OK again, now the color is set.

Fire Alpaca/Medibang have 8 bit and 1 bit paint layers that work in a way similar to Krita/Photoshop's fill layers, except that they're not designed as a bucket fill that applies automatically, but instead as a paint layer that can only have one color (they don't fill the canvas by default, and black is opaque instead of white).

These 8 bit layers are useful for artists with workflows that make use of multiple single-color paint layers (typically cel-shaded style, with one base layer for color, and multiply/addition/etc. blend modes on top for shading). The "fill" layers in Krita/Photoshop are designed backwards for this use case, but one could still use them the same way as the 8 bit paint layers: you'd just need to delete the mask after creating the layer and draw with white instead of black. So long as you don't have a brush that uses a multiply blend mode, for example, it should work the same way.

The problem is that the way color change is designed in Krita makes them practically unusable for this use case.

Without this type of layer, artists with this workflow use a normal paint layer, and to change color they lock the layer's alpha, select a new color, and use a shortcut (such as CTRL+F) to fill. While this is a bit of a hassle, you can quickly click color, CTRL+F, click color, CTRL+F, click color, CTRL+F, until you find the color that you want.

In photoshop and Fire Alpaca, the 8 bit/fill layer's properties dialog has a color picker immediately accessible. With just one click you can change the color and preview the result, so it's much easier to search for the color you want.

In Krita, you can't preview the result as quickly. There's a color button instead of a picker, and the color button opens a dialog where you choose the color. Then you have to click OK to preview the color changed. If the color doesn't look good, you'll have to open the dialog again, click a new color, click ok again, and repeat.

The process to change the color in a layer type designed to have only a single color ends up being more complicated than the same process in the general-purpose paint layer type that's designed to have any color.

This isn't a problem if the fill layer is supposed to be just an automated bucket fill tool that you barely touch, similar to a filter layer, but I think with some small changes like this one these fill layers could also be used as single-color paint layers, which would be useful for artists with the aforementioned workflow.

PROPOSED SOLUTION

Replace the color button with a color picker, and make picking a color preview the change instantly.

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Bug 412928 proposes to change the way the brush's color picker works when fill layers are selected, which would equally make the color-change process faster. I don't think this should be done.

First, tools should work seamlessly independent of layer. Selecting the gray color makes the brush paint gray, and it just happens in mask/fill layers gray means half-transparent. If you changed this, there would be no way to paint "gray" in a fill layer. I don't remember for sure, but I think there was a brush setting to make it replace the layer's alpha with the brush's opacity instead of adding alpha. You could use this instead, but you would need to create a custom brush just for fill layers.

Second, if selecting the color for the brush changes the layer's color, then conversely selecting a fill layer should change the brush's color to match. This would mean the brush color changes without you changing it. If you were painting green on one layer, and selected a blue fill layer, when you go back to the previous layer, is your brush green or blue? In either case it would be very confusing.

Instead it makes more sense that the same color (white in Krita's case) always mean opaque, so you don't need to watch the brush's color when changing layers.

One solution could be if clicking on the fill layer thumbnail (which shows its solid color) in the layers docker "selected" the thumbnail, and selecting the thumbnail changed the brush color to it, and changing the brush color while it's selected similarly changed the layer color. However, given this whole thumbnail-selecting concept simply doesn't exist in Krita right now, it would be too complicated to implement something like this currently, while simply replacing the color button in the properties dialogue should be much easier to implement while also being a huge improvement.