I've been using Inkscape for a while now, and aside from its tendency to crash spectacularly, it has been very useful. I know I'm not taking full advantage of it, though, and when exploring some of the more advanced options, I've hit some problems. First of all, how are filters applied? I know many of them are resolution-dependent (or at least some are), so I can understand why some of my creations look different at different scales. No big deal. What really baffles me is the behavior of a distorted, resized, or rotated object that has had a filter applied. If I apply a filter and increase the size of the object, the filter also expands (leading to, say, larger bumps in my turbulence primitives). I then try to remove the filter and reapply - same outcome. When I change the size of an unfiltered object, then apply the filter, the scale of the effect is not distorted. Some of the premade filters in the .47 builds act very strange when rotated, sometimes reapplying themselves in light of the transformation. Is there a clear way to handle this behavior? I am not opposed to learning the SVG code behind it.

My other question(s) deal with layers. I had been using Inkscape to design web graphics with shadows, highlights, and backgrounds, so the majority of my work would have been much easier if I had designed elements in layers. Instead, I had to use a lot of alt-clicking. I figured the implementation of layers had something to do with the way SVG worked, but from what I see, the layers are simply glorified groupings with some additional code. This is a shame, because nearly any other modern graphics software will have every element displayed as a layer. Has anyone developed a way to observe all objects, and not just layers, by their z-indices? I know this can be an "Inkscape isn't photoshop" issue, but the current implementation seems to be completely opposite of user-friendly or intuitive, and the layer explorer seems all but hidden. I would have never even discovered layers without looking through a number of tutorials, and I'm still not convinced of their efficiency.

In that same vein, can the blending modes of layers be applied in another fashion? I like to use effects like multiply and screen for my highlights and shadows, but placing them on a separate layer is cumbersome and, at the moment, very difficult to do habitually.

I'm not that familiar with filters, but I'd imagine that you have to tweak the filter options to adjust it to a larger object size.

Inkscape has layers, Shift + Ctrl +L brings up the Layers dialog. It doesn't show all the objects contained but its been requested before many times and it will be implemented eventually (probably as an XML editor enhancement).

Until then you can use XML editor (Shift + Ctrl + x), there are no nice colors to visually separate different objects and you can't do all the Photoshop tricks through it (clipping and whatnot) but you can see a list of your objects in z order (or should I say reverse order because objects on top of the editor are lower in the drawing.) Edit the IDs of the objects so they will serve as object names when viewed in XML editor.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/181578

At first you could apply a blending mode to any object, it was implemented in Fill and Stroke dialog, but there were some technical problems so it was decided to move the blending modes to layers.