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Limner User Manual
Getting around
- Getting Started - Welcome to Limner, a Windows-native raster and vector painting app. This page walks you from the installer to your first finished PNG: installing and updating, creating and opening documents, saving your work, and a quick five-minute drawing exercise.
- Limner Plus - Limner has a free core for everyday raster art, and a Plus tier that adds the vector, animation, comic, and pro-production tools. During the open beta, Plus is free: request a key, paste it in, and everything unlocks. Plus will become a paid upgrade once the beta ends.
- The Interface - Limner keeps every painting control inside one window, arranged so the canvas stays front and centre and the tools sit close to your hand. This page walks through each zone of the window from top to bottom, then covers the things you will touch most: the tool strip, the status bar, the document tabs, and how to rearrange the panels into a workspace that suits you.
- Menus Reference - This page lists every item in Limner's nine menus: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, and Help. For each item you get the exact on-screen label, what it does, the named shortcut where one exists, and when the item is greyed out (disabled).
Tools
- Tools Reference - Limner's tools live on the left tool strip. Click a tool to select it, or press its keyboard shortcut. Many tools share a group with a flyout (a small popup); hold a tool key or long-press a group to reorder them. Every shortcut shown here is the default and can be changed in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.
- Brush Tool - The Brush is Limner's main painting tool. It lays down colour with the active brush, dab by dab, along the path you draw. Strokes are stamped on a background worker thread, so the canvas stays responsive even with a large brush on a big document: you draw, the worker stamps, and the live preview appears as it catches up.
- Eraser Tool - The Eraser clears pixels back to transparency. It shares the same stroke engine as the Brush, so it feels identical to paint: same size ring, same pressure response, same stabilizer. The only difference is that instead of laying down colour, it removes it.
- Smudge and Blur Tools - The Smudge and Blur tools are Limner's two "blend" tools. They do not lay down new paint from your colour swatch. Instead they rework the colour that is already on the canvas: Smudge drags it along your stroke, and Blur softens it. Both are great for finishing work, like pulling highlights into shadow, melting hard edges, or adding depth-of-field haze.
- Fill Bucket Tool - The Fill Bucket floods a region of the canvas with the active color in one click. Click inside an area and Limner finds the connected patch of similar color around the point and pours paint into it, stopping at edges where the color changes (your line art, for example). It is the fastest way to lay down flats under inked drawings or to block in solid shapes.
- Gradient Tool - The Gradient tool fills an area with a smooth blend between two or more colors. Pick a gradient, then drag across the canvas: the start of your drag is the beginning of the ramp and the end of your drag is the end of it. The drag direction and length set the angle and the spread.
- Rectangle, Ellipse, and Line Tools - Limner has three raster shape tools for drawing clean geometry by dragging on the canvas: Rectangle, Ellipse, and Line. They all draw onto the active layer and fold into the same undo history as a brush stroke, so anything they place can be undone or re-edited.
- Text Tool - Click anywhere on the canvas to place editable text. Limner keeps the text re-editable on its own text layer: change the words, font, size, colour, or position any time, then flatten to plain pixels only when you are ready. Default shortcut: T (rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts).
- Transform and Layer Move - Transform and Layer Move both lift pixels off your layers into a single free transform, where you can move, scale, rotate, and flip them on the canvas before committing. The two tools differ only in what they pick up: Transform works on the current selection, while Layer Move grabs the whole active layer.
- Mesh Warp Tool - The Mesh Warp tool lifts the active layer onto a small grid of draggable control points so you can bend, stretch, and reshape the artwork by hand. Grab a point, pull it, and the pixels follow with a live preview. When the shape looks right, confirm it. If not, reset the grid or cancel and nothing changes.
- Liquefy Tool - The Liquefy tool lets you push, pinch, bloat, and twirl the pixels of the active layer with a brush, as if the artwork were wet paint. It is perfect for nudging a silhouette, fixing a wobbly line, tweaking a facial feature, or adding a bit of organic flow. Nothing is permanent until you confirm, so you can experiment freely.
- Eyedropper Tool - The Eyedropper picks up a color from your canvas and makes it the active brush color. Click anywhere on the artwork and Limner reads the color you see at that point, then loads it ready to paint with. It is the fastest way to match an existing color exactly, whether you are continuing a stroke, building a palette, or sampling from a photo.
Working with your artwork
- Layers - Layers let you build an image in independent, stackable pieces: line art on top, flat colours below, a background at the bottom. Each layer keeps its own pixels, blend mode, opacity, visibility, and locks, so you can change one part without disturbing the rest. This page is both the concept guide and the reference for the Layers panel.
- Selections - A selection limits where your edits land. Draw one with a marquee, lasso, polygon, or the Magic Wand, then paint, fill, transform, copy, or delete only inside it. With nothing selected, every tool acts on the whole canvas.
- Color - The Color panel is where you choose what you paint with. Pick a color on the HSV wheel, fine-tune it with channel sliders, type an exact hex value, build up palettes you reuse, and let harmony modes suggest colors that go together. This page is both the concept guide and the full reference for every control on the Color tab.
