The complete Limner manual.

The install steps below are the Windows ones. On Apple hardware, start with Limner on Mac or Limner on iPad; everything after the install, from the Home screen to saving and exporting, works the same on all three.

When you are ready to learn the workspace, the panels, and the rest of the tools, see The Interface, the Brush tool, Layers, and File Formats.

Install and first run

Run the installer

On Windows, Limner ships as a signed installer for Windows 10 and 11. Download it from the official Limner download page, then run it. The installed program is Limner.exe. On a Mac, Limner comes as a signed and notarized disk image, and on iPad from TestFlight; see Limner on Mac and Limner on iPad.

The SmartScreen note

Limner's installer and executable are code-signed by a verified publisher, Parker Vincent (the developer behind Limner). Because Limner is still a new app, Windows SmartScreen may show a blue "Windows protected your PC" screen the first time you run the installer. That is normal for a newly released app, not a sign that anything is wrong, and it fades as more people install. If you see it, click More info, confirm the publisher reads Parker Vincent, then choose Run anyway. This is the same signature Limner verifies before installing any future update.

First launch

Limner opens to the Home screen, its front door to your recent works and new canvases. What appears first depends on your last session:

• Crash recovery. If Limner did not close cleanly last time, it finds the automatic backups it saved and shows a "Recover unsaved work?" prompt. This takes priority over everything else (recovering unsaved work comes first). See Crash recovery below.
• The Home screen. With nothing to recover, Limner shows the Home screen: your recent works as preview cards, newest first with the latest as a large Continue card, beside one-click quick starts, New Book…, and Open File…. Click any work to pick up where you left off. See The Home screen below.
• Prefer the classic blank start? Untick Show Home screen on startup (in the Home screen footer, or Edit ▸ Preferences). Limner then launches the old way: a "Welcome back" prompt when you have a recent file, otherwise an empty app waiting for File ▸ New or File ▸ Open.

Double-clicking a .limner or .limnerbook file in Explorer (or the Finder) launches Limner and opens it directly.

The Home screen

The Home screen is its own surface: while it is up only the menu bar stays, and the painting workspace appears the moment you open or create something. Documents and Books are listed together, each with a live preview captured every time you open or save it. Works from before this feature fill in on their own: Limner quietly generates a few previews per launch while you sit on the Home screen, newest first.

• Quick starts. A New Canvas button opens the full New Document dialog. Below it, Screen, Square, A4 print, 4K, Vector, and Animation create a canvas instantly (Vector and Animation are Limner Plus workspaces, so on the Free tier they open the unlock window instead); Last used repeats your most recent size; More sizes… opens the full dialog too.
• Right-click a work to open it, show it in Explorer (Show in folder on the Mac), or remove it from Recent. A file that no longer exists dims with a Missing note and a small X that removes it in one click.
• Coming back. The Home button at the right end of the menu bar (or File ▸ Home) reopens it any time; Back to canvas or Esc returns to what you were doing. Closing the last document tab lands on the Home screen again.
• The footer. Show Home screen on startup turns the whole screen off and on; Docs and Community open your browser, and only when clicked. The Home screen itself never touches the network.
• The first-run card. On a fresh install a short card above the Recent grid points out where to begin. Dismiss it once, or open your first document, and it stays gone.

Keeping Limner up to date

On Windows and Mac, Limner has a built-in updater. It only ever contacts the network to fetch a small version manifest and, if you choose to update, to download the new signed installer (a signed and notarized disk image on the Mac). No identifiers are sent, and you can turn the whole feature off. On iPad TestFlight delivers updates like any other app.

Check for updates

• Windows manual check. Help ▸ Check for Updates… checks immediately and tells you whether you are up to date or shows an available update.
• Windows automatic daily check. Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Check for Updates Automatically is a checkbox (hover text: "Once a day on launch. This anonymous check sends no Limner or device identifiers."). When it is on, Limner checks at most once every 24 hours on launch.
• macOS. Help ▸ Get Limner Updates… opens the secure download page, and the Mac menu bar's Help ▸ Check for Updates… starts a check. The background signed-feed check is separate; the Windows manual-check and automatic-check preference controls are not available on macOS. See Limner on Mac.
• iPad. Updates arrive through TestFlight; the iPad build does not fetch or install a desktop update.
• Version readout. Help ▸ "About Limner…" shows the version you are running.

The update flow

When an update is found, a status bar badge ("Update available") and a dialog appear. The dialog shows the new version, what you have now, and the release notes. From there you can:

• Download and install the update. Limner downloads the new installer, verifies its SHA-256 hash and its code signature (the signer must match the verified publisher), and then offers Install now. On Windows, installing closes Limner so the installer can replace the running program, then reopens it; on the Mac, the verified disk image is mounted and the new copy is installed and relaunched for you.
• Skip this version to silence the automatic check for that release (a manual check still surfaces it).
• Later to dismiss the prompt for now.

For what a check sends, the two verification steps, and the SmartScreen note, see Updating Limner in Troubleshooting.

Creating a document

Choose File ▸ New… (Ctrl+N) to open the New Document dialog.

New Document dialog

Below the fields, the dialog shows the resolved size as "Canvas: W × H px", a note when a side was rounded to an even number, and a memory warning when the canvas would need more than 512 MiB per layer.

Size and resolution limits. The final pixel dimensions are clamped to a minimum of 16 px and a maximum of 16384 px per side on the desktop (8192 px on iPad), and forced to an even number (H.264 timelapse requires even width and height, and even dimensions tile cleanly). DPI is kept between 1 and 2400.

Size presets. Selecting a preset fills the fields with these pixel sizes and DPI:

Click Create to make the document, or Cancel (or press Esc, or click outside) to dismiss the dialog.

Opening a document

File menu

• File ▸ Open… opens a .limner document, or takes a Photoshop (PSD or PSB), OpenRaster or SVG file as a new document. The legacy .artpaint extension is also accepted, so older files keep loading. If a file is already open, Limner switches to its tab instead of opening a second copy.
• Photoshop import. Every kind of .psd and .psb opens, up to the 16384 px canvas ceiling: layers, folders and masks are rebuilt, text, layer effects, vector masks, pattern fills, Smart Objects and adjustment layers stay live and re-editable, and anything Limner has no model for is kept as pixels. The same dialog also opens OpenRaster (.ora) and SVG files as new documents.
• File ▸ Import… (Image) brings a PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP, TGA, or TIFF image into the current document as a new layer, centered at its native scale. This item is enabled only when a document is open.
• File ▸ Import… (SVG) places an SVG file's groups and paths into the document you have open, as vector layers.
• File ▸ Open Book… opens a .limnerbook project; see Book.

If a document cannot be opened, Limner shows a "Could not open file" dialog with the reason.

Drag and drop

Drag a file onto the Limner window to open it. The action depends on the file type:

Dropping several files opens or imports each one in turn. The file picker and drag and drop accept the same image types, and on Windows a file opened from the command line or a file association takes the same route.

For the full details of every format Limner reads and writes, see File Formats.

Saving

• File ▸ Save writes the document to its current file. If the document has never been saved, Save behaves like Save As. If nothing has changed since the last save, Save does nothing.
• File ▸ Save As… writes to a new file. The default name is untitled.limner (or the existing file's name). The native extension is .limner; the legacy .artpaint extension is still offered so existing files can re-save in place.

When you save, Limner shows a brief "Saving…" indicator in the status bar. Writes are atomic, so the previous file is never left truncated, even when you save over the file you have open.

The modified dot

A document with unsaved changes shows a dot marker:

• In the document tab strip, the tab label gains a "•" suffix while it has unsaved changes (hover text: "Unsaved changes: click to switch").
• Undoing back to the saved state clears the dot again, and Save skips a write when nothing has changed.

Default shortcuts (all rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts):

Autosave and crash recovery

While you work, Limner periodically writes a background backup of each modified document or Book (by default about every two minutes, in between strokes). These backups are never "the" save: an autosave does not clear the modified dot or change which file Save targets, so you still need to save your work normally.

If Limner does not close cleanly, those backups remain on disk. The next launch detects them and shows the Recover unsaved work? prompt:

• Restore (or Restore all) reopens each backed-up document or Book, pointed back at its original file so Save goes to the right place.
• Discard backup (or Discard backups) throws the backups away.

For where these files live and the related preferences, see Preferences and Shortcuts.

Draw your first thing (five minutes)

This quick walkthrough gets you from a blank canvas to an exported PNG.

1. Create a canvas. File ▸ New…, leave the defaults (2048 × 2048 px, 72 DPI, white background), and click Create.

1. Choose a brush. Click the Brush tool in the left tool strip (default shortcut: B). Open the Brush panel and pick a preset. For everything the Brush tool can do, see the Brush tool.

1. Pick a color. Open the Color panel and choose a color; the panel shows it as a hex value too. Tip: hold Alt anywhere on the canvas to pick up a color from the artwork (the eyedropper).

1. Draw a stroke. Drag on the canvas to paint. Press [ and ] to shrink and grow the brush, even mid-stroke. Made a mistake? Press Ctrl+Z to undo.

1. Add a layer. Press N (or Layer ▸ New ▸ Add Layer) to add a new layer above the current one, then draw on it without touching your first stroke. Layers stack from bottom to top. See Layers to learn about blend modes, opacity, masks, and reordering.

1. Export a PNG. Choose File ▸ Export As…, pick PNG, click Export…, pick a location, and save (or press Ctrl+E to export a PNG straight away). The PNG keeps transparency and records your document's DPI. To save the editable project itself (with all layers intact), use File ▸ Save and keep the .limner file.

That is the whole loop: new document, brush, color, stroke, layer, export. Help ▸ Limner Manual (F1) opens this manual from inside the app, and Help ▸ Search the Manual jumps straight to the page that answers a question. From here, explore The Interface to learn the workspace zones, dig into the tools, or read up on File Formats.

