They could probably also go the Krita route with an actual reference tool. I could imagine them implementing something similar. This might be a bad comparison but in Clip Studio Paint you can toggle a reference layer and clearly see the layer marked as well. (The menus of the apps could be improved with a few hours of development time, but that's likely to be eternally trapped near the bottom of a prioritised list of improvements.) That should also be available in the right-click menu of a Group, but it's missing. I'm not talking about the colour tag that can be set for any object.Īccess the Layer colour chooser by right-clicking the Layer in Layers panel and picking Properties at the bottom of the menu.Ī Group can be converted to a Layer by Promote Group To Layer in the app Layer menu. Layer (capital L) objects have a user-definable colour (defaulting to blue) that is used for the paths and bounding boxes of the members of the Layer. AI lets you change that colour per group but I don't think you have an option to change it at all in AD or have I missed it? On a related note regarding using reference photos, blue lines for the object outline can be hard to work with if your reference uses the same sort of shade of blue, the Porsche was like that. Also I will sometimes put a colour coded bookmark layer or empty group (I used to highlight it by the label, ****** DESCRIPTION ******), move the real group right to the top, work on it and then move it back (you don't always need a bookmark depending what you are working on). I never bother setting transparency either as you just can't see enough detail but I do a silly amount of exports. I sometimes use the colour coding to make it a bit easier to find the group I'm working on (usually red as it shows up the best on the mac) but when you've loads it can still takes time to find it. Before the layer selection "fix" it used to drive me mad now it can just be annoying. SERIF: Please have a look at the following posts from examples from Krita, that does have reference layer and tools.
I know I can keep the photo layer to fx 50% transparent to see both vector and pixels, but I need photo at 100% to compare with my work and to get an idea about how to vector paint the various details and sense?
When drawing on top on an image (photo) - something I do quite a lot for weeks - I toggle displaying of the photo on and off.