I’ve always wanted to know and have always wondered, why are there no selection tools, I’m EXTREMELY GREATFUL for the one that’s in MyPaint 1.2.0, but, all we can do is move a drawing on a separate layer, well it’s more of a move tool. Are there any plans to implement selection tools in future builds? By selection tools I mean example a lasso tool, so I can select, cut and paste a portion of my drawing, magic wand etc…
I mainly use windows, so maybe there are some on Linux…?
PLEASE FORGIVE ME IF THIS HAS BEEN ASKED BEFORE, I’M NOT PERFEC:slightly_smiling:
Rectangular select for cut-and-paste is probably really easy. Extracting to another layer so that the existing move tool can chew on it is only a little bit harder.
Anyway, it’s already reported and anyone interested should probably follow the issue tracker request:
Lasso tool is harder because it involves selection masks, rather than rectangular regions. But we do have some established ways of representing and showing similar things (the stroke picker blink shape is “just a layer”, and the strokemap is “just a bunch of mask regions”…)
Magic wand selection is moderately hard and requires selection masks, but we have the fill implementation needed to generate the selection. That’s a pretty major part of the puzzle already.
One of the harder things to implement is getting the brush engine to respect our selection areas, and only paint within it. Oh, and fill needs to do that as well! Oh, and paste should paste into the selected area!
In other words, getting everything everyone might want implemented in one go won’t be possible. But work is scheduled to start soon.
I know it’s a lot of work and thank you very much for the detailed response. I personally want MyPaint to be a strong contender to SketchBook Pro, and in my humble opinion, for what MyPaint is, all we need is a selection tool and we are there
This is the feature that is most needed to make it as useful as any other paint program. The ability to select a region, move, rotate and scale it means that you can compose elements in the image, place them where they should be as apposed to where you happened to draw them. This is what would stop someone from deciding that they can’t use MyPaint for serious illustration work ATM since placement and positioning of elements is half the work. I would make it a priority over other features.
Right now, MyPaint dose have the ability to open a layer into a External App that can support “png” files. So a work around for this would be to open a layer in GIMP, or Krita for example and use the selection tool on there. I would love to see selection tools in a future MyPaint, but currently at least it can play nice with other programs which can at least alleviates the problem.
That is awesome, works very well. For the time being it is quite an acceptable solution. For anyone else, the procedure is to select the layer you wish to edit, RMB and choose ‘edit layer in external app’. Then choose from a list of apps.
The layer then opens in that app, you make your changes save the result. Back in MyPaint, RMB the layer and choose "Update layer with external edits’.
Thanks for the summary, djwaterman, but please could you translate “RMB” to newbies?
I would like to say that, as a general principle, It doesn’t help any cause to make it closed jargon to insiders or experienced people only, when I would say there is a huge need of making the use of this wonderful program as popular as possible, given the truly amazing potential to make the rest of us just forget about whatever “Windows only” fancy names!
Thanks again!
To edit a layer in an external program the procedure is to select the layer you wish to edit, Press the Right Mouse Button and choose ‘edit layer in external app’. Then choose from a list of apps.The layer then opens in that app, you make your changes save the result. Back in MyPaint, Right Mouse Button on the layer and choose "Update layer with external edits’.
Adding my vote for selection/manipulation tools. The other program workaround is usable but I would prefer to stay in the one app. Sketchbook pro has one of the best selection/manipulation methods I have used thus far.
Thank you for the work that has been done thus far on this wonderful art tool.
Also, in between the sketch and the inks, I sometimes enlarge the image, change the pencils to light blue or red etc. I do this in external program, either gimp or inkscape (with the sketch as an embedded image in a vector layer) works fine. If I want any speech balloons, panel lines etc I add them in this step, too – yes, before the inks and colors. Weird but true.
Yeah that about sums up how I do it as well so I guess it’s not weird. I love the open layer in external app. It opens up so many possibilities. I wish more applications added this feature. However this should be continued in another thread so we don’t steer this topic off. ^^’
Open in another app is a good feature, but I’m not a huge fan of using it in place of native selection and transformation tools. For one, running two applications takes precious resources from my non-expandable computer. (Stupid Cintiq… apparently you can add more memory, but you will void the warranty and scratch it) Two, you have to do the edit out of context of the entire image.
Setting up a group, making a copy of your layer, moving it into the group, creating a new layer, setting it to destination out, painting in what you want to keep, merging everything… it’s a rather roundabout way of doing things, especially if you like to shuffle things about a lot.
What I’m trying to do here is to send a message to the developers that this user at least, would be grateful for a very simple select and transform solution.
Don’t worry about free-form selection, magic wand, or keeping brushes within the selection. A rudimentary rectangular selection will go very far.
Having non-destructive editing and all objects are scalable vectors that offer bit depth independence was in TIFFany 3.0 back on NeXTSTEP in 1996. I actually demoed it as an Apple Engineer from NeXT to the Adobe Devs who later incorporated it into Illustrator and Photoshop.
Having the ability to truly work with such functionality would give MyPaint a huge presence in scene development for Games, Motion pictures, etc. You would want a live edit view with minimal post processing and a post process view for final output. Not having the ability to treat all objects as scalable and independent is one of the reason Inkscape was developed. However, they have a lot of limitations in that application. To build upon libraries and cross service functionality between GIMP, Inkscape and MyPaint would be a big selling point for FOSS.
On OS X working in Affinity Designer and Photo, with Pixelmator allows for a great work flow. Vector Brushes in Affinity Designer is something that would make MyPaint an obvious choice to have. The traditional painting of MyPaint is awesome. It just needs that added underlying large functionality to be an indispensable tool in more market segments.
However, I would first coordinate with GNOME/KDE and Linux proper to get a much broader range of Tablet/Pen functionality to not only recognize the USB device, but actually leverage the hardware and use it as designed.
Like Wacom, Huion should be built into GNOME and KDE. As of now, it’s hit n’ miss.
MyPaint needs a proper port to OS X that GIMP already has done. Elle Stone and Partha seem to be the folks to work with to get it done.
Long-term, I would love to see Blender, GIMP, MyPaint and Inkscape as a quartet of tools used along side Adobe’s traditional suite.
Final Cut Pro/Motion/Logic and Adobe Premiere will never lose to any FOSS platform. The previously mentioned quartet has the best shot of garnering major financial backing, while maintaining your core ethos on licensing, if you can collaborate together more completely.
