CorelDRAW Ideas Portal
The mesh warp effect on Photopaint is awful. I wanted to use it to match the folds in a shirt with a logo.
you can't see the image below it. I can't match the folds if I can't see the folds.
You can't zoom in on just the image you want to work on. It makes it the same size as the entire file.
Voted. Same effect exists in CorelDRAW (Effects > Distort > Mesh Warp) with the same problem, so a fix should land in both.
I think the visibility complaint points at something more specific than the preview being bad. The real issue is that it's a dialog at all. You're editing a picture of your image in a small box, instead of editing the object on the canvas. That's why you can't see what's underneath and can't zoom the way you would anywhere else.
There's a worked-out answer to this inside Corel already — PaintShop Pro's Mesh Warp tool. It puts the grid straight onto the image on the canvas and you drag the nodes there. Mesh density is set independently for horizontal and vertical. You can reconfigure the grid mid-edit without losing the deformations you've already made. And node positions can be saved as a deformation map and reapplied to other images.
PaintShop Pro came in through the Jasc acquisition and is a separate codebase, so this obviously isn't "the code already exists, just move it across". But the design questions are answered there — how density gets set, how to change the grid without throwing away work, how a deformation becomes reusable. That's the part worth borrowing.
One thing I'd add on top: let the grid take its curvature from a selected object or the current selection, instead of always starting as a flat uniform grid. A cylinder, a cone, a shirt outline — the shape is usually already on the canvas.