Digital Light & Color

The mask tools include a variety of shape drawing tools, namely :

• Freehand tool
• Rectangle Tool
• OvalTool
• Polygon Tool
• Spline Tool

It would be convenient to have all these tools available for defining the paint brush shape.

If you use the Composite transformation with the Overlay set to a solid color, you can use all the current mask tools to paint.

jsachs wrote: ↑August 16th, 2023, 3:35 pm If you use the Composite transformation with the Overlay set to a solid color, you can use all the current mask tools to paint.

Here are my initial impressions.

I have tried the composite transformation as an alternative to the paint tool for controlling the brush shape. The composite transformation for that purpose is, in my limited assessment, not as usefulness or convenient. For example, if a user wants to mimick painting using a brush shaped as an oval gradient of a certain aspect ratio and orientation: it can be done once, but repetition is uneasy. The running icon must be pressed to complete the pending mask operation after every stroke, and the aspect ratio and orientation are lost. The "oval gradient brush" must be recreated at every stroke.

Compared to the drawing tool, the composite tool is also missing functionalities, such as : lighten only and darken only ; brush continuous and one-shot ; spacing, fadeout,and stylus pressure.

Finally, the paint tool in the base mask dialog has useful features such as "apply to similar pixels (fixed and track)". Would it be possible to offer these controls in the paint tool itself ?

A couple corrections to your message:

>> The running icon must be pressed to complete the pending mask operation after every stroke

In the Mask Settings menu, you can select Update transformation with mask which will avoid this problem.

>> the composite tool is also missing functionalities, such as : lighten only and darken only

You have these options by selecting the Operation as Lighten or Darken.

>> spacing, fadeout, and stylus pressure

There are sliders for these in the Mask Brush tool.

Granted that I could add all the Mask features to Paint and vice versa, it would be a major undertaking which, at least for the way I use the program, would not be worthwhile. I'm not sure how you are trying to use it, but I rarely paint solid color over photographs and mostly use the Paint tool to fill in holes in a black background or something similar. Similarly I mostly use the Mask paint tool to fill in pinholes and other areas of a mask and not for paint shapes.

Thank you fot your reply.

I am currently without a computer, thus unable to experiment with your answers ... so I will comment from memory,

Does the Composite tool allow to adjust the darken only or lighten only on a per-stroke basis -- as the paint tool does ?

For me, the most common task with the paint tool is dodging and burning using soft light operation. I normally use high transparency and softness, which I continually adjust between strokes.

Shape control by the user could be useful for cloning as well.

OK, I see why you want this feature, and I misread your original message in that I did not realize you are talking about creating custom brush shapes.

Custom brush shapes is a feature I have thought about implementing for some time. Since brushes can be scaled larger and smaller, they would have to be defined at a large size such as 2000x2000 pixels so they could then be scaled according to the desired brush radius. You could create a custom mask using Composite with the mask tools. The mask could then be used as a brush shape with relatively little change to the existing code which currently generates a brush mask on the fly from the fixed set of available shapes. This change could then be propagated to all tools that use brushes.

Thank you very much for the recent addition of custom brush shapes