New in 0.9.0

• Windows 10 or later. The installer states the requirement up front; the Mac build needs macOS 13 and the iPad build iPadOS 16. See Limner on Mac and Limner on iPad.
• The modified dot clears on undo. Undoing back to the saved state clears the modified marker, and Save skips a write when nothing has changed.
• No more "experimental" notice. The one-time first-save note about the format is gone; the format is the versioned container described in File Formats.
• A first-run card you can dismiss. A short card points out where to begin on a fresh install, and it stays gone once dismissed.
• The manual is one keystroke away. Help ▸ Limner Manual opens the manual and F1 does the same, and the Help menu itself is searchable, so a feature you cannot find is one keystroke from an answer.
• A Vector mode quick start. Vector mode opens with a way in rather than an empty canvas.

For installing and updating the app itself, see Getting Started.

Free and Plus

Limner and Plus are both free during the beta. Limner Free is the complete Illustration studio: raster painting, the full brush engine, layers, filters, timelapse, and the everyday file formats. Limner Plus adds the larger design, animation, and production workspaces.

Limner Free includes:

• Raster painting with the full brush engine, layers, blend modes, masks, and selections.
• Filters and adjustments: HSL, Levels, Curves, Gaussian Blur, and the rest.
• Brush Studio: build your own brushes, with .abr import and export and .lbrush presets.
• Timelapse recording and video export, with social presets and end cards.
• Watermark stamping on PNG, JPEG, and single-page PDF exports.
• Opening and saving .limner, and importing and exporting PNG, JPEG, PSD, OpenRaster, SVG, and CMYK TIFF.
• Platform-appropriate update access, autosave and crash recovery, rulers, symmetry, and the rest of the core workspace.

Limner Plus adds:

• Vector design workspace and editable vector layers.
• Vectorize Layer (Image Trace): any raster layer traced into editable vector shapes. Editable vector layers and Image Trace stay Plus in any document.
• Animation studio: the cel timeline, a keyframed 2D camera, per-channel motion, scale, rotation and opacity curves in the graph editor, layer parenting, an audio track, composited onion skin, and GIF, APNG, MP4, PSD, and PNG-sequence export (with GIF and image-sequence import).
• Comic and manga studio (Book projects).
• Every future Limner Plus feature.

On Limner Free, some Plus commands are hidden and the rest are marked rather than hidden, so you can see what Plus adds. The Vector and Animation workspace buttons stay visible with a Plus mark, as do the matching Home screen cards and Layer ▸ Vectorize Layer; choosing one opens the Limner Plus window instead of running the command. Book commands live in File and open the Book home or the Page Manager.

Getting a key

During the open beta, keys are free. Request one from the Limner website: enter your name and email on the signup form, and a key is emailed to you. There is one key per email address, so asking again just re-sends the same key.

On iPad there is nothing to enter: the beta is fully unlocked on iPadOS, with every workspace and every Plus feature available and no key entry in the app. Keys apply to the desktop builds on Windows and macOS.

Plus is free while Limner is in beta, on Windows and macOS with a key and on iPad with nothing to enter. Pricing for the full release will be announced before anything changes.

Starting a 14-day desktop trial

Choose Help ▸ Start a free trial..., enter your email address, and click Start. Limner emails a signed trial key. Paste that key into the activation field to unlock Vector, Animation, and Book on this computer. The dialog explains that the trial covers Vector, Animation and Book for 14 days and that the key arrives by email.

The 14 days begin when the server creates the trial, and the email includes its end date. Each email address and device can receive one trial. Requesting again or reinstalling does not start another 14 days. A trial key cannot be activated on a different device.

You can close the request dialog while it finishes. Reopen the trial command to see its result. If email delivery is delayed, Limner reports that the trial was created and delivery will be retried; its original end date stays the same. Check your inbox before making another request.

The iPad beta remains unlocked and has no trial request or desktop-key entry.

Activating Plus

Open Help ▸ Enter Limner Plus Key…, paste your key into the field, and click Activate. The first time you launch Limner, a welcome window also offers to paste a key or to continue on Limner Free. On macOS the menu bar at the top of the screen has the same window under Help ▸ Limner Plus….

Activation happens online and ties the key to the computer you activate on. Keys may be scoped to desktop, iPad, or Both, and a mismatched key is refused before it replaces your current key. Paid and comp keys support up to three desktops and two iPads in separate platform groups, within the key's scope. Beta and trial keys each have one seat per permitted platform. As soon as activation succeeds the Plus tools appear, Help ▸ About Limner… shows "Limner Plus" instead of "Limner Free", the Help menu's key entry reads Manage Limner Plus…, and Start a free trial… leaves the Help menu.

Moving a key to another computer

On the currently activated computer, open Help ▸ Manage Limner Plus…, choose Deactivate this device, then Confirm deactivation. The computer returns to Limner Free when the server confirms the release. Keep your key so you can enter it on the new computer. Your documents stay on the old computer.

Each key allows two self-serve deactivations per rolling 30 days. For more, contact limnersupport@limnerart.com. New-device activation also has a separate anti-abuse limit, so releasing a seat does not reset that limit.

If the reply is lost, choose Retry device deactivation when online. Limner saves the pending request and retries it after relaunch; retries do not spend another deactivation. Automatic renewal waits until the request is resolved. If the saved request itself is damaged and cannot be read, Limner moves it aside as deactivation.pending.corrupt in its settings folder, writes a line to its log, and carries on: renewal and key entry work again instead of staying paused. A device that stays offline for more than 30 days stops occupying a seat; the next activation still checks for a free seat.

Staying activated and privacy

Desktop Limner performs entitlement maintenance at most once a day on launch, so you do not have to do anything to stay activated. Online beta, trial, paid, and comp keys keep working offline for up to 14 days after their last successful renewal, or until the key expires if that is sooner. Online perpetual keys keep a 90-day grace.

Desktop activation and renewal contact the configured license service with the key and device activation identifiers needed for entitlement upkeep. Activation and renewal include the device's platform. The iPad beta has no key or entitlement maintenance and does not contact the license service. Limner never sends your artwork.

A desktop trial request sends your email address, device activation identifier, and platform to that service so it can issue and deliver the trial key. Trial access ends at the signed expiry even if the computer stays offline.

Limner reaches the network for only these things: the once-a-day version check, downloading an update you choose to install, activating or renewing your key, and requesting a trial. It never sends your artwork, and it sends no personal identifiers beyond what those requests need.

If a feature is locked

A workspace button or menu item marked with a Plus star, or a panel that reads "... is a Limner Plus feature", is part of Plus. Choosing it opens the Limner Plus window, which lists what Plus adds and offers Start a free trial and key entry. On the desktop you can start a 14-day trial there; on iPad everything is already unlocked during the beta.

If a key will not activate, check that you are online (activation needs a connection), that you pasted the whole key, and that the key is not already active on another computer. If the key is in use on too many devices, deactivate another computer from this one when that computer is online, or contact limnersupport@limnerart.com.

For everything that is the same on all platforms, start at Getting Started. This page covers only what is specific to the Mac.

What you need

• macOS 13 Ventura or later. Earlier versions of macOS cannot run Limner.
• Apple silicon or Intel. One download serves both. Limner runs natively on each, without translation.
• A pen tablet is optional. A trackpad or mouse draws perfectly well; a connected tablet adds pressure and tilt.

Installing Limner

Download the disk image from limnerart.com, open it, and move Limner to your Applications folder. Then open it from Applications the way you open any other app.

Limner for Mac is signed with an Apple Developer ID and notarized by Apple, so macOS checks it and opens it without the warning that unidentified downloads produce. If you ever see a warning that Limner cannot be checked, you are not running a build from limnerart.com.

Cmd instead of Ctrl

Every shortcut written as Ctrl in this manual is Cmd on a Mac. Save is Cmd+S, Undo is Cmd+Z, Redo is Cmd+Shift+Z, and the command palette is Cmd+K.

You do not have to translate them yourself. Limner spells its own shortcuts for the machine it is running on, so the menus, the tooltips, the command palette, and the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog all show Cmd on a Mac and Ctrl on Windows. The Option key keeps the name Alt in those labels. A shortcut you record in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog on one platform still works on the other.

Two things stay literal, because they read the physical key rather than the shortcut modifier: holding Ctrl while dragging a selection subtracts from that selection, and Alt does the same, on every platform including the Mac.

The Mac menu bar

Limner adds a real Mac menu bar at the top of the screen, beside the Apple menu. It carries the standard Mac items plus click mirrors for the commands people reach for most:

• Limner: About Limner, Hide Limner, Hide Others, Show All, and Quit Limner.
• File: Home, Open, Save, Save As, Export PNG, and Close Window.
• Edit: Undo and Redo.
• View: Enter Full Screen.
• Window: Minimize and Zoom.
• Help: Check for Updates… and Limner Plus….

These rows are grayed out when they cannot act: Save, Save As and Export PNG with no document open (Save and Save As also work on an open Book), Undo and Redo when there is nothing to undo or redo, and Open while a Book is open. Home, Check for Updates and Limner Plus are always available.

Limner's full menus stay inside the window, exactly as they are documented throughout this manual, so nothing is reachable only from the system menu bar.

The mirrored items deliberately show no shortcuts of their own. macOS gives a menu item's shortcut priority over the app, so a native Cmd+Z item would take Undo away from a text field you were editing. The in-window shortcuts do that work instead, and they behave as they do on Windows. The standard Mac items keep their usual keys, including Cmd+Q to quit and Cmd+W to close the window.

Drawing on a Mac

• Metal. Limner draws through Metal, so compositing, filters, and the brush engine run on the GPU.
• Retina. The canvas renders at the display's full resolution rather than being scaled up from a smaller image.
• Pressure and tilt. A connected pen tablet reports pressure and tilt to the brush engine, so pressure curves and tilt dynamics behave as they do on Windows.
• Trackpad gestures drive the canvas. A gesture that starts on the canvas belongs to the canvas: two-finger scroll pans it, pinch zooms around the point you pinched, and a deliberate twist rotates it. A gesture that starts over a panel stays with that panel.
• Mouse and keyboard. The wheel zooms, Space-drag pans with any tool, and Space+Cmd-drag zooms by dragging.

