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My illustration practice relies on a ton of transparency, and I get by fine with a much lower-precision control of it. Illustrator lets me set up keyboard shor

My illustration practice relies on a ton of transparency, and I get by fine with a much lower-precision control of it. Illustrator lets me set up keyboard shortcuts to 0/10/20/30/40/50/60/70/80/90/100% opacity and this is how I assign the vast majority of my opacity levels. Effectively I'm "losing" a lot more steps than just the difference between 100 and 255. I'm also usually using some kind of blur on my shading, possibly filling them with a gradient that has different opacity levels on its stops, so there's a lot of subtler opacity happening in my work. Sometimes there's an additional modifier created by changing the opacity level of a group of translucent shapes, or an entire layer. Or a complex appearance stack of multiple fills and strokes applied to single paths, each of which has their own opacity level (and mode!) that's modified by the path's overall opacity. But in terms of my interaction with the whole system it's largely just eleven levels spread out across 0%-100%. More precision would be nice now and then I suppose, I wouldn't complain if it existed, but in practice it's something I rarely need. Bjango does a bunch of super-fiddly UI work so maybe they need it more, I dunno.

marcedwards 5y ago
I use those shortcuts as well, and often change things in 5% or 10% jumps. This is a really deep topic though, and some of the issues are from cumulative rounding errors, which can happen if you stack lots of layers or stack layer effects. It’ll also depend if you’re just moving sliders around until things look good (which is great!), or if you’re doing something that require exact values (building LUTs to process map tiles etc). My main concern is that information is being thrown out at the input UI. As far as I can tell, Illustrator stores opacity as 8bit values internally. This can be tested by using the blend tool on objects with similar opacities. I just want our tools to be better.
- egypturnash 5y ago
  With Illustrator, getting any change sure is an uphill battle. I wonder how many years it’ll be before selection rectangles are drawn properly when the canvas is rotated?
  - marcedwards 5y ago
    You’re right, and I have no idea. I hope that gets fixed for you! My main issue is a bug that was introduced a few versions ago — if “Grids in Back” is turned on, the entire app crawls and is completely unusable. Like, multi-second delays between clicks. Having grids on and in the background is entirely how I used to work. Now I can’t.

marcedwards 5y ago

I use those shortcuts as well, and often change things in 5% or 10% jumps. This is a really deep topic though, and some of the issues are from cumulative rounding errors, which can happen if you stack lots of layers or stack layer effects. It’ll also depend if you’re just moving sliders around until things look good (which is great!), or if you’re doing something that require exact values (building LUTs to process map tiles etc). My main concern is that information is being thrown out at the input UI. As far as I can tell, Illustrator stores opacity as 8bit values internally. This can be tested by using the blend tool on objects with similar opacities. I just want our tools to be better.

egypturnash 5y ago
With Illustrator, getting any change sure is an uphill battle. I wonder how many years it’ll be before selection rectangles are drawn properly when the canvas is rotated?
- marcedwards 5y ago
  You’re right, and I have no idea. I hope that gets fixed for you! My main issue is a bug that was introduced a few versions ago — if “Grids in Back” is turned on, the entire app crawls and is completely unusable. Like, multi-second delays between clicks. Having grids on and in the background is entirely how I used to work. Now I can’t.