Problem: While working in Umoupen, layer management, clipping and coloring is a very unintuitive workflow; navigating right-click menus and being unable to keybind basic shortcuts such as creating a new folder, creates a lot of friction. Coloring animation while keeping lineart and color layers separate is also frustrating.

My workflow from previously animating in Krita: When I want to color, I create my lineart, flat color, shadows, highlight layers in advance (usually, I have this setup in advance with Krita’s templates feature, but this might need to be a separate idea topic); each layer is usually in their own respective group folder, and given their own unique color label. Depending on what I want to color using the fill tool, I will toggle on one or more color labels and use them as reference while I color. If I want to color a layer non-destructively, such as my genga highlights or shadows layer, I will make an additional layer above those layers and clip it to the highlights/shadows via inherit alpha (In Umoupen, this requires me to right-click and click “Clip to Layer Below”. In Krita, the “Inherit Alpha” toggle is immediately accessible in the Layers docker/menu.

I don’t know any other app that does this, so Krita is my only frame of reference. Sorry if I have been unable to explain it properly. The functionality is better explained here in Krita’s documentation with images (I am unable to share them directly here on this forum post): https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/layers_and_masks.html https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/tools/fill.html

Color labeling and fill-tool referencing color labels:

I find that color labeling layers in Krita makes the coloring process extremely easy and convenient.

Krita’s implementation of the feature: https://docs.krita.org/en/reference_manual/tools/fill.html “Color Labeled Layers - Use only the layers specified with a certain color label. This is useful for complex images, where you might have multiple lineart layers. Label them with the appropriate color label and use these labels to mark which layers to use as a reference.”

Ex: a lineart layer labeled “red” will serve as the reference for the fill tool if the tool is also set to that same “red”. Umoupen’s current functionality for the fill tool (the only options being “Visible Layers” or “Selected Layers”) is much less convenient or efficient for my workflow.

Inherit Alpha: https://docs.krita.org/en/user_manual/layers_and_masks.html#inherit-alpha-or-clipping-layers

The Inherit Alpha feature is also something that I find far more efficient and intuitive in my workflow than that of CSP or Photoshop’s. It’s as simple as grouping layers you want to clip and toggling the layers above your base layer with the “Inherit Alpha” toggle.

“It can be somewhat hard to figure out how the inherit alpha feature works in Krita for the first time. Once you click on the inherit alpha icon on the layer stack, the pixels of the layer you are painting on are confined to the combined pixel area of all the layers below it. That means if you have the default white background layer as first layer, clicking on the inherit alpha icon and painting on any layer above will seem to have no effect as the entire canvas is filled with white. Hence, it is advised to put the base layer that you want the pixels to clip in a group layer.”

hope this feature gets taken into consideration, and thanks for reading. I really like Umoupen’s high-speed performance, but if it was just a bit more configurable in the same fashion as Krita, and if I could transfer my Krita workflow over 1-to-1, it would become the perfect animation software for me personally.