Keeping Limner up to date

Choose Check for Updates in the Mac menu bar's Help menu, or click the Update available badge in the status bar when the daily check finds one. (Limner's own in-window Help menu offers Get Limner Updates…, which opens the download page.) When a newer version exists, Limner downloads the disk image and verifies it before trusting it: the download must carry a valid signature and must be signed by the same Apple developer identity as the app you are running, or it is refused. Once it is verified, Install and Relaunch closes Limner, replaces the copy in your Applications folder, and reopens the new version. Open Disk Image is there if you would rather mount the image and drag it across yourself.

The macOS, Windows, and iPad builds share a release and a document format, so a document saved on one opens on the others without converting anything.

Everything in the rest of this manual applies on iPad as well, with two exceptions noted where they come up: a new canvas reaches 8192 px per side rather than 16384, and updates come from TestFlight rather than from inside the app. This page covers the parts that only exist there. For the shared basics, start at Getting Started.

What you need

• iPadOS 16 or later. Earlier versions cannot run Limner.
• An Apple Pencil, to paint. Out of the box the Pencil is the only thing that paints, which is what lets you rest your hand on the glass; fingers work the interface and navigate the canvas, and can paint too once you turn on Finger Painting.

Everything is unlocked during the beta

Limner for iPad is free during the beta and every feature is unlocked. There is no key to enter and nothing to buy inside the app: Vector, Animation, Book, and every Plus-labelled feature are simply available.

Beta keys are a desktop matter. If you also use Limner on Windows or macOS, see Limner Plus for how keys work there.

Apple Pencil

• Only the Pencil paints. Resting your palm, your wrist, or the side of your hand on the glass while you draw does nothing to the artwork.
• Pressure and tilt. Both reach the brush engine, so pressure curves, tilt dynamics, and every brush setting behave as they do with a tablet on the desktop.
• One line is one line. A long stroke stays a single stroke with a single Undo, including through the brief moments the hardware itself loses contact with the Pencil.
• Palm rejection has a grace period. For about half a second after the Pencil lifts, fingers stay ignored, so a wrist resting between two strokes cannot press a button or drag a slider. Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Palm Rejection (on by default) turns that grace period off; your hand is always ignored while the Pencil is touching. If a palm still gets through, Record Input Trace beside it writes a log of every touch to Limner's Documents folder for diagnosis.

What fingers do

• One finger works the interface. Buttons, sliders, panels, and menus all respond to a finger.
• Hold one finger on the artwork to sample a colour. After about half a second the colour loupe appears under your fingertip and follows it; lift to take that colour as the foreground. Touching down with a second finger or with the Pencil cancels the sample cleanly.
• Two fingers navigate. Pan, pinch to zoom, and rotate the canvas with two fingers.
• The Reference board navigates on its own. Two fingers pan and pinch the board without moving the canvas behind it.
• The Pencil always wins. Every finger gesture stands down the moment the Pencil touches the glass, so a gesture in progress never turns into a mark.

Press and hold to reorder

Press and hold a layer row for a moment and it lifts, ready to be dropped into a new position or nested into a folder. This is the touch equivalent of dragging a row with a mouse, and it works the same way in the Layers panel and in folders.

Your documents in the Files app

Open uses the system document picker, so you can pick Limner documents and Books from On My iPad, iCloud Drive, or another Files provider, and the Files app can move, rename, duplicate, tag, and share them like any other document. Limner edits the picked file where it lives: Save writes back to that same file, so the original in iCloud Drive or elsewhere is the version you just saved, and your other devices see the change once Files syncs it. The file also stays in Recent, and reopening it from there, even after Limner restarts, opens the original again.

If the file was moved, renamed or deleted in Files while it was open, or Limner can no longer reach it, Save refuses instead of writing somewhere else and says so; choose File ▸ Save As… to keep your changes. A file you deleted in Files is treated as gone even while it sits in Recently Deleted: its Recent entry says it could not be opened, and Limner never edits the copy in the trash. Recover it in Files and the Recent entry works again.

Save As works as before on iPad: type a name and choose Save to keep a new document in Limner's own folder (On My iPad ▸ Limner), or Save to Files to save it there and then hand a copy to the Files picker, so you can put it in iCloud Drive or anywhere else. Exports go out through the same Files picker.

Some storage providers do not let an app edit a file where it lives. When Limner cannot open a picked file in place, it copies the file into its own folder, On My iPad ▸ Limner ▸ Imported, opens that copy, and says so in an Editing a copy notice. Save then writes to the copy and the original does not change; to put your changes back, choose File ▸ Save As… and pick Save to Files.

Crash-recovery backups always stay in Limner's own storage. Limner never writes them next to a file you opened from Files. When Limner leaves the foreground (you switch apps, pull down Control Center, or iPadOS warns that memory is low), it takes a recovery snapshot of your unsaved work straight away, rather than waiting for the next periodic one, and asks iPadOS for time to finish writing it. Leaving again within a minute with nothing changed does not take another. Your settings and Recent list are saved at the same moment, so a file you opened is still in Recent after iPadOS closes Limner in the background.

The file formats are the same everywhere. A .limner document written on iPad opens on Windows and macOS, and one written on the desktop opens on iPad, with layers, folders, masks, and text intact. Older .artpaint files still open everywhere.

Saving a timelapse to Photos or Files

When you finish a timelapse on iPad, Limner asks where the video should go: Save to Photos, Save to Files, or Cancel.

The video is finished and written to a recoverable copy inside Limner before that question is asked, and Photos permission is requested only if you choose Save to Photos. So a denied permission, or choosing Cancel, never costs you the recording: the finished file is still there and can still be saved through Files.

For what a timelapse records and how to control it, see Timelapse.

The tool options bar

The tool options measure the space they have and render the richest layout that genuinely fits, so the bar stays usable in either orientation. Undo and Redo stay centred, and the controls you reach for most stay within reach.

Finger painting

Prefer drawing by hand? Turn on Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Finger Painting and one finger drives the active tool at full pressure, on every tool a pen can drive: brushes, fills, transforms, Mesh Warp, Liquefy and the polygon selection. Two fingers still pan, zoom and rotate, a second finger ends a one-finger stroke, and the Pencil still wins whenever it touches the glass. The colour loupe moves to the Eyedropper tool while finger painting is on. Even with it off, a finger can drag existing anchors and objects with the Selection and Direct Select tools, and the anchor and handle hit zones are larger on iPad than on the desktop.

Reach any tool in one gesture

Hold a tool group on the strip and it opens under your finger; slide onto the tool you want and lift. Tapping still selects the tool shown on the key, and a second tap opens the flyout, exactly as on the desktop.

Naming your work

Save As on iPad asks for a name, warns before replacing a file, and can hand a copy straight to Files; a new document is no longer quietly written as "untitled 2". Every timelapse export option (Faster, Fit to time, the 9:16, 1:1 and 16:9 crops, Hold last frame and the watermark) works on iPad, re-encoding through the same hardware pipeline the recording uses, and PNG sequence export and Import Image Sequence both work as they do on the desktop.

Updates on iPad

Updates arrive through TestFlight during the beta, so there is no update check inside Limner on iPad. The Windows and macOS builds have their own in-app update check.

For the full menu reference see Menus. To rebind keys or change preferences see Preferences and Shortcuts. For what lives inside each dockable panel see the Panels overview.

The window at a glance

Limner stacks a series of bars across the top and bottom of the window, puts the tool strip and dockable panels along the sides, and gives whatever space is left to the canvas. Top to bottom, left to right:

The flat ink-black theme with a single bright cyan accent is intentional: the chrome stays dark and quiet so the one hot color, cyan, always means "this is active or actionable". See Theme below.

F11 (View ▸ Fullscreen) gives the canvas the whole screen, and F11 again brings the window back. Ctrl+0 fits the canvas to the window and Ctrl+1 shows it at 100%, pixel for pixel; the same two views are buttons in the status bar's zoom cluster.

Workspace mode switcher

The workspace switcher sits at the right end of the menu bar: a weak "Mode" label followed by the Illustration, Vector and Animation buttons, then a divider, a Book button and a Home button that returns to the Home screen. The active mode is highlighted; clicking a different one switches the current document into it. Once you have starred commands in the command palette, a Quick Access strip of one-click buttons also appears in this row, next to the mode buttons; see Command palette, Quick Access, and workspaces.

A few things worth knowing about modes:

• Mode is per document. Two open documents can sit in different modes at the

same time.

• Switching never converts your layers. The mode is a lens on the same

document. Switching reconfigures the tool strip and the panels, but the layer stack is left exactly as it was. (Entering Animation mode does add an opaque white paper under your art the first time, so frames are not see-through; see Animation Mode.)

• Switching on a document that already has artwork asks first. Rather than

switching silently, Limner opens a dialog with three choices: New starts a fresh document in the chosen mode, Convert reinterprets the current document in that mode, and Cancel leaves the document where it is.

• The Ctrl+Shift+M hotkey cycles the workspaces in switcher order: Illustration, Vector, Animation, and back to Illustration. While a Book is open it skips Animation, which a Book page can never be.

reached by clicking its switcher segment; pressing the hotkey while in Animation returns you to Illustration.

• A document opens in the workspace that suits its contents: an animation opens

in Animation mode, a document with vector artwork in Vector mode, and everything else in Illustration.

Switching an Illustration document into Vector mode first asks what you mean: Switch this document re-lenses the same document (your layers stay, the Vector tools and panels appear), New Vector document starts a fresh Vector document and leaves this one untouched, and Cancel stays put. Tick "Don't ask again when switching workspace mode" to make the switch immediate from then on.

Books

A Book is a multi-page comic or manga project. It is not a fourth mode: the mode buttons are still only Illustration, Vector, and Animation, and Book is a separate axis with its own button beside them, lit while the Page Manager surface is showing. A Book wraps a sequence of pages, and each page is its own document that you paint in Illustration or Vector.

A Book opens from the Book button at the right end of the menu bar, beside the workspace switcher, and with Limner Plus from the File menu:

• File ▸ New Book starts a fresh book.
• File ▸ Open Book opens an existing one.
• File ▸ Open Recent Book lists books you opened lately.

