Paint

Layers, shapes and text

An artwork contains two kinds of thing. Pixel layers contain pixels, set one by one: what you draw with the Pencil stays exactly as drawn. Shapes and text are vectors: outlines and words that stay editable, and are turned into pixels at the artwork's size whenever they change. You can mix both in one artwork, and the tools you use depend on which you're working on (see The tools).

Everything in an artwork is listed in the Contents panel, in the order it's drawn: the top of the list is in front. Drag items to reorder them, or move the selection with ⌘] and ⌘[. Add ⌥ to send it to the top or bottom. Drag up or down the hide or lock buttons to hide, show, lock or unlock every row you pass, as the first one went. While you edit a path, the same keys move the subpath in its path's paint order.

Whatever you add, drawn, pasted or made from a menu, goes directly above what is selected, or above what you selected last once nothing is. A selected frame or group takes a new pixel layer, adjustment or paste inside it, at its top.

Pixel layers

A pixel layer contains pixels you've drawn. Each has an opacity and a blend mode, and can be locked or hidden. The blend modes are Photoshop's, in its order and groups, from Darken and Multiply to Vivid Light, Divide and Luminosity, and they blend as they do in Photoshop. Hover over a mode in the list to see it on the canvas before choosing it. ⌘⇧L adds one, and ⌘E merges a layer into the one below it, blending as it's drawn. On a group, a shape or text, ⌘E first flattens it into a pixel layer; press it again to merge that down. With several things selected, it merges them into one layer.

Shapes

Shapes are vector paths: rectangles, ellipses, lines, and anything drawn with the Pen or the Vector Brush. A shape can have several fills and strokes.

⌘J joins two open paths, and closes one open path on its own. ⌘8 combines paths into one shape, and ⌘⇧8 splits them apart.

A rectangle or ellipse stays one when you turn it, resize it or move its points. Resizing a turned shape on its own stretches it along its own sides, and the selection box turns with it. Double-click it to move its points: moving two corners together along a side keeps a rectangle, and moving one corner on its own makes it a path. To make it a path on purpose, right-click it and choose Convert to > Path.

Text

Text is set in pixel fonts. Pixels Sans 4px, Pixels Sans 3px and Pixels Mono 4px are built in and free to use; fonts you make in the Font Editor are listed under Your fonts. Text takes fills and strokes the same way a shape does.

Size sets how far apart the font's pixels sit, and Pixel size how big each one is drawn: smaller than Size leaves gaps between them. Left blank, Pixel size follows Size. Double-click it, or clear what's typed in it, to make it blank again.

Typing Chinese into text whose font has no Han switches it to one of your bundles with a Han module: first one that holds the text's own font, then one with any Latin font, so the rest of the line still draws. With no such bundle, it switches to a Han module.

Groups

⌘G groups the selection, and ⌘⇧G ungroups it. On the canvas, a click selects the outermost group or frame around what's under the pointer, and each click after that goes one level further in; hold ⌘ as you click to select the item itself. A selection rectangle picks the same way: the outermost groups and frames it touches, or with ⌘ held, the items themselves. Enter selects what's in a group, and Esc steps back out. On a pixel layer, Enter selects all its pixels and switches to the Arrow tool, so you can drag them. In Contents, with nothing selected, ⌘-click a group or frame, or choose Open in separate panel from its right-click menu, to list its contents in a panel of its own. Frames, groups and artboards compares a group with a frame.

Boolean groups

A boolean group combines the shapes inside it. An operation makes one of the selected shapes, or turns a selected group of shapes into one:

The result takes the look of the topmost shape, or for Subtract the bottom one, the shape the others are cut from. It can work on the shapes' outlines or on their pixels, set in Properties. Flatten turns the result into a single shape.

An instance of a component made only of vector shapes can be combined too, as the area its shapes cover where the instance stands, at its scale. An instance with changes of its own (overrides), or of a component holding pixels, text or a filled frame, can't. In the right-click menu of Contents, the operations are under Boolean.

Masks

A mask crops the items above it to its own shape. Select an item and choose Use as mask from the right-click menu, or press ⌃⌥M. The mask itself isn't drawn. It crops everything above it in the same group or frame, up to the next mask. Where the mask is partly transparent, what it shows is too. With several items selected, ⌃⌥M groups them and makes the bottom one the mask.

Any item can be a mask: a pixel layer, a shape, text, a group or a frame. Hide a mask to see what it's cropping. Remove mask, or the Mask switch under Opacity in Properties, turns it back into an ordinary item. In Contents, a mask has its own icon, and the items it crops are indented above it. Blend modes on those items reach everything beneath, as in a masked Photoshop group: a Multiply shadow cropped by a mask darkens what's under it, within the mask's shape.

Turn on Invert mask under Opacity to have a mask work the other way: it hides the items above where it has pixels and shows them everywhere else. A highlight then stays clear of a shadow drawn by the mask, an instance of the shadow's component included, without a second shape for the lit part.

Clipping masks

A clipping mask works the other way round, as in Photoshop. Choose Create clipping mask, turn on Clip to below under Opacity in Properties, or ⌥-click its row in Contents, on the item you want cropped: it clips to the item below it, which stays drawn. Shading, highlights and texture then stay inside the shape beneath, however you paint them. Several items in a row can clip to the same base. Each clipped item has a down arrow in Contents.

