struggling with transform masks

[Matt_Wilkie]

I’m struggling to understand how to use Transform Masks. I don’t know if the problems I’m having are because I don’t grok the tool or because I’m on Android and it just doesn’t work quite right yet.

In the docs what does the sentence “The transform mode will be the same as the stored transform, regardless of what transform you had selected.” mean?

After a transform mask layer had been added to a layer, I select the transform tool in the tools dock, then open the tools options dock. In there are radio buttons for Position, Rotate, Scale, Shear.

Picking those options don’t have a reliable effect on what happens on the canvas. For example I select Rotate because I want to spin the layer, but when use my pen on the canvas the layer might bend, spin or scale seemingly at random.

There aren’t any visual cues I’ve noticed to indicate which handle is active at the moment. By careful quick taps on the handles I can sometimes appear to make one active or deactive, meaning the next pen action might rotate instead of skew. It’s really hit and miss though.

I’m using Galaxy Tab S6 Lite and Krita 4.4.2-beta.

Am I missing something or is the tool not working yet on Android?

[AhabGreybeard]

With Free tranform and Perspective transform, the radio buttons act to select the numerical control sliders/boxes. These give precise control of one particular parameter, by changing the numbers involved.

At all times, the on screen box handles and edges give manual click-hold-drag control of all of those values, with a cursor change to indicate what will be controlled.

I don’t know if there’s a problem here on Android. Can you use an ‘ordinary’ computer to compare the behaviour?

[Matt_Wilkie]

Thanks, using Krita on a desktop computer was a good idea. I see now how it’s supposed to work. On my tablet the cursor does not change when hovering over the free transform handles. Actually there is no cursor at all when using Free Transform and a pen. (I think only Brush tool shows a cursor.) However now I can use transform effectively and reliably, as aside from no cursor feedback the tool does work the same.

For anyone else coming across this thread and who does not have access to an ordinary computer for comparison Free Transform in the canvas works by:

• Corner handles Scales (resizes) the drawing uniformly keeping aspect ratio
• Middle handles Scales along that axis only
• Anywhere outside the box Rotates
• Anywhere inside the box moves Position. (If too close to a handle or perimeter line it might do something else.)
• Grabbing on a box perimeter line between handles and moving in same direction as the line is Shear

There is no click and drag, it’s just place pen on surface and drag. Double-tapping and the like doesn’t do anything (useful).

The Advanced Tool Panel is useful for knowing what effect using the pen on the canvas is having, e.g. that you’ve rotated by 15 degrees and resized from 400 to 435 px wide, but fiddling with widgets in the panel has no effect on how the pen behaves on the canvas.