A Book saves to a single .limnerbook file that holds all of its pages. While a Book is open you get a page list (to add, reorder, and page through the pages) and a comic Panel tool in the tool strip, which lays down panel frames that clip their artwork so nothing spills into the gutters. For the full page and panel workflow see Books.

Menu bar

The menu bar holds nine menus in Illustration and Animation (and with a Book open): File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, Help. Vector mode holds ten: File, Edit, Layer, Object, Path, Type, Select, View, Window, Help. The workspace switcher sits at the right end of the same bar, and in a narrow window the menus fold right to left into a "..." overflow button so the switcher keeps its place. Every command and its shortcut is documented in Menus.

The menus are filed the way Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint file them: colour and tone adjustments under Image ▸ Adjustments, selection edits and Free Transform under Edit, Expand, Contract, Border and Feather under Select ▸ Modify, and app settings under Edit ▸ Preferences.

Tool options bar

The bar directly below the menus is contextual: its contents change with the active tool. Pick a selection tool and you get the selection mode and feather; pick the Fill and you get tolerance, and so on. Each tool's options are documented on that tool's page under Tools.

Three things hold their place no matter which tool is active:

• Undo and redo sit in the exact centre of the bar, as a pair of small arrow

buttons (hover "Undo (Ctrl+Z)" and "Redo (Ctrl+Shift+Z)"). They are pinned to the bar's true centre, so they stay put however many controls the active tool shows.

• The active tool's name and icon lead the bar on the left, in bold.
• A "Snap" checkbox appears from any tool while a ruler or guides are in use,

so you can turn snapping off without leaving the brush.

The sliders are responsive: their track width scales with the window, growing on a wide screen and shrinking on a narrow one, so a busy bar stays clear of the centred undo and redo.

The bar holds a constant height no matter which tool is active, so the canvas no longer shifts up or down when you switch tools.

When the window gets narrow, the bar keeps each tool's essential controls visible and tucks the rest into a "more" menu at the right edge; Undo and Redo always stay on screen. At full width the bar shows everything.

The Brush bar

With the Brush active, the bar is trimmed to the four controls you touch constantly, each with its caption on the left:

A live thumbnail of the active brush sits at the far left (click it to open the Brush picker). Pinned to the right edge, clear of the centred undo and redo, are the colour swatch, an Erase toggle (paint transparently with the current brush), and a Tool Settings button that opens the deeper Tool Settings panel where the blend mode, stabilizer, pressure curves, tip shape, scatter, and texture live. The full set of brush controls is on the Brush page.

Document tab strip

When you have one or more documents open, a tab strip appears showing one tab per document.

Hovering a tab shows "Unsaved changes: click to switch" when it has unsaved work, or "Click to switch" otherwise.

Left tool strip

The vertical strip on the far left holds the tools as a column of icon keys. The active tool's key is lit in cyan.

The strip is resizable. Drag its right edge wider and the keys reflow into more columns, the way Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint let you widen a compact tool column. Each key is 40 by 36 points before the UI scale preference. Pen, Pencil, and Airbrush sit on the strip as brush families beside Brush: each drives the full brush engine and remembers the last brush you picked in it, across restarts.

Tool groups and flyouts

Related tools are bundled into a group that shares one key. A grouped key shows a small corner triangle to signal "more tools live here". The key displays the active tool when one of its members is selected, otherwise the group's first tool.

• Click a single-tool key to select that tool.
• Click a grouped key that is not active to select the tool shown on it. Two groups open their flyout instead, because selecting their tools changes the document: the construction-aid group (picking a ruler places it) and the Mesh Warp / Liquefy group (Mesh Warp lifts the layer).
• Click the active grouped key to open or close its flyout.
• Double-click a grouped key, or click its corner triangle, to open the flyout from any state.
• Each flyout row also carries a pin that gives that tool a key of its own on the strip (see below). The Illustration and Animation strips have pins (the two modes share one layout, so a pin made in either shows in both); the fixed Vector strip has none.

In Illustration mode the strip starts with these 20 keys, in this order (flyout order shown). Shortcuts are the defaults; the Tools Reference says which of the other tools can be given a key in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Pen, Pencil, and Airbrush are Brush keys that each remember their own last-used brush. Transform has no key on the strip: press Ctrl+T or choose Edit ▸ Free Transform. While a Book is open, a Panel tool key is added at the end of the strip. See Crop Tool and the Tools Reference.

In Vector mode the strip is built for path work and grouped into captioned sections (View ▸ Show ▸ Tool Strip Captions, on by default; the captions show while the strip is one column wide and keeps its default layout): Select (Selection with the Object Lasso, and Direct Select), Shapes (Rectangle, Ellipse, Polygon, Star and Spiral, with Line on its own key), Draw (Pen with Curvature, Pencil with the Vector Brush, and Eraser with Scissors, Knife and Join), Modify (Shape Builder with Pathfinder, Width, and Rotate with Scale and Reflect), Type, View (Artboard, Hand, Zoom) and Color (Gradient with the Style Picker), with a Fill-over-Stroke stack at its foot. The order is fixed by default, but the All Vector Tools panel (Window ▸ Customize Vector Toolbar) reorders and regroups its keys. While a Book is open, a Panel tool is appended to whichever strip is showing. See Vector Mode and Tools.

Animation mode uses the Illustration paint strip, unchanged, since you draw each frame with the same raster tools. See Animation Mode.

Picking from a group, and pinning

Holding a group key for about a third of a second opens its flyout under the pointer or your finger; slide onto the tool you want and lift to pick it. The strip's order itself is fixed (the old drag-to-rearrange was removed). To give a tool a key of its own, click the pin on its flyout row ("Give ... its own key on the tool strip"); the new key appears right after its group. The group's flyout keeps a row for that tool with a lit pin ("... has its own key. Put it back in this group."); click it to fold the tool back. The Illustration and Animation strips share one layout, so a pin made in either shows in both; the Vector strip has no pins. Window ▸ Reset Tool Strip Layout puts every pinned tool back.

Cursors

Over the canvas, Limner shows a Photoshop and Clip Studio-style cursor that matches the active tool, so the pointer tells you what it will do.

• Brush, Eraser, Liquefy, and the blend brushes show a ring sized to the

brush, optionally with a centre crosshair. Toggle the ring with View ▸ Show ▸ Brush-Size Cursor and the centre crosshair with View ▸ Show ▸ Crosshair in Brush Tip.

• Caps Lock switches the brush tools to a precise mode: the ring is replaced

by a fine crosshair, the way Photoshop's Caps Lock works. Press it again to go back to the ring. This affects only the brush-style tools.

• Eyedropper shows a crosshair; the Text tool shows an I-beam.
• Transform, Layer Move, the Object tool, and the Vector-mode Selection tool

show contextual handle cursors: a four-way move inside the box, a directional resize arrow over a corner, and a grab over the rotation handle. Mesh Warp shows a grab over a grid point and a move elsewhere. (The Direct Select and Line Edit point editors keep the plain arrow.)

• The draw, select, shape, ruler, and pen tools show a precise crosshair.
• View gestures override the tool cursor: holding Space shows an open hand,

dragging to pan shows a closed hand, and a Space+Ctrl scrubby zoom shows a magnifier.

Status bar

The bar across the bottom of the window is a single glanceable row. Left to right:

Centred under the canvas area sits the view cluster:

Canvas rotation is a view-only transform: it turns how you see the canvas, it does not rotate the artwork itself.

Update badge

The badge only appears when there is news to act on:

• Update available: a cyan pill reading "Update available". Click it to see

details. Hover reads "A newer version of Limner is available. Click for details."

• Update ready: a cyan pill reading "Update ready" once the update is

downloaded and verified. Click it to install. Hover reads "The update is downloaded and verified. Click to install."

• Updating: a plain "Updating…" label while a check, download, or

verification is in progress.

When Limner is up to date there is no badge. For more on updating see Updating.

Dockable panels

Limner has two panel areas: one on the left, beside the tool strip, and one on the right. In Illustration and Animation the left area holds Tool Settings and the Brush picker by default; in Vector mode it starts empty. On a narrow window the left area collapses on its own to give the canvas room; Window ▸ Show Left Panels forces it open or closed, and Use Responsive Panel Layout hands the decision back. The right area collapses to a fixed 14 pixel rail when empty, which doubles as a drop target so you can drag a panel back into it.

Each panel rides in a tab you can move freely. The panels themselves are documented in the Panels overview; the Layers panel is covered in Layers.

Moving, floating, and docking a tab

• Reorder: drag a tab sideways within its dock to reorder it.
• Float: drag a tab out of the dock to open it as a floating window.
• Dock: drop a tab on a window edge to dock it there.
• Close: right-click the tab and choose Close panel. Reopen it later from the

Window menu.

Right-click a tab to split

Right-clicking a panel tab opens a "Move panel" menu with four placements and a Close panel item:

• New column left puts the panel in a new column to the left.
• New column right puts it in a new column to the right.
• Stack above stacks it above the current panel.
• Stack below stacks it below.

Reopening and resetting

• Every panel has a checkbox in the Window menu. A check means the panel is

open, docked or floating. Toggle it to show or hide the panel. The menu lists the panels for the current mode.

• Window ▸ Reset Workspace Layout restores the default arrangement: it

puts the default panels back where they started, re-docks anything you had floating, and closes the panels that are not part of the default.

Theme: dark, light, and Customize

Limner ships with a flat ink-black dark theme accented by a single bright cyan ( #2de2ff ). The dark chrome keeps attention on the artwork, and the cyan marks exactly one thing: what is active, focused, or actionable (the lit tool key, the active tab, the slider fill, the update badge).

A light "paper" theme is available, and you can build a custom theme from a base and an accent color. All three are reached from Edit ▸ Preferences:

• Light Theme / Dark Theme toggles between the two built-in skins.
• Customize Theme… opens an editor seeded from the current theme.
• Reset Theme clears any custom theme.

See Menus ▸ Edit for the rest of the Preferences submenu, and Preferences and Shortcuts for how the choice is remembered between sessions.

