I requested this in bug 449592 but it’s been suggested this should be discussed with other artists. I hope this is the right place for that.
I’ve tried switching to Krita several times but its layer stack is the one thing that I found the most problematic and ultimately always puts me off: as mentioned in the bug I am autistic and one thing that I find generally hard is to parse through many layers that all look the same. As Krita doesn’t have a prominent enough difference between groups/folders and sub-layers, I figured I’d get around this by colouring groups as I created them, but this happens:
I only selected the group itself, the same way I’d select a folder in Photoshop or CSP or Sai, but the whole tree, subfolders included got recoloured.
When I click on the group itself again and use transparent instead, this is the result:
As you can see the clipping group parent is transparent, but the children are still orange.
This seems like inconsistent behaviour to me, it’s certainly not how any Sai, Photoshop or CSP behave when recolouring layers operate.
Personally I’d much prefer it if only the selected area got recoloured so, in my case above only the parent would get coloured and if I wanted the children to be recoloured as well I’d hold down SHIFT and select them first, then recolour the lot. This also seems like a much more intuitive behaviour, as only what is actually manually selected gets recoloured (and it really is how I’ve seen this operation work anywhere else I’ve tried it).
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The reason why this is important to me to me is that I regularly have files with 100+ layers and several groups and having the top layer a different colour in each group makes it easy for me to find what I need at a glance. I personally don’t find the layer preview useful for that.
Currently having to colour, then de-colour layers to make it easy for me to parse really is a huge time sink and it means I just can’t use Krita for work despite liking the brush engine a lot, but the layers are just not easy to parse for me.