So my friend whom I got to upgrade to NG has been complaining about one thing regarding Shade mode. According to him, it doesn’t work as it used to. So here’s what he said (translated as he doesn’t speak English well, just good enough to understand the interface):
In 6.5 when he was drawing using Shade mode, it was slowly increasing gradient color as he moved around which was great as he could get some cool gradients just by move brush around. However in NG it only goes one shade as he moves mouse around, requiring him to do multiple strokes to try and get similar effect (and it doesn’t look as good either).
I’ve made above paragraph in third person as to make it clear that it’s not my problem, however the behavior he explains looks like it could be used to get some cool effects if used correctly. Now, not sure whether it was a bug that was fixed or what, but I would certainly like to see it back as an option (since current behavior may be useful in some cases too). I know that gradient can be affected by pen pressure, but not everyone owns a tablet or wants to use one for pixel art.
Or if there is an option to re-enable this behavior in NG, I’d like to know how, my friend would be thrilled since he likes improvements in NG over 6.5 in general.
//edit: yup, according to changelog it was something that changed with 7.0.5
I changed this because other users complained about the shading being applied too fast. I checked how it worked in DPaint where this kind of painting was introduced and changed it to how it worked there.
I could add an option because I actually like both ways. But then bot shade modes (Shade, Multi Shade) should work the same which they did not in the past (Shade was step based, Multi Shade was movement based).
How about deriving it from Shade behavior and adding an option to the paint settings (the one where you e.g. set dithering) a checkbox saying “Old shade behavior”? Or something similar. I didn’t experience how it worked previously and my friend didn’t mention multi shade once so I believe it should be that way.
Alternatively, add a dropdown where you can choose from old shade behavior, old multishade behavior and the current one and have that settings applied to both Shade and Multishade (which I believe would be the best, most flexible option).
Would be cool too if shading could use the brush pixel values beyond just opaque/transparent, such as pixel index or colour brightness to shade multiple steps at once, so you could use like soft brushes in RGB-based image editors.
With the formula paint mode you can’t add the fast mode because during a stroke every pixel is only modified once.
This leads to the point that we could add another option in the paint mode settings that switches this on/off for all paint modes. This could indeed work, although I don’t know if it will lead to useful results. Some paint mode might make no sense with this options such as invert.
While that may be true that for some modes, like Inverse it may not make sense, I think from the implementational standpoint it’s easier just to make it apply for every mode - if you start adding specific checks so it sometimes work and sometimes doesn’t, it’ll lead to messy code - trust me I was there with my own software.
Plus you never know - maybe cumulative mode for the Inverse would lead to some cool/interesting results given the right colors and right palette.