New in 0.9.0

• The workspace switcher lives on the menu bar. At its right end, with a Home button beside it, in every workspace.
• Pixels look like pixels. At 200 percent zoom and above the display switches to nearest sampling, so hard edges stay hard the way Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint show them.
• More undo. Undo entries are charged at their compressed size, so the history holds far more steps on a mostly empty canvas.
• Vector strip captions. In Vector mode the tool strip carries Select, Shapes, Draw, Modify, Type, View and Color captions (View ▸ Show ▸ Tool Strip Captions) and a Fill-over-Stroke stack at its foot.
• Narrow windows. The menu bar collapses right to left into a More menus button, and the Vector panels wrap or scroll rather than clipping.
• Right-click a panel tab for New column left / right, Stack above / below, and Close panel.
• Flipping a rotated view mirrors what you see instead of the unrotated canvas.

This page is about getting around faster. The window zones themselves (tool strip, panels, status bar) are covered in The interface, and every menu item is listed in Menus.

The command palette

Press Ctrl+K (rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts) or choose View ▸ Command Palette. A dimmed window opens with the search field already focused: type a few letters, press Enter, and the command runs. It reaches practically everything in the app: menu items, tools, panel toggles, workspace modes, and app settings, so it is usually faster than remembering which menu holds a command.

Searching and running

• Matches are ranked, best first. A term can match anywhere in a command's name, in hidden keywords (typing "hotkeys" finds Keyboard Shortcuts), or even as scattered letters, so "gblur" still finds Gaussian Blur.
• Shortcuts show on the row. A command that has a keyboard shortcut shows it as a chip, read live from your keymap: a rebound command shows your key, not the factory one.
• Unavailable commands gray out, they do not hide. The palette mirrors the menu bar's graying, so a command that needs a selection or an open document stays visible but muted, and running it does nothing. Hover a grayed-out row to read why (for example "Open or create a document first" or "Requires Limner Plus").
• The Home screen and the Page Manager hide the document. There, rows that would change it are grayed out with "Not available on the Home screen" or "Not available in the Page Manager". Opening, creating and saving, app settings, layouts and panels stay available.

Browsing when the search is empty

With the search field empty the palette becomes a browsable catalog: your Favorites group first, then Recent, then every command grouped by category (File, Edit, Selection, Layer, Filter, Object, Path, View, Tools, Panels, Workspace, Animation, App). It doubles as a way to discover what Limner can do.

Recent holds the last 8 commands you ran from the palette or the Quick Access strip, most recent first, and it persists across sessions, so tomorrow's first Ctrl+K still shows yesterday's habits. A command that is both starred and recent appears only under Favorites.

When the palette refuses

The palette will not fire a command into the middle of another live operation: while a stroke or drag gesture is down, while a filter dialog's live preview is showing, during a transform, while a marquee selection is being dragged out, or while a text preview is active. In those moments Ctrl+K does not open the palette, and Quick Access clicks are ignored. Commit or cancel the operation first, then reach for the palette. This is deliberate: running an arbitrary command under an uncommitted preview could strand the preview on your canvas.

Favorites and Quick Access

Every palette row carries a star at its right edge. Clicking the star marks the command as a favorite without running it, and the palette stays open so you can star several commands in one visit. Click the star again to unstar.

Starred commands show up in two places:

• In the palette: a Favorites group at the very top of the browse view, in the order you starred them.
• In the top bar: a Quick Access strip appears at the left end of the menu bar's switcher row, marked by a small pin, with the workspace buttons to its right. Favorites that do not fit the window move into a "..." menu at the end of the strip rather than being clipped. Each favorite is a one-click button. The strip only exists once you have starred at least one command, so the top row stays clean by default.

A favorite that does not apply right now greys out instead of disappearing (hover it and the tooltip says it is not available right now), so the strip's buttons never shuffle position. You can star any command, even one that is currently greyed. Favorites persist across restarts in your settings.

Named workspaces

A workspace is a named snapshot of your layout: which panels are open, where they are docked or floating, and which tools you have pinned onto keys of their own. Save one arrangement for painting with the references and color panels out, another stripped down for inking, and switch between them in one click.

The controls live at the bottom of the Window menu, under the Workspaces heading:

• Save Workspace As… prompts for a name and saves the current layout. Saving under an existing name updates that workspace in place.
• Apply: click a workspace's name to restore its layout.
• Rename / Delete: the small pencil button renames a workspace, and the trash button deletes it.

Workspaces are stored in the app settings, not inside your documents, and they persist across restarts. A few honest edges worth knowing:

• Delete asks no confirmation. If the layout you just deleted is still on screen, choose Save Workspace As… again with the same name and you have it back.
• A workspace does not record which mode you were in. Applying one changes your panels and tool strip only; the document and its Illustration / Vector / Animation mode are untouched. Ctrl+Shift+M cycles those three workspaces in switcher order (skipping Animation while a Book is open), and Ctrl+N creates a new document from the palette like everywhere else.
• The palette carries only Save Workspace As… Applying, renaming, and deleting are done from the Window menu.
• Workspaces saved by a different Limner version restore partially. Both halves of the snapshot are version-stamped: an arrangement saved under a different dock or tool-strip layout version is ignored and your current one is kept, because pinning the strip or the docks to an old shape would be worse than doing nothing.

The same menu's Reset Workspace Layout and Reset Tool Strip Layout restore the factory defaults; neither touches your saved workspaces.

Canvas focus mode

Canvas focus hides every panel and bar: the tool strip, the docked panels, the menu bar, the tool options bar, and the status bar. The artwork fills the window and nothing competes for your eye. Toggle it from View ▸ Canvas Focus (Hide Panels), from the command palette, or with a key of your own.

• Esc brings the interface back. Esc answers to the most urgent thing first: if a dialog or a live preview is open, Esc closes that, and the next Esc exits canvas focus.
• No key is bound by default. Tab already moves focus between interface fields, so Limner does not claim it the way Photoshop does. Bind your own under Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts; the command is named Canvas Focus (Hide Panels).
• Independent of fullscreen. F11 removes the window frame; canvas focus removes Limner's own chrome. Use both together for an edge-to-edge easel.
• Not saved between sessions. Restarting Limner always starts with the full interface visible.

Tips

• Star the handful of commands you keep digging two menu levels for (Flip Canvas, a favorite filter, a panel toggle); one starred command saves a trip every time you need it.
• Closed a panel and cannot find it? Ctrl+K and type its name; panels reopen from the palette too.
• Save your current layout as a workspace before experimenting with docking, so one click undoes the experiment.
• If canvas focus becomes a habit, bind it to a comfortable key; the toggle is instant in both directions.

Related

• The interface - the window zones the workspaces rearrange, including the mode-switcher row that hosts Quick Access.
• Menus - the full View and Window menu listings.
• Preferences and Shortcuts - rebinding Ctrl+K and giving Canvas Focus a key.

New in 0.9.0

• The palette covers the app. Essentially every command is now reachable, searchable, and favoritable from the command palette, and Ctrl+N creates a new document there like everywhere else.
• The workspace toggle cycles. Ctrl+Shift+M now cycles Illustration, Vector and Animation in switcher order instead of bouncing between two (it skips Animation while a Book is open).

This page lists the menus in the Limner window, item by item, with the on-screen label, what each item does, its default shortcut where it has one, and when it is grayed out. In the Illustration and Animation workspaces (and while a Book is open) the bar reads File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, Help. In the Vector workspace it reads File, Edit, Layer, Object, Path, Type, Select, View, Window, Help; the Vector differences are collected in The Vector workspace's menus at the end, followed by the right-click context menus.

A few things worth knowing up front:

• The menus run left to right along the top of the window. The right end of the bar holds the Quick Access buttons (once you star a command) and the workspace switcher: Illustration, Vector, Animation, then Book and Home. When the window is too narrow for every menu, the last ones fold into a "..." menu (hover "More menus").
• A row shows its current keyboard shortcut on the right. The column reads the live keymap, so a shortcut you rebind shows there too, and a row whose shortcut the active workspace uses for another command shows none. The shortcuts below are the defaults. Rebind them in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts (Help ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts… opens the same window); see Preferences and Shortcuts. A few behaviors are fixed modifiers rather than rebindable commands: the Alt-hold eyedropper, Space-drag pan, Space+Ctrl-drag zoom, the wheel zoom, and the Shift / Alt / Ctrl selection modifiers.
• A grayed-out row is unavailable right now; hover it to read why (for example "Open or create a document first" or "The bottom layer has nothing below it"). With no document open, the Layer menu says so once, at its top.
• The View and Window menus stay open when you click an item, so you can toggle several settings in one visit. The other menus close after each click. On macOS the Ctrl chords are Cmd chords and Exit reads Quit.
• "Active layer" means the layer currently selected in the Layers panel. "Selection" means an active marquee made with a selection tool (see Selections) or, in Vector mode, the selected objects.
• On macOS, Limner also fills the system menu bar at the top of the screen with a short native menu: Limner (About Limner, Hide Limner, Hide Others, Show All, Quit Limner), File (Home, Open…, Save, Save As…, Export PNG…, Close Window), Edit (Undo, Redo), View (Enter Full Screen), Window (Minimize, Zoom) and Help (Check for Updates…, Limner Plus…). Those rows are grayed out when they cannot act: Save, Save As and Export PNG with no document open (Save and Save As work on an open Book too), Undo and Redo when there is nothing to undo or redo, and Open while a Book is open. Everything below describes the menus inside the Limner window. See Limner on Mac.

File

Create, open, save, import, and export.

Open Recent

File ▸ Open Recent lists your recently opened or saved Limner documents, most recent first (the last 8, with duplicates removed). Each entry shows the file name, with the full path on hover; click one to open it. Clear Recent at the bottom empties the list. Limner also remembers the folder you last opened a document from, so the Open dialog starts there next time.

Edit

Undo and redo, the clipboard, edits on the selection, and the Preferences submenu. In the Vector workspace the Edit menu is the Vector one listed further down.

Preferences

The Preferences submenu is the same in both Edit menus.

Image

Active-layer adjustments and whole-canvas geometry. Illustration and Animation only.

