Mask's transparency based on value, please

[MarioManzanares]

Hello!

I'm trying to migrate from Photoshop to Paintstorm, but I use masks a lot in my workflow and the way they work in Paintstorm is quite limited and frustrating since we are forced to use the brush/eraser method instead of actual values (black, white or other grayscale values) within the mask to define it's transparency. I noticed that colors appear in the Mask thumbnail, but they don't affect it's transparency. The brush/eraser current method doesn't give me very nice-looking results, which is a shame since Paintstorm has a very powerful brush engine that would allow very cool effects in the masks (blends between grays that would make smooth transitions).

It would also be very interesting if we could color-sample from the mask with the color-picker to blend better, just like in Photoshop.
Is this a possibility? Maybe we could have both methods implemented, and chose between them in the preferences panel?

I also noticed that right now we can't merge a masked layer with a regular layer underneath, which doesn't make a lot of sense. I tried to put all of them inside a group and then merge the group, but Paintstorm crashed.

PS: I'm mainly using the iOS version.

Thanks!!

[support]

hm, you can erase mask with blend if you enable "blend with transparency"... but if you want to draw in the mask you must choose eraser and eraser do not blend anything. You can use the trick with reverse transparency graph to erase by brush (blend with transparency required) but it's not very comfortable in front of simple black and white. I think you right about a mask type. But if you use a mask to crop erase/delete transparent type is more comfortable because you don't need to think about colors, just select and fill or delete. Maybe better to do some checkbox to choose mask type. We'll think about it.

[JulianK]

HI,
Although a veteran in digital art I am completely new to Paint Storm.
I'm very familiar with a plethora of Apps ranging from the Photoshop,Adobe Illustrator, Corel Painter, Krita etc... to Zbrush, Maya, Max and so forth.
After more than 20 years of using art creation packages, both at work and for private proposes, I am not easy to impress.
Paint Storm did impress me instantly.
The brush engine is fantastic. Maybe even the best out there. It just feel right and the vast brush customization options, although overwhelming for the novice make it possible to get a brush to behave exactly like any artist individually prefers.
There is no debating that this is the big strength of PaintStorm.

That being said, year long experience also taught me that no matter how advanced or revolutionary an app is in a specific feature, you also have to get basic and long established tools right. For many reason I'm not a big fan of Adobe anymore, but like them or not, they brought us layers and layer masks and the standard they have established simply works best. There is absolutely no need to reinvent the wheel and make masks work any different than most of us are used from Photoshop. Sometimes it's great to modify existing standards if they need modification, but breaking those which work just great, is never a good idea.
I'd love to make Paintstorm my main drawing/painting app, but as of now, whenever I need complex mask editing, I have to switch over to Photoshop, which should be unnecessary.
My advise and also my plea as a new fan of Paintstorm is, please make masks simply behave exactly like they do in Photoshop.

Thank you for an otherwise extremely promising Art tool.