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I really dig your ideas about UX and hotkeys. On that point, I’m reminded of a really old android app I used to use: Cloverpaint. It also allowed color sliders to be keymapped, with a clever design that also let you slide up/down to change the scale range, allowing greater or less granularity on the fly, e.g. value slider.

It was such a thoughtfully designed app, probably meant to specifically solve issues relating to small mobile screens; and yet I still wish big staple apps (zbrush, mari) would take a cue from that. Granted zbrush has its own solution, but damn is it really bad! For all other paint apps that can, I just use a stupidly large color wheel pop-up when I need more subtle changes

Good thoughts!


Yes, agreed, i've already replicated much of the canvas navigation. One issue i have with photoshop is that some shortcuts are handled with special code, for example dragging to change brush size.
I'm building what i think is the most capable shortcut system possible. Any slider in the app can be mapped to drag shortcuts. You can have modifier only shortcuts, shortcuts that only work in specific contexts ect. I'm forcing every interaction I code to go through this system and be Interactable, so there shouldn't be edge cases here.

I'll also have radial popup menus, and the ability to popup small redesigned versions of many panels under your mouse while holding a key.

The vision here is to minimize the user ever having to shoot their cursor halfway across the screen to change say the saturation, you should be able to just hold S and drag.

This is actually the most questionable, because one of the core concepts I'm introducing is a tone mapped canvas, which means colors behave in a more analog way, and we're working in floating point. So if you were to export a file and go to photoshop i can't guarantee that you'll get the same visual output. I'm also considering a crazy idea for how color blending works with colored alpha too, which would push it harder into the photo-shop can't do this category.
Converting from PS to this app is a much easier proposition however.

This is one of those things that people will need to try to truly get it though i think.

Mostly already in the works, the effects are the only one not on the to-do list.

Also liquify should just be a tool, not a mode, like photoshop seems to think. I just want to hit G and grab some pixels and drag them around, none of this open a new window gaf.

I also think many of these functions can be conceptually simplified without losing power. But a lot of this will come out if I'm smart of not based on user feedback when we get to it.

Yep basic image filters are shockingly easy to implement.
While I can't improve the hardware you are using, I think we can do a lot better when it comes to showing the user the composition and scale of their drawing while they work.

I love the idea of it working more like pure ref. I'm going to be splitting the concept of a canvas (what you draw on) from a view, which is the camera, you will be able to have reference, multiple canvases all within the one view. And of course color constructor swatches, as I should really bring my legacy software along for the ride.

But also, you should be able to have multiple non destructive views into the same canvas data. for example, you could have another view into the same canvas, but instead of looking at all the color layers, it's just the lineart, and they are both the same file. Representing the UX for this might be a bit tough, but it's something that seems like it would be a big help.


Here's some extra stuff too.
brush preview!

Lerping color themes!