Adjustments submenu

A weak footer reads "Acts on the active layer (or the selection)." See Filters and Adjustments for the controls inside each dialog.

Layer

Manage the layer stack, masks, retained transforms, and rasterizing. The whole menu is grayed out while no document is open. See Layers for the full workflow. The Vector workspace has the same Layer menu, without the Layer Effects… row.

New submenu

Mask submenu

Select

Selection operations. See Selections for how to make and refine selections, and Named selection channels for the saved-selection commands. Illustration and Animation; Vector has its own Select menu (below).

Filter

The repeat command and the convolution filters. Each acts on the active layer's pixels, clipped to the selection if one is active. Every item is grayed while no document is open or another filter dialog is open. A weak footer reads "Acts on the active layer (or the selection)." See Filters for the controls inside each dialog. Illustration and Animation only.

View

Display and canvas-view settings, grouped into submenus. The View menu stays open while you click items, so you can toggle several settings at once. In Vector the menu adds its own rows on top (see View (Vector additions)) and hides the rows marked "not in Vector".

Show submenu

Snap To submenu

Window

Panel visibility and workspace arrangement. Like the View menu, this menu stays open while you click items. See Interface for how docking works.

Panels

Illustration and Animation list these panels:

The full-width Animation Timeline is a fixed bottom panel in Animation, not a Window-menu checkbox. The Vector workspace lists these, in this order:

Brush and Create Brush follow, grayed out, with the hover "Raster brushes work in Illustration and Animation, not in Vector".

Help

The manual, the keymap, updates, the Plus key, the legal pages and About. The same rows appear in every workspace; in Vector the menu opens with one extra submenu (see Help (Vector additions)).

The Check for Updates Automatically checkbox is in Edit ▸ Preferences on Windows only. macOS and iPad do not show it.

The Vector workspace's menus

In the Vector workspace the bar reads File, Edit, Layer, Object, Path, Type, Select, View, Window, Help. Every Vector command row shows its current shortcut, and a grayed row says why on hover (for example "Select at least two graphic objects"). The same commands are in the command palette and on the canvas right-click menu, under the same names. See Vector Mode and Vector Editing.

• File is the menu above, except: New Vector Document… replaces New…; Place / Import (submenu) holds Import… and Import Animation; Export (submenu) holds Export As… and Export Animation; and Artboards and Export Sets… opens the Artboards and Export Sets panel.
• Layer is the same Layer menu as the other workspaces, without the Layer Effects… row.
• Edit, Select, View, Window and Help are Vector versions, and Object, Path and Type replace Image and Filter. Each is listed below. The Preferences submenu is the same in both Edit menus.

Edit (Vector)

Object

Everything that acts on whole objects: transforms, stacking, grouping, locking, masks, symbols, appearance and the advanced authoring objects. See Vector Editing and Output.

Path

Operations on the geometry itself: anchors, joins, offsets, simplification and the boolean combinations.

Type

Text objects in the Vector workspace; the Type tool (T) does the same from the canvas.

Select (Vector)

View (Vector additions)

These three sit above the shared View rows in Vector mode, before a separator. Snap to Special Ruler, Brush-Size Cursor, Crosshair in Brush Tip, Transparency Checkerboard and Show Editable Stroke Paths are hidden there, and Tool Strip Captions appears in View ▸ Show.

Window (Vector additions)

Help (Vector additions)

The rest of the Vector Help menu is the shared one above, row for row.

Context menus

Right-click (or hold, on iPad) opens a menu in these places:

Canvas (Vector mode)

Right-click the canvas in Vector mode for Cut, Copy, Paste, Paste in Front, Paste in Back, Paste in Place, Paste in New Graphic Layer, Duplicate and Delete, followed by the full Object, Path, Type and Select menus as submenus. The raster canvas has no context menu.

Panel tab

Right-click a panel tab: New column left, New column right, Stack above, Stack below, and Close panel. See The Interface.

Layer row

Right-click a layer (or hold it on iPad): Duplicate Layer, New Clone Layer (a plain raster layer), Add Layer Below, Lock Layer, Lock Transparency, Clip to Layer Below, Reference Layer, Add Layer Mask (when the layer has none), Layer Effects… (outside the Vector workspace), Merge Down, Break Link (a clone layer) or Rasterize Layer (fill, adjustment, Colorize color and graphic layers; grayed with the reason while the layer is locked), Remove from Folder (when the layer is in one), a row of color labels, and Delete Layer.

Folder header

Right-click a folder: its color label, then Add Folder Mask (from the current selection), or Enable / Disable Folder Mask and Delete Folder Mask once it has one, and Delete folder and contents.

Ruler badge

Right-click the ruler badge on a layer: Show in editing layer only or Show in all layers, Move to active layer, and Delete ruler.

Timeline cel

Right-click a cel: Duplicate frame, Clone frame (linked), a Timing submenu (On 2s / 3s / 4s, Double or Triple Every Hold, Keep Every 2nd or 3rd Drawing, Reverse, Repeat Once / Repeat Twice / Repeat Three Times), Copy Frame and Paste Frame After (with counts when a range is selected), Delete frame, and a Color tag row. On a transform-key cell the menu offers the interpolation instead: Hold, Linear, Smooth, Ease in, Ease out, Exponential (on scale and camera zoom only), and Delete Key. See Animation Mode.

See also

For command search, Favorites and Quick Access, named workspaces, and canvas focus, see Command Palette, Quick Access, and Workspaces.

• Preferences and Shortcuts for the full, rebindable shortcut list and theming.
• Filters for the controls inside each Filter dialog.
• Layers and Selections for the workflows behind the Layer and Select menus. The Select menu's saved-selection commands (Save Selection…, Load Selection, Rename Saved Selection, and Delete Saved Selection) are covered in Named selection channels.
• File formats for what each import and export reads and writes.
• Interface for the menu bar's place in the overall layout.

Limner's tools live on the left tool strip. Click a tool to select it, or press its keyboard shortcut. Many tools share a slot with a flyout (a small popup): the first click selects the tool shown on the key and a second click, or a double-click, opens the flyout; the Ruler and Deform slots open their flyout first. Pen, Pencil and Airbrush sit on the strip as brush families: each drives the full brush engine and remembers the last brush you picked in it. Every shortcut shown here is the default and can be changed in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts, except where a tool is marked as not bindable.

The contextual options bar at the top of the window changes to match the active tool, and it is responsive: at narrow widths the less-used controls move into a More popup at the right end of the bar. Undo and Redo stay centred. When a raster ruler is active a Snap switch appears in the bar's header. Each tool page lists its options with exact ranges and defaults.

The strip itself changes with the workspace. Illustration and Animation share the twenty-slot raster strip below; the Vector workspace has its own fifteen-slot strip with section captions; and while a Book is open a Panel tool is appended to whichever strip is showing. See The Interface for the strip's layout. On the raster strip (Illustration and Animation) each flyout row carries a pin: tap it to give that tool a key of its own on the strip, and tap the lit pin to fold it back into its group. The Vector strip has no pins; Window ▸ Customize Vector Toolbar regroups it instead. Window ▸ Reset Tool Strip Layout restores the default order.

Painting and erasing

A saved Blur brush loads as a Smudge brush, and Filter ▸ Gaussian Blur softens a whole layer or selection.

Fills and shapes

Move, transform, warp, and crop

Sampling and selecting

Construction aids

The Ruler slot holds six aids, and opens its flyout on the first click so you can choose one: Linear Ruler, Parallel Ruler, Radial Ruler, Concentric Ruler, Symmetry, and Perspective. None of them has a bindable key; reach them from the strip or the command palette. See Construction Aids.

Editable stroke tools

The Vector slot of the raster strip holds Object and Line Edit, the two tools that work on an editable stroke layer (Layer ▸ New ▸ New Editable Stroke Layer): Object selects, moves, restyles and redraws whole lines, and Line Edit reshapes them point by point. Neither has a bindable key. See Vector Editing and Output.

Vector tools

The Vector workspace has a strip of its own, in Illustrator's order with section captions (View ▸ Show ▸ Tool Strip Captions), real icons, and a Fill-over-Stroke stack at its foot (X targets, Shift+X swaps, D restores the defaults, / removes the targeted paint). Each of these tools is described in Vector Mode and Tools. The letter keys are active only in Vector mode.

Several labels exist in both strips and mean different tools: Pen, Pencil, Eraser, Rectangle, Ellipse, Line and Gradient in the Vector strip work on vector objects, their raster namesakes on pixels. The Zoom tool exists only in the Vector strip; in the raster workspaces use the status bar, Ctrl+0 / Ctrl+1, the wheel, or Space+Ctrl-drag.

Book

While a Book is open, a Panel tool is appended as the last slot of whichever strip is showing. It draws and edits comic panels: line width, border colour, an optional fill, Snap to the page guides and neighbouring panels, and Delete for the selected panel. It has no bindable key. See Book.

New in 0.9.0

• The Blur tool is gone. The Blur tool, the Blur brush mode and the built-in Blur preset were retired; use the Smudge tool or Filter ▸ Gaussian Blur instead.
• Colorize. A new tool in the Fill slot flats line art from a few color hints and solves the color again whenever a hint or a line changes. See Colorize Tool.

The Brush always paints with whatever brush is currently selected in the picker, so its feel ranges from a hard inking pen to a soft airbrush to a wet oil smear depending on the preset. To change the brush itself (tip, dynamics, texture, and the rest) see Brushes and the Tool Settings panel.

Shortcut

The default key is B. Like every shortcut in Limner, it is rebindable from Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Options bar

When the Brush is active, the contextual options bar shows the controls below. The slider values are not fixed defaults: they mirror the parameters stored on the active brush, so each preset starts the sliders where its own design puts them. (For reference, the brush engine's base values are size 24.0, hardness 0.85, opacity 1.0, flow 1.0, and stabilization 0.35; the brush selected at first launch is Pencil (HB), which starts at size 8.0, hardness 0.9, opacity 1.0, flow 1.0, stabilizer 0.3.)

