Krita Selection & Transform Shortcuts

The core four follow convention. Ctrl+A selects the whole canvas, Ctrl+Shift+A deselects, Ctrl+Shift+D brings back the selection you just cleared with its shape and feathering intact, and Ctrl+Shift+I inverts. The reselect is more valuable than it first appears — a lasso outline traced carefully around a complex shape represents real effort, and deselecting one action too early is common enough that having a one-keystroke recovery changes how freely you are willing to press Ctrl+Shift+A. Inversion carries the trap. Ctrl+Shift+I inverts the selection; Ctrl+I applies the Invert colour filter to the layer. One modifier apart, and the results share nothing — one changes which pixels are editable, the other turns the artwork into a photographic negative. Photoshop refugees hit this more than anyone, because there Ctrl+I is bound to the selection inversion they are reaching for, so the muscle memory is not merely absent but actively wrong. The consolation is that the mistake is impossible to miss and Ctrl+Z reverses it cleanly. Selection modes are Krita's real departure from the norm. Rather than holding Shift to add and Alt to subtract on every drag, you press R for replace, A for add and S for subtract, and the mode persists until you change it. For a single quick selection the held-modifier approach is fine. For building a complicated selection out of eight or ten overlapping pieces, setting the mode once and drawing freely removes an entire class of error — the one where a modifier slips on the fourth drag and silently replaces everything you had assembled. The cost is that the mode is stateful, so a selection that behaves unexpectedly after you return from a break is usually a mode left set from earlier rather than anything wrong with the tool. Ctrl+H toggles the marching-ants overlay while leaving the selection fully active, which is useful for judging an edge without an animated dashed line running along it. It is also the single most reliable way to confuse yourself in Krita. With the overlay hidden and a selection still live, brush strokes appear in one region and vanish everywhere else, with no visible indication why. When painting stops working across most of the canvas, Ctrl+Shift+A is the first thing to try; if strokes immediately start landing again, a hidden selection was the cause. The selection tools themselves are separate tools with separate keys rather than variants sharing one slot: Ctrl+R for rectangular, J for elliptical. There is no cycling between them the way a single Photoshop tool slot would offer. Ctrl+T opens the transform tool, and it is worth opening the tool options once rather than assuming it matches the free-transform box the shortcut implies — Krita's transform covers free, perspective, warp, cage, liquify and mesh modes from the same entry point, and the liquify and mesh options in particular do work that would otherwise mean a filter or a round trip to another application. One more property of Krita's transform tool changes how you use it. The transform stays live until you commit it, which means you can switch modes mid-operation — start with a free scale, move to perspective, finish with a warp — and only the final result is applied to the pixels. Each intermediate state is not separately resampled, so the quality loss of a multi-step adjustment is the loss of one transform rather than three stacked on top of each other. This is the practical argument for doing all your repositioning in a single Ctrl+T session rather than committing and re-entering, particularly on a layer you have already transformed once before. Selections and transforms interact in a way that is easy to get wrong in either direction. With a selection active, Ctrl+T transforms only the selected pixels; with no selection, it transforms the entire layer. Both are legitimate, and the difference is invisible until the operation is already underway — so a transform that unexpectedly grabs the whole layer usually means a deselect you did not intend, and one that grabs a fragment usually means a selection you had forgotten was live. Ctrl+H hiding the marching ants makes both cases harder to diagnose, which is the recurring theme of this section: Krita gives you precise control over what is selected, and almost all of the confusion comes from losing track of what that currently is. Two keystrokes cover nearly every case — Ctrl+Shift+A to clear whatever is active, Ctrl+Shift+D to bring it straight back if clearing was the wrong call — which makes checking cheap enough that it is worth doing before diagnosing anything else.