File Layers¶
File Layers are references to files outside of the document: If the referenced document updates, the file layer will update. Do not remove the original file on your computer once you add it to Krita. Deleting your original image will break the file layer. If Krita cannot find the original file, it’ll ask you where to find it. File layers cannot display animations. Krita uses a relative path to store the location of the file in the .kra. If you move the .kra but not the file, the file layer may be broken.
File Layers have the following scaling options:
- No Scaling
This’ll import the file layer with the full pixel-size.
- Scale to Image Size
Scales the file layer to fit exactly within the canvas boundaries of the image.
- Adapt to image resolution
If the imported layer and the image have a different resolution, it’ll scale the filelayer by scaling its resolution. In other words, import a 600dpi A4 image onto a 300dpi A4 image, and the filelayer will be scaled to fit precisely on the 300dpi image. Useful for comics, where the ink-layer is preferred to be at a higher resolution than the colors.
- Scaling Filter
Here you can set the scaling filter. Most of the time, you will want to use Bicubic. However when working with pixel art, it is more useful to use Nearest Neighbour which doesn’t try to mix colors.
Neu in Version 5.2.
File Layers can currently not be painted on. If you want to transform a file layer, you need to apply a transformation mask to it and use that.
In the layerdocker, next to the file layer only, there’s a little folder icon. Pressing that will open the file pointed at in Krita if it hadn’t yet. Using the properties you can make the file layer point to a different file.
You can turn any set of layers into a file layer by right-clicking them and doing . It will then open a save prompt for the file location and when done will save the file and replace the layer with a file layer pointing at that file.