A Smart Shape checkbox is on the bar too (on by default): hold the pen still at the end of a stroke to snap it to a clean line, arc, ellipse, rectangle or polygon, and untick it to keep every stroke freehand. Blend mode and Stabilizer are not on the bar: they live on the Tool Settings panel's Ink and Correction pages, the Correction page also holding the stabilizer's delay radius and Tail Aggressiveness. At narrow widths Hardness, Flow, Smart Shape and Tool Settings move into the More popup; the thumbnail, Size, Opacity, Erase and the colour swatch stay on the bar.

Flow and Opacity are separate controls. Flow is the per-dab deposit: how much paint each stamp lays down, so overlapping passes within one stroke build up gradually toward full strength. Opacity is a ceiling on how solid the whole stroke can become; once a stroke reaches it, crossing your own stroke never pushes past it. A low Flow with a high Opacity gives an airbrush that builds slowly but can still reach full strength on repeated passes; a high Flow with a low Opacity lays paint instantly but caps the stroke at a fixed translucency.

Hardness greys out for sampled-tip brushes. The Hard slider only shapes the soft-to-hard edge of the built-in round tip. A brush whose tip comes from a sampled image takes its edge from that image, so the slider would do nothing and is disabled. Hovering the disabled slider explains this: "Hardness shapes the round tip's edge. This brush uses a sampled tip, so its edge comes from the tip image." Round-tip brushes keep Hardness live.

The far left of the bar shows a small live thumbnail of the active brush. Click it to open the brush picker.

The deeper brush parameters (taper, pressure curve, jitter, tip shape, scatter, texture, and more) are not on the bar; they live in the Tool Settings panel. The bar keeps only the controls you reach for constantly.

Blend modes

The stroke's own blend mode lives on the Tool Settings panel's Ink page, as Blending mode. It offers the same thirty modes a layer does, in this order: Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Darken, Lighten, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Linear Dodge (Add), Linear Burn, Hard Light, Soft Light, Difference, Exclusion, Hue, Saturation, Color, Luminosity, Subtract, Divide, Vivid Light, Linear Light, Pin Light, Hard Mix, Darker Color, Lighter Color, Dissolve, Grain Merge, Grain Extract, Hard Mix (Soft). The blend mode is applied once when the stroke commits. It is hidden for smudge brushes, since those deposit no colour of their own.

Live size change

Press [ to shrink the brush and ] to grow it. Each press steps the diameter by about 10 percent (with a 1 pixel floor), clamped to the same range as the Size slider. These keys work mid-stroke: the new size takes effect on the next dab, so you can taper a stroke by hand as you draw. The Size slider follows along automatically. Both keys are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Modifier keys

For the dedicated colour picker, see the Eyedropper.

Smart Shape snap

The Brush can clean up a freehand shape for you. Draw a rough circle, rectangle, or other recognizable shape, then hold the pointer still at the end of the stroke. After about 800 milliseconds of dwelling in place (within roughly 6 screen pixels, so the feel is the same at any zoom), Limner recognizes the shape and snaps the stroke to a clean version, dropping you into an on-canvas re-edit with handles. Strokes smaller than about 48 pixels on screen never snap, so hatching and small detail work stays freehand, and the gesture can be turned off entirely with the Smart Shape checkbox on the Brush options bar. The snap can fire two ways:

• Mid-stroke, while you keep holding (a stationary tablet pen keeps emitting samples, so it triggers as you hold).
• On release, as a fallback, if you held at the end (a mouse held still emits no samples, so this catches that case).

If the path is not a clean shape, the stroke commits as normal freehand paint. Smart Shape applies only to the Brush tool, not the Eraser, and never fires for a transparent-paint (Erase) stroke. Holding Shift while a recognized shape is active constrains it (for example, a circle locks to a perfect circle and a line locks to 15 degree increments). See Shapes for more on the shape re-edit handles.

Notes and special cases

• Blend-folder brushes reroute the tool. Selecting a brush from the "Blend" folder (or any brush that carries the smudge flag, including the wet-mixing oils in the Painting folder) keeps the Brush tool selected but smears instead of depositing colour. The Erase toggle wins over this rerouting: with Erase on, any brush erases, Blend brushes included. See Smudge for that behaviour.
• The Eraser shares this path. The Eraser is the Brush in erase mode on raster layers. You can also make any brush erase by turning on the Erase toggle in the options bar.
• Locked layers. Painting on a locked layer is a no-op. See Layers.
• Text layers. Trying to paint on a text layer prompts you to rasterize it first; the triggering stroke is dropped, and you paint after confirming.
• Vector layers. On a vector layer, a Brush stroke is captured as an editable vector line at pen-up. See Vector mode and Vector editing.
• Construction aids. When a ruler, guide, grid, or perspective snap is active, strokes rail onto it. See Construction aids. Symmetry repeats the stroke across the symmetry images; the symmetry controls live on the Symmetry tool's options bar (see Construction aids).

New in 0.9.0

• Spacing takes care of itself. Dab spacing follows a square-root law from the brush size and the projected width of a flattened nib, so a tilted flat nib lays a continuous edge.
• Pressure per tablet. Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Pen Pressure keeps a calibrated curve for each tablet, and an unnamed pen never overwrites a named one.
• The first dab follows the stroke. A directional tip starts pointing the way the line goes, curve following subdivides where a stroke bends, and lifting the pen no longer freezes the app.
• Clone Stamp and Heal. Two new brushes on the Retouch slot; see Clone Stamp and Heal Tools.

See also

• Brushes: the brush picker and library.
• Tool Settings panel: the full per-brush settings.
• Eraser, Smudge.
• Color for choosing the paint colour.

Default shortcut: E. All shortcuts are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

What it does

• On a normal raster layer, the Eraser removes paint under the brush dab, leaving transparency behind. Strength controls how completely it clears, so a soft, low-Strength eraser fades pixels rather than wiping them out.
• On a layer mask, the Eraser behaves like a normal raster erase, editing the mask itself.
• On a vector layer, the Eraser switches to the geometric vector eraser, which cuts the vector lines themselves instead of clearing pixels. The exact behaviour depends on the active erase mode. See Vector layer erasing below.

The Brush tool can also erase. Turn on the Erase toggle on the Brush options bar (CSP-style transparent colour) and the active brush erases instead of painting. This lets any custom brush, with all its dynamics and texture, act as an eraser. See the Brush page and the brush library.

Eraser brush defaults

The Eraser carries its own brush parameter set, separate from the Brush tool, so changing the eraser does not disturb your painting brush.

Other engine parameters fall back to the brush engine base (flow 1.0, stabilization 0.35).

Options bar

These controls appear on the contextual options bar while the Eraser is active.

Hard is on the bar only at full width; at narrow widths it moves into the More popup, leaving Size and Strength. The eraser's stabilizer lives on the Tool Settings panel's Correction page.

Modifiers

• Alt: hold to temporarily switch to the Eyedropper and sample a colour, then release to return to erasing. (Useful when you want to check or pick up a colour mid-edit.)

Vector layer erasing

When the active layer is a vector layer (and you are not editing a mask), the Eraser becomes a geometric vector eraser. Instead of clearing pixels, it operates on the vector lines themselves. Three mode buttons appear on the options bar, and your choice is remembered.

The default mode is Erase touched areas. The buttons appear in that order on the options bar, and your choice is remembered for the next vector erase.

For more on vector layers and how their lines are drawn and edited, see Vector mode.

Tips

• Because the Eraser and Brush share one engine, you can build a custom eraser the same way you build a brush: pick a tip, set hardness and stabilization, and adjust Strength for partial clearing.
• For a precise, line-art friendly eraser, raise Hard toward 1.0. For blending edges, lower it.
• To erase with a textured or shaped brush, switch to the Brush tool and turn on its Erase toggle instead, so the brush's tip and dynamics carry over to the erase.

It lives in the same dab engine the Brush uses, so a soft, large tip blends broadly and a small, hard tip works in tight spots.

Under the hood a blender is a pigment carrier. It picks colour up over a 64-point sample of the area under the tip (the Sample radius), carries a finite load, and pulls paint inward as well as pushing it outward, so dragging from empty canvas into a shape draws the edge back with the pen. It deposits nothing of its own, every stroke starts clean, and a stroke reads only the tiles the brush touches, so there is no pause at 4K and above.

Where to find them

The tool ships in two places, and it behaves identically either way:

• As the Blend tool on the tool strip (the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog and the command palette list it as Blend too). Its options bar carries the brush controls plus Sample all layers and Sample radius, which live nowhere else.
• As library brushes in the Brush picker's Blend folder. Pick one and keep using the Brush tool; the stroke smears or softens instead of painting. See Brush library and presets.

Either way, the settings come from the active brush. To change size, hardness, flow, or stabilizer, edit the brush in the Tool Settings panel or pick a different Blend-folder brush.

Keyboard shortcuts

Smudge has no default keyboard shortcut. It appears in the Keyboard Shortcuts list and can be given a key of your own in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

What works on, and what does not

• Smudge works on normal raster layers and layer masks.
• It is blocked on vector layers. If you try, Limner shows a notice and does

nothing, because there is no pixel colour there to rework. Convert or rasterize the layer first.

• It respects the active selection, symmetry, and the perspective ruler. With a

perspective ruler and snap on, strokes rail toward the vanishing points just like a brush stroke.

• A locked layer cannot be smudged.

Smudge

Smudge picks up the colour under the tip at the start of the stroke and drags it along your path, mixing in colour it passes over as it goes. The result is the classic "wet fingertip" smear.

How it behaves:

• Pressure drives the smear. Press hard and your starting colour carries

farther before it blends into what is underneath, like a loaded fingertip. A light touch blends gently and locally.

• Flow sets the deposit strength. Higher Flow lays the carried colour down

more strongly per dab.

• The smear carries a finite load. What the tip picked up runs out as it travels, the way real paint does, instead of feeding itself from its own trail.

instead of dying out after the first inch.

• With symmetry on, each mirrored stroke carries its own colour, sampled from

under its own start point, rather than a shared average.

Smudge options

The dedicated Smudge tool reads these from its brush. The defaults below are the values of the built-in Smudge brush.

