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I am animating in a blue pen (because I'm old fashioned!) and now I want to change that line to a colour, or even just brown. It seems there are two ways to do it, but neither is proving to be entirely satisfactory. I can either use the FX Stack and Color Replacer, or I can switch on Preserve Transparency directly on the layer and paint the colour over, or draw a box of colour over the whole frame, which then colours only the pixels, so colours the line from blue to whatever I choose. Thing is, I want to do it to all instances on the whole layer. Using Preserve Transparency only changes one instance, even though they are all selected. Using FX Stack and Color Replacer degrades the line considerably. I have tried adjusting the settings, but nothing makes it work without damaging the line work. Preserve Transparency is perfect, but will be tedious to use to change the line on every instance one at a time. I have attached an image here which shows what I mean about the quality of FX Stack Color Replacer. You can see that it's really bad, making that tool useless for this task (perhaps it's meant for solid colours). So my question really is about how I can change colour on more than one instance at a time, but while preserving the line quality, as Preserve Transparency does.

Activate the "preserve transparency" option, draw a filled rectangle on the first frame, then mark all frames and press return. Return makes tvpaint redo the last action (even painting a single line) and if you got seleced all frames before, your last action (drawing the rectangle) gets applied on all frames.

If you know how to do it it's pretty easy and fast, but I think it could be a single function in TVPaint, cause this whole return thing is not that obvious.

schwarzgrau wrote:Activate the "preserve transparency" option, draw a filled rectangle on the first frame, ...

+ hit [Undo], Select all frames, and hit [Enter],
if your "autobreak" option is Off, it should work,
if not, Shift [Enter], which is my shortkey for this command : like this, you will re-apply "on heads only", respecting the instances timing,
(no need to recompute every times anymore ...)

Fantastic tip. Thank you schwarzgrau. And good tip, Zigotto, for avoiding the bizarre recompute.