Hiding the base hides everything clipped to it, and the clipped items take on the base's opacity. With a Normal base, a clipped item's blend mode reaches everything beneath the base, so Multiply shading clipped to a colour darkens it together with whatever shows through it. A base with a blend mode of its own is drawn with its clipped items as one piece and blended as a whole, as Photoshop's Blend Clipped Layers as Group does. Release clipping mask frees an item again.

Adjustments

An adjustment changes the colours of everything beneath it, as Photoshop's adjustment layers do, and has no pixels of its own. Add one with New adjustment, the knob beside New pixel layer in Contents. The menu lists them as Photoshop does: Brightness/Contrast, Levels, Curves and Exposure; Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Colour Balance, Black & White, Photo Filter and Channel Mixer; Invert, Posterise, Threshold, Gradient Map and Selective Colour. It goes above the selected item, and its settings open in Properties, where the canvas follows every change.

Inside a Normal group or frame it changes only the group's contents; in a Pass through group it reaches everything beneath the group too. Clip it to an item to change that item alone, or put a mask beneath it to limit it to the mask's shape. Its opacity sets how strongly it applies, and its blend mode how the adjusted picture blends with the one beneath: Curves in Luminosity changes brightness and leaves the colours as they were.

In Curves, press on the line to add a point and drag it; drag a point well outside the plot to remove it. The other channels' curves show faintly behind the one being edited. Exposure, Vibrance, Hue/Saturation, Colour Balance, Black & White, Photo Filter and Selective Colour come close to Photoshop's results without matching them exactly. Not supported yet: adjustments in Layered SVG exports (they are left out; a Flat SVG draws them), and changing Hue/Saturation for a single range of colours (a file from Photoshop keeps its settings, but only the master settings can be edited).

To bake adjustments into what they reach, right-click them in Contents and choose Bake into layers..., or bake them all with Bake all adjustments... at the bottom of the New adjustment menu, Bake adjustments... in Artwork setup, or Bake all adjustments in Search. Each adjustment is worked into the colours of the items it reaches and removed; every layer stays a layer of its own, and the picture stays as it is, so any of them can be baked while the rest stay live. The bake happens at once, and undo takes it back; a dialog appears only when there is something to choose. Pixels in free colours take their new colours exactly. For pixels in swatches, Swatch colours chooses: Update and add swatches gives a swatch its new colour when every use of it came out as one colour, and links the other results to a swatch of exactly that colour or a new one; Free colours makes the baked pixels free colours and leaves the palette alone. Remove swatches no longer used tidies the palette afterwards. Shapes, text and frames are recoloured and stay editable. Instances, sprites and image fills can't take the result in place: the dialog lists them and converts them to pixel layers first, unless you untick it. The whole bake undoes in one step.

Opacity

Press a digit to set the selection's opacity: 1 is 10%, 5 is 50% and 0 is 100%. Two digits in quick succession set an exact value, so 55 gives 55%.

Opacity is dithered: below 100%, an item keeps some of its pixels and drops the rest in a pattern, so it stays crisp pixel art. The button beside the value in the Opacity section of Properties switches an item to smooth transparency instead; images set as references fade smoothly unless you switch dithering on. Algorithm chooses the pattern, and Lattice makes it keep or drop whole cells, such as 2×2 blocks, or the cells of one of the artwork's grids.

Effects

A pixel layer, a shape or a piece of text can carry effects, added under Effects in Properties. They work from the top of the list down, each from what the ones above it have drawn, so their order matters. A Stroke draws a ring of a colour round the item, and a second stroke rings the first, which is how lettering gets a halo and an outline. A Feather softens the edge of everything above it in the list, dithering the soft part so it stays pixel art; a stroke below a feather rings the softened shape. Pattern on decides whether the dither stays still on the artwork while the item moves, or moves with the item. A Drop shadow casts everything above it in the list onto the ground, from one of the artwork's lights, by the item's Depth (its Z in Properties, how far it stands off the ground; adding a shadow to an item on the ground lifts it to 4). A lamp hangs at a place and a height, so shadows fan out from it and stretch with distance; a sun has only a direction and an elevation, so every shadow it casts falls the same way. Add one from the Contents window's light button; the first made is the default light, which a shadow set to Default light casts from, and a light that's off casts nothing. A lamp is dragged on the canvas; a selected sun shows a dial round the middle of the view whose knob turns its direction; a selected item with a shadow shows a grip where its shadow lands, and dragging it raises or lowers the item. Knockout carves the shadow out where the item has pixels; Follows opacity fades the shadow with the item. A shadow lands on the ground and on every item drawn under its caster that stands lower, each piece cast by the depth between the two, so it's short and sharp on a card just below and long and soft on the ground, and shows only over that item's pixels. Receives shadows, in the Depth section, turns that off for a highlight or a glint that isn't a surface. A Thickness stands the item up as a block: its silhouette swept to a depth along an angle (straight down by default, as the buttons and the enamel lettering), the sides filled and an outline drawn round the block and down its corner edges, all behind the item. Corner edges picks the outer corners, where the front meets the sides, or every inner corner drawn as a fold. The fill's colour is Auto unless you pick a swatch: a shade darker than the colour most used along the item's edges, and the outline a shade darker again. An effect above a Thickness works from the whole block, so a Drop shadow above it casts the block and a Stroke rings it. Anything more than one flat side colour, such as shaded faces or perspective, is painted by hand. Effects show in exports and previews as they do on the canvas. Not supported yet: effects on groups, frames and instances, and groups or frames as surfaces.