Layer Panel

[frankinstien]

The layer thumbnails are way too small is there a way to enlarge them? My problem is when I have a lot of layers its hard to tell which is which when some of the layers have small images. 

[Pixey]

3 hours ago, frankinstien said:

way too small is there a way to enlarge them?

 

No, you can't.  What most of us do, is name the layers as we work    Double click on the layer window, and give it a name.

 

[Red ochre]

I agree with @frankinstien  . The example @Pixey has shared shows the problem of seeing what is on a layer, especially when it's a small object
against a chequerboard background.

I would love it if @Rick Brewster would consider a 'mouse over' 'call-out? (super big thumbnail)' to temporarily show individual layers at a much larger size when the mouse is over the thumbnail in the layers panel. Similar to the way Windows shows previews of open Pdn files when you hover over the taskbar.

 

I realise this would involve a lot of work but it would be extremely useful.

(Personally I rarely name layers ... only when I need to record a font and size really.)

[BlastOfBN]

@Red ochre As a person who works with a lot of layers on most of my PDN projects, that isn’t a bad idea.

 

Do I name my layers? It honestly just depends on what I’m working on.

 

A good example of me naming layers would be character asset files I’ve made with Paint.NET. I save these files in the  .pdn format, and have all the body parts split into different layers (e.g. legs, arms, eyes, head, etc.), and I paste them into animation software, so I can animate them (yes, I recently got into animation).

 

However, there are some times where I don’t name the layers. This often happens with files that have many, many layers in it, or for images that are big in their size (how visually large it is).

 

A bigger thumbnail preview whenever hovering the cursor over a layer in the layer panel isn’t such a bad idea, consider how it could really work whenever you have a layer with small objects in it, yet you have a rather large canvas.

 

One last thing; there should probably also be a feature to disable this feature, as it’s one of those features that might get in the way eventually.

[midora]

'Call Out' would be great for the layer thumb. Or a general zoom panel which could magnify layer thumb or image at the mouse position.
I hope that Rick can spend some time in the future to extend the pdn file format to allow layer groups and other layer specific infos (comments, channels, ... 😉

[Rick Brewster]

Do make sure you're using the latest version -- I made the thumbnails 20% larger in the new 5.0 release.

[midora]

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