I’m totally new to Krita and have the following issue/question:
When I import a PNG photo with transparent background as a new layer, Krita cuts off the empty parts of the photo with transparent background and resizes the photo and new layer accordingly. The photo I’m importing has a portrait on it which stretches out for the full height of the photo, but has empty spaces to the left and right side of the photo in order to force the photo to be square.
How can I prevent the above described behavior of Krita and have it import images as they are without adapting them?
With a .png image file that has central content and transparency to the left/right, or top/bottom, I don’t see that happening if I use Layer → Import/Export to bring it into krita.
Is that how you did it?
Can you upload the original .png file and a full screen screenshot showing what happens as you described?
This sounds like your png is bigger than the resolution of the canvas.
For example: When you put a 800x800 px PNG file with a 200 px transparent border into a KRA file with a 500x500 pixel canvas it would appear to be cropped and zoomed in but in reality the canvas is just too small.
Check if the canvas has the same dimensions as the file you are importing.
Unfortunately I cannot share picture/project I’m working on yet publicly (it’s a draft for a newspaper ad)…
The image I’m working on is 4370 x 1004 px (indicated in the right corner of the bottom status bar) and the transparent PNG photo I’m importing as a layer (either via drag & drop from the file browser in Mac OS X or via Layer → Import/Export… → Import Layer…) is 687 x 687 px.
Even when Krita is removing the transparent part for some reason, since your canvas is bigger and has different dimensions, wouldn’t you have to move and transform the layer anyway to make it fit the correct place?
I’m slightly reducing the size of the photo after importing as a new layer, yes.
I’m not changing the dimensions though. I cannot resize the imported photo as a square as the dimensions after importing as a new layer are not 1:1 anymore…
I added censored screenshots as proposed in order to show you more clearly what I’m exactly doing.
Please note that the imported photo was created in Photoscape X (just discovered Krita a couple of days ago
Also, I am using Mac OS X and Krita in German language.
I didn’t mention that before as I didn’t think it’s relevant. Is it maybe?
When I imported the photo as a new layer I want to resize it as a square and the then presented dimensions (without any change to the new layer from my side so far) clearly show that the photo got cropped during importing…
From what I understand your actual problem is you want to keep the proportions while resizing.
Switch to the layer you want to transform.
Activate the transform tool by clicking on it or press ctrl + T (or its Mac OS equivalent)
Now you should see a frame around the layer content with a few little squares as handles. This frame only encloses opaque pixels because transforming transparent ones does nothing.
Now click and hold on one of the corner handles and when you drag while holding ctrl (at least that’s how it works on non macs) it will keep the proportions.
Resize to your desired size by dragging the corner handles while holding down ctrl.
As an alternative to 4 you can also click on “scale” (Skalieren) and then activate the “keep proportions” button indicated by a broken/connected chain-link icon in the tool options docker (Werkzeugeigenschaften). You may have to scroll down a bit since your docker seems too small.
When you do it that way you can only scale proportionally and nothing else.
You can also click this chain link icon in the resize dialog you currently try to use and then only edit one of the input fields, the other one will be automatically set correctly so it wont get distorted.
That’s what I ended up doing in the meantime. I changed only the height to the other imported photos and let Krita decide on the width accordingly. Krita seems to ignore the original image size as you indicated in your explanation…
No it doesn’t. When you would open the PNG as an image itself with Krita, all the transparent parts still would be there. But layers are not the same as images. For layers transparent parts are simply empty space. That’s why it doesn’t get captured by the transform tool because empty space can’t be transformed.
However I think it could work like you want it when you use the layer transform menu option without having the transform tool active at the time. Depending on Krita even importing empty space.
A slightly different question I’m facing if I may:
How can I align elements (on different layers) like i.e. in PowerPoint?
In this case I imported 5 portraits as separate layers, resized them to be the same size and now I would lime to align them to the top/left/bottom/right.
I already searched YouTube for a tutorial on this, but didn’t find anything.
In the Krita doc there seems to be an alignment tool, but only for vector shapes… am I out of luck or am I missing something?
Please let me know if I should push this (new) question into a separate thread.
As far as I know this is not possible at all. The closest you could get is the snapping options buts still manual positioning.
You see, Krita is an application that is meant for digital painting only and doesn’t aim to be more than that, unlike Photoshop for example. Therefore it lacks pretty much all the functionality a designer like you would need.
A software like Scribus is probably more suited to your needs
As @Takiro explained earlier, when the .png image is imported into a layer, the transparent pixels have no ‘significance’ inside krita and so are ignored by the Transform tool.
If you’re very keen to keep track of the relative size and edges of the original image, for your own registration and manipulation purposes, you could edit the original .png images to put a thin (maybe 2px) border around them.
You’d be able to see this and it would be acted on by the Transform Tool as part of the ‘significant’ layer content.
Then you could erase the borders after all work has been finished.
Thanks for the quick response and clarification.
I was indeed looking for a free alternative to Photoshop and liked the digital painting tools Krita has to offer (just starting with digital painting) and thought I’d see how much of the other tasks I can accomplish with it.
I might have a look at Gimp for these kind of tasks then…
Thanks for the hint, I’ll maybe try that next time I run into such an issue in Krita.
For the time being I’ll stick to the above mentioned method in order to finish the project as time is starting to press…
GIMP does note and keep a record of imported image size when you do
File → Open As Layers because layers in GIMP can be different sizes and it will highlight the boundary of a layer and also pay attention to transparent pixels in its assesment of the layer size when an image is opened as a layer.
It also has specific layer resizing and manipulation operations.
Sounds like what I’m used to, thanks for the clarification and the support guys!
I will use Krita mainly for digital painting then… especially the perspective tools will come in quite handy when just starting out to (digital) painting…
