Non Destructive Editing - Plans and roadmap

[pedropaulosuzuki]

Hello everyone! Hope y'all are doing well!

Transforming Pinta into a non-destructive workflow is not an easy task. Here are some things we'll need to take into consideration if we set this as a goal:

1. Text as object - #1337
2. Shapes as objects
3. Handles for gradients - #1533
4. Editable layer effects - Saving, loading and UI for displaying and editing effects, applied to: 4.1 Adjustments (Curves, Hue/Saturation, Levels, Brightness/Contrast, and so on) 4.2 Effects (Artistic, Blurs, Color, Distort, Noise, Object, Photo, Render, Stylize, and so on) 4.3 Layer transforms (rotate, flip, translate, shear, crop, resize, perspective transform, and so on)
5. Color as variable (which could be applied as properties for many objects as fill, stroke or gradient)
6. File formats for saving and loading all of the above

This is a big step into making Pinta a competitive image editor, but the refactoring won't be quick or easy. I'm opening this so that we can keep track of each step and what will be required in order to accomplish it, or even when and if we will want to tackle this endeavor.

Thanks and best regards.

[cameronwhite]

This is quite a large project :) so I think figuring out the right architecture is important.

The current approach for the "re-editable" text and shape tools was attempting to keep things simple for the end user (e.g. not having to be aware of special text layers, for example), but can be hard to discover and many actions will finalize the text. It's also probably the buggiest part of Pinta, too, with a long list of bugs on the launchpad tracker :)

Attached is a discussion from the original mailing list (which is no longer available - no one knows who had admin permissions) which had some ideas around this and things to consider

New TextLayer Proposal.pdf Proposed Addition of Text Layers.pdf

[rolandixor]

If this moves forward, I'd be happy to assist with UI/UX planning (mockups included)