AuthorTopic: I'm making a paint program, so useful tools, ideas and features required please  (Read 156484 times)

Offline Helm

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I don't have the latest version of ProMotion, but am I correct in thinking that it can only handle one custom brush at a time? (I.e. A brush selected from the canvas) I can't remember how many DPaint on the Amiga could handle, but I know that Personal Paint could deal with upto 9 different brushes.

Promotion has a Brush Container panel in which you may store a very large number of brushes.

Offline happymonster

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Dunno what cutting/copying 'automatically' amounts to
In Dpaint/Promotion you can cut out a brush and the selection disappears automatically and you can then draw with the brush, or manipulate it.

Photoshop, PSP, Graphics Gale, etc.. keep the selection in place so you can either manipulate the pixels directly, or copy to a brush.

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Promotion has a Brush Container panel in which you may store a very large number of brushes.
Ah! Thanks Helm.. Found it now. :)

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I really like the dpaint-ish test gui!! It's far more clear and readable. IMO the old bevelling effect drew too much effect to specific icons (which had a lot of edges)

Trying to come up with a nice theme is a total nightmare! :P
It might be easier just to offer different options to suit different people. But personally I would like to have one nice theme that everyone pretty much likes.

Today I realised that there are a few nasty bugs in the fill tool, so I need to fix that. Undo/Redo is almost done though..

Offline Ai

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In Dpaint/Promotion you can cut out a brush and the selection disappears automatically and you can then draw with the brush, or manipulate it.

Photoshop, PSP, Graphics Gale, etc.. keep the selection in place so you can either manipulate the pixels directly, or copy to a brush.
The Dpaint way is clearly a big advantage, so I just implemented it for GIMP. Thanks for the idea :)

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Trying to come up with a nice theme is a total nightmare! :P
Personally I think, with the dpaint-ish GUI, having white scroll-arrows rather than black helps readability.
You also might want to go somewhere like http://www.gnome-look.org and see what themes are popular that you also like, take some hints from them.
« Last Edit: January 08, 2009, 01:30:44 pm by Ai »
If you insist on being pessimistic about your own abilities, consider also being pessimistic about the accuracy of that pessimistic judgement.

Offline Helm

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You can also remove the cut brush from the art and have it as a selection in ProMotion if you select it holding the right mouse button down.

Offline happymonster

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Helm, do you mean cut the brush out of the image, as you would with Dpaint?

Offline happymonster

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Well, fixing the bug with the fill is proving more interesting than I thought! :)
Hopefully I will get that and Undo/Redo working by the end of the weekend though.

Offline happymonster

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Ok.. I think I've fixed the fill bug.

Undo/Redo is nearly done..

Something else I've been thinking about. The tool icons are currently 24 x 24 pixels in size with a gap of 8 pixels (So an icon is drawn every 32 pixels). With the GUI width of 224 pixels this lets me fit in 7 icons in a row (instead of the 8 I had in the old large version). Now.. if I reduce the gap to 4 pixels then I can fit 8 icons in again, but it does look a bit cramped.

So I don't know whether I will really need the 8 icons across yet, and if I do I don't want to redraw all the icons at a late stage. So I'm wondering whether it would be best to draw icons in something like 20 x 20 now?

Photoshop's tools seem to average around 16 x 16 (some are bigger), but none seem much more than 20 x 20. The second column of icons is 26 pixels after the first.
The small icons windows uses in their office programs like Excel are around 16 x 16 pixels (maximum for nearly all) with a spacing of 23 pixels.

Well, just thinking about it at the moment.. We will see! :)

Offline Ai

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Over at gimp-brainstorm (http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/)
someone just posted this
http://gimp-brainstorm.blogspot.com/2009/01/colour-selector-on-canvas.html (first picture)
and i thought 'that's such a good idea; it totally owns all other methods of selecting colors from a palette.' Seriously, if you can do something like this, it would solve a lot of problems including the 'palette space limitation' one.
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Offline Helm

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Helm, do you mean cut the brush out of the image, as you would with Dpaint?

Yes

Offline happymonster

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Well, the idea of the selector is interesting, but I don't think it would work so well here. In a paletted mode, you want to see the image if possible when altering colours, so the colour wheel would obscure most of the image. As would the palette wheel selector.

I've had some free time at work today, so I've redrawn the icons for the new smaller size of 20 x 20! I can now fit 8 icons horizontally again and they look uber-cute.. :)

I'll try to finish off the undo/redo and fix some more things for a release this weekend.