document selection workflow

[weltkante]

Documentation source

https://github.com/mypaint/mypaint/wiki/FAQ-Why-so-few-fancy-features

Documentation issue

I've been looking into how to select a piece of my worksheet and e.g. move it around. There's the wiki (link above) and e.g. issue #31 which both sound like its not supported. After having played around with the features that are supported I figured out a pretty easy way to create and manipulate a selection as a layer, I think something like this should be document to be more discoverable.

Documentation suggestions

• make sure you have all but one layer hidden to use this workflow
• create a new layer onto which you paint the selected area
• set mode of this layer to destination out
• pick a thick opaque brush and draw over what you want to select, it will "disappear" from the rendering due to the previously selected mode
• once you are done (or if you need to check what you selected) switch mode to destination in
• turn off "show background" and do a "new layer from visible", this copies the selected content to a new layer
• hide the new layer
• set mode of the selection layer back to destination out
• select the base layer and do a "merge visible layers" to remove the selection from the original layer

now you can transform and modify the selected content in its own layer, like moving it around, and when you're done merge it back into the primary layer via "merge visible layers"

the steps sound complicated but after I've done it a few times it is a pretty decent workflow and definitely can replace the presumably "unspported" selection mode

PS: if you don't hide the background when copying the selection to its own layer then you get weird black artifacts wherever something was drawn but not selected, hiding the background avoids that

MyPaint version

2.0.1

Code of Conduct

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[odysseywestra]

This is actually what I've been doing to work around the lack of selections tools as well. Would you mind actually writing a tutorial over on our Community Forums? I'm only asking is cause that were most of our users post and having this would be handy. Plus I can always create it as an wiki and we can add screen shots and refine the process.

Long term we need to reword the a lot of these layer effects since it not clear what they really do beyond the basic ones which every other program that uses layers. They are technically correctly named according to the spec but extra context would be better. I'll leave that to another issue ticket.

https://community.mypaint.app

[weltkante]

Would you mind actually writing a tutorial over on our Community Forums?

I'll have a look at the weekend

I've no experience with making screen recordings so the best I could do would be making some screenshots to go with the explanation - however I ran into technical issues which I don't have time to resolve today, so I settled for a search and responding to relevant issues. It seems one of the discussions mentioned destination in/out before but used it in a slightly more awkward way than creating ad-hoc layers. Generally from these discussions it seems making people more aware of those modes probably would help.

If anyone else is successfully using these modes feel welcome to post your results with it, the more people know the better.

I'll try again in a few weeks (since I'll be too busy to look at this again next week) and see if I can fix my screenshot issues and maybe manage to get an animated gif to go with it, if things go well. Though it'll have to be seen what exactly I am allowed to put on the forum, it already started complaining when I put three links into the reply 😅