- Brushes: Library and Picker - Every mark the Brush tool makes comes from a brush: a preset that bundles a tip shape, pressure dynamics, spacing, texture, and dozens of other settings. Limner ships a full library of brushes, lets you organise them into folders, build your own, and trade them with other apps as Photoshop .abr files.
- Brush Settings Panel - The Brush Settings panel is Limner's deep per-brush editor. It is where every detail of the active brush lives: size and hardness, opacity and flow, the pressure and tilt response, taper, the stabilizer, multi-tip sets, grain and texture, scatter, the per-brush blend (Ink) mode, and wet color mixing. Edit anything here and the change applies to the active brush immediately.
- Filters and Adjustments - Limner's filters are non-destructive-feeling tonal and colour adjustments you preview live and then commit in one step. Every filter lives under the Filter menu and works the same way: open the dialog, watch the preview update on your canvas as you drag, then press Apply to keep the result or Cancel to throw it away.
Vector mode
- Vector Mode and Tools - Vector mode is Limner's Illustrator-style workspace for drawing editable shapes. Instead of painting pixels, you build resolution-independent paths (cubic Bezier curves) with a fill and a stroke, then keep editing the points, the colors, and the line weight forever without losing quality. This page covers entering Vector mode and every tool in the Vector tool strip.
- Vector Editing and Output - This page covers everything you do after you draw a vector object: setting its fill and stroke, moving and resizing it precisely, combining shapes with booleans, grouping and clipping, aligning, and finally getting the artwork out of Limner as SVG. It applies to Vector mode (the Illustrator style editable path model). For drawing the objects in the first place (Pen, Pencil, live shapes, Direct Select, and the rest), see Vector Mode.
Animation mode
- Animation Mode - Animation mode is Limner's third workspace: a frame-by-frame (cel) animation studio built around a per-layer timeline. You draw a pose, add a frame, draw the next pose, and play it back. It uses the same brushes, layers, and painting tools as Illustration mode, and adds a full-width Timeline along the bottom, onion skin, playback, and export to GIF, MP4, or a numbered PNG sequence. This page covers entering Animation mode and every part of the timeline.
Book
- Book: Comics and Manga - A Book is Limner's multi-page comic, manga, or book project: an ordered list of pages held together in a single file, with a Page Manager board to add, reorder, and page through them. A Book is a NEW axis layered over the workspaces, not a fourth one. Each page is its own normal document that you draw with the usual Illustration, Vector, or Animation tools, and a page can be in a different workspace from its neighbours. On top of that, a Book adds comic-specific helpers: per-page bleed / trim / safe guides and a Panel tool for laying out frames.
Aids, files, and setup
- Construction Aids: Rulers, Symmetry, Perspective - Construction aids are drawing guides that snap your strokes to clean geometry: straight lines, parallel lines, circles, mirror copies, and perspective lines that converge on vanishing points. They do not paint. They constrain whatever you paint next with the Brush, the Line and Shape tools (see Shapes), and most other stroke tools.
- File Formats and Export - Limner reads and writes its own native project format and exchanges work with other apps through PSD, ABR, SVG, PNG, and JPEG. This page lists every format the app handles, what each one stores, and how to use the matching commands.
- Timelapse - Limner can record your whole painting session and play it back as a sped-up video. One recorded frame plays back per stroke (or per timed sample), so a few hours of work becomes a short, satisfying clip you can post or keep. The recording is saved inside the document, so you can stop, close Limner, reopen the file days later, and pick up the same timelapse right where you left off.
- Preferences and Keyboard Shortcuts - Limner remembers how you left it. Window size, your last tool and brush, the colour you were painting with, your custom theme, your swatch palettes, and your keyboard shortcuts all persist between sessions, so the app comes back ready to work. This page covers where those settings live, every preference Limner stores, the theme and pen-pressure controls, the View toggles, and the complete default keymap.
Panels
- Panels Reference - Panels are the dockable windows around the canvas. Open or close any panel from the Window menu, drag a tab to reorder it, drag it out to float it, or drop it on a window edge to dock it there. Window ▸ Reset Workspace Layout restores the default arrangement. See The Interface for docking in detail.
- Reference Panel - The Reference panel is a board for the images you want to draw from. Drop in photo references, model sheets, color studies, or anything else, then arrange them freely on an infinite board, zoom in on a detail, and keep them all in view while you paint. It works like a PureRef-style pinboard built into Limner.
- Navigator Panel - The Navigator gives you a small, live map of your whole canvas so you always know where you are, even at high zoom. The minimap is the real composite of your artwork (the same pixels you see on the canvas), so it updates the instant you paint. A bright outline shows the part of the canvas your window is currently looking at, and you can click or drag on the map to jump the view anywhere. A zoom row underneath lets you zoom out, snap back to 100 percent, and zoom in.
- Stats Panel - The Stats panel is a small, read-only readout of how much work has gone into the current document: how long you have actively been drawing, how many strokes you have committed, how many layers you have, and the canvas dimensions. It is handy for tracking a piece over a long session, for timed studies, or just for curiosity.
Help
- Troubleshooting and FAQ - Quick answers to the questions that come up most often, plus what the various one-time notices and recovery prompts actually mean. Everything here is grounded in how Limner behaves, so if a message looks alarming, this is the page that tells you whether it is.