Notes:

• The deposit per dab combines pressure with Flow, so a light pen pressure

always smears more gently than a hard one at the same Flow.

• On pen-up the final dab is laid down at a fixed strength so the stroke ends

cleanly instead of fading to nothing.

Tips

• For a believable smear, keep Flow moderate and let pressure do the work. Full

Flow at full pressure drags colour a long way, which can look streaky.

• The tool commits on pen-up and adds one stroke to the Session Stats count. See

the Stats panel.

New in 0.9.0

• No stall on a large canvas. Starting a smudge stroke used to read the whole canvas first; it now reads only what the stroke touches.
• Sample radius. The Blend slot's options bar carries Sample all layers and a Sample radius (5 to 100 percent, default 15) that sets how far the pickup looks around the dab, and the sampling now zooms with the brush.
• Blending rebuilt around pigment. A blender carries a finite amount of the colour it picked up, pulls paint inward as well as pushing it outward, deposits nothing of its own, and starts every stroke clean. See Brushes.

Related pages

• Brush tool
• Brush library and presets
• Tool Settings panel
• Eraser tool
• Construction aids for the perspective ruler that

both tools rail toward.

Clone Stamp and Heal share the Retouch slot of the raster tool strip. Both paint with the full brush engine, so size, hardness, opacity, flow and every brush dynamic apply, and both take their paint from somewhere else on the canvas instead of from the colour panel.

Where to find them

Click the Retouch slot (below the Blend slot) to pick Clone Stamp; click it again, or double-click, for the flyout with Heal. Neither has a default hotkey, and both can be bound in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Neither tool works inside a layer mask: starting a stroke while a mask is the edit target is refused with a notice, and the mask is left alone.

Clone Stamp

Alt+click to aim the source, then paint: the pixels under the source point are copied under your brush, offset by the distance between the source and where you started painting. It is the tool for repeating a texture, patching a gap in a pattern, or moving a detail without redrawing it.

Heal

Heal aims the same way, with Alt+click, but blends the source's texture into the colour and lighting of the place you paint, so a patch disappears into its surroundings rather than sitting on top of them. Use it for blemishes, dust, seams and small distractions; use Clone Stamp when you want an exact copy.

Tips

• Both tools always copy from the active layer, so the paper and the layers below never bake into the clone. Aim the source on the layer you mean to paint on.
• A soft, low-flow brush hides the edge of a clone; a hard brush copies crisp detail.
• Both tools respect the selection, symmetry and the rulers, so a cloned repeat can follow a perspective ruler.

Related pages

• Brush Tool for the shared controls.
• Smudge Tool for blending rather than copying.
• Selections for limiting where a clone can land.

Default shortcut: Shift+G. Shortcuts are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

How it works

1. Pick the color you want in the Color panel (see Color).
2. Select the Fill Bucket, then click inside the region you want to fill.
3. Limner samples the color under your click, grows outward to every touching pixel within the Tolerance range, and paints that area with the active color.

The fill is deferred for responsiveness: the click records the target pixel right where you pressed, and the actual flood, edge processing, and upload run once on the next frame. You still get exactly one fill per click, with identical results and a single undo step, but a click never freezes the app even on a large canvas.

By default the fill matches against the merged composite of all layers and paints onto the active layer alone (like Clip Studio Paint's default Refer other layers bucket): the fill respects line art kept on its own layer while the color lands on your flats layer. Untick Reference all layers to match against the active layer's own pixels instead.

Where it lands

• Active layer: the normal case. The fill paints onto the layer you are working on.
• Multiple selected layers: if more than one layer is selected, every selected non-background layer is filled, all folded into one undo step.
• Layer mask: when you are editing a mask, the fill paints into the mask instead of the pixels (fill with black to hide, white to show). See Layers.

The active color you fill with is also added to the Color History strip in the Color panel.

Options

These controls appear in the options bar while the Fill Bucket is active.

Notes on the options

• Tolerance is the single most useful dial. If a fill leaks across a soft edge, lower it. If a fill leaves a halo of unfilled pixels around your lines, raise it (or use Expand).
• Expand with Under line is the standard flatting combination, and it is what ships: the flat climbs under anti-aliased ink to the line's own ridge so there is no gap, and it can never cross a line into the region beyond, however thin the line is.
• Reference all layers (on by default) is what makes flatting work out of the box when your line art is on one layer and you are filling on another: match against the visible drawing, but keep the color on the flats layer. Untick it to match only the active layer's own pixels. If a visible layer is flagged as a Reference layer, the fill matches against that layer's lines instead, regardless of this option.
• Gradient fill reuses whatever ramp the Gradient tool is set to, so set up your ramp there first.

Symmetry

When a symmetry ruler is active, the Fill Bucket also fills from the mirrored copies of your clicked point, so a symmetric region fills symmetrically. The whole set of fills folds into a single undo step. See Construction aids for setting up symmetry rulers.

Limitations

• Vector layers: the Fill Bucket is blocked on vector layers, because they hold strokes rather than filled regions (a flood would be wiped by the next re-render). Limner shows a notice if you try. Use vector fills in Vector mode instead.
• Locked layers: filling does nothing on a locked layer.

New in 0.9.0

• Colour matched the way your eye does. The bucket compares colours perceptually, so a tolerance of 20 means the same visual distance in light and dark colours.
• Sample size. Point, 3 by 3 or 5 by 5 sampling for the seed colour, as on the Magic Wand.
• Enclose and Fill. Edit ▸ Enclose and Fill fills every closed gap inside a rough lasso; see Selections.

See also

• Color - choosing the active color and the Color History strip.
• Gradient tool - editing the ramp used by Gradient fill.
• Construction aids - symmetry rulers that drive symmetric fills.
• Layers - filling masks and multiple selected layers.

Colorize shares the Fill Bucket's slot in the tool strip (press and hold the slot, or click its small triangle) and has no keyboard shortcut. Pick the raster layer that holds your line art, choose a color, and draw a short stroke inside each region: the color lands on a new layer directly under the lines, named after the line layer with "color", and fills each region up to its lines.

The hints stay on that color layer as strokes (drawn over the canvas while the tool is active), and the color is solved again whenever you add or delete a hint or the line art changes: draw another line on the line layer and the color follows it, delete a hint and its region goes clear. A hint cannot be moved or reshaped once drawn; to change one, Alt-click it to delete it and draw it again.

Options

Alt-click a hint to delete just that one. Every hint edit is one undo step, and dragging the Drop leaks percentage is one undo step too, solved once when you let go.

A gap in the lines lets color through: with a hint on each side, the leak is a few pixels beside the gap on the side whose hint is farther from it (draw the hint near the gap, or close the gap on the line layer). Anti-aliased edges and faint scanner noise do not stop the color, and neither do semi-transparent light strokes (a 50% white stroke is paper, not a line); a line at a quarter of full ink or darker does.

The color layer

The color layer is a generated layer, like a fill layer: its pixels are solved from the hints, so the brush and the bucket do not paint on it. Paint on a layer above it, or bake it into ordinary pixels with Layer ▸ Rasterize ▸ Rasterize Layer or Merge Down, which drops the hints. A locked color layer refuses hint edits ("Layer is locked": unlock the color layer to change its hints), but it still follows its line layer when the lines change. The color also follows lines that a layer's live effects redraw.

It follows one line layer. If that layer is deleted, merged away or flattened, the color layer keeps the colors it shows as an ordinary raster layer, the status bar says "1 color layer unlinked", and one Undo brings back the line layer and every hint. Photoshop, SVG and OpenRaster exports get the flat color; the hints stay in the Limner document (the export notice names "Colorize hints"), which then needs this build or newer to open.

Where Colorize is unavailable

• Animation. Colorize solves one drawing, not a frame timeline, so in Animation the tool refuses to draw, delete or clear hints with "Colorize is unavailable in Animation". Existing hints still show. Switch to Illustration to edit them; leaving Animation for any workspace solves the color layers again.
• Not enough memory. Before each solve, Limner checks that it fits in the memory the device can safely give it (about 8 bytes for every canvas pixel). A solve that would not fit is skipped with "Colorize needs more memory", which names the size, instead of risking the app being closed. On desktop computers every canvas Limner can create fits; the check matters on an iPad with little memory free.

Related pages

• Fill Bucket Tool: the one-click fill for a single region.
• Fill and adjustment layers: generated layers and Rasterize Layer.
• Layers: Merge Down and the rest of the stack.

Default shortcut: G (rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts).

What it does

• Drag to fill with a multi-stop color and opacity ramp.
• Choose from 8 built-in presets or build your own in the Gradient editor.
• Pick the shape (Linear, Radial, Reflected, Conical, Diamond), reverse the ramp, and turn on dithering to hide banding.
• Save your own gradients as presets and remove them later.

The preview is drawn through the real compositor, so it appears at the active layer's depth, blend mode, and selection clip while you drag. Release to commit.

Gradients track the active paint color: the default ramp blends the current color into transparent. See Color for picking and managing colors.

Options bar

When the Gradient tool is active, the tool options bar shows a compact ramp preview plus a couple of quick controls. Click the ramp preview to open the full Gradient editor.

The Dither option lives in the Gradient editor (see below).

The Gradient editor

Click the ramp preview in the options bar to open the Gradient editor in the Tool Settings panel. It holds the presets, the editable stop bar, the selected stop's color, opacity, and position controls, and the shape options.

Presets

The top row holds the 8 built-in presets, followed by any presets you have saved, followed by a Save button. Click a preset swatch to load its colors into the current gradient. Loading a preset replaces the stops but leaves your shape, Reverse, and Dither settings as they are.

The 8 built-in presets:

Hover a built-in swatch to see its name.

Adding, moving, and deleting stops

The stop bar shows the ramp with one triangular marker per stop. A gradient always keeps at least two stops and can hold up to 16.

• Add a stop: click an empty spot on the bar. The new stop samples the ramp's current color at that position (so it is invisible until you recolor it).
• Move a stop: drag its marker. A stop is clamped between its neighbors so the order is preserved.
• Select a stop: click its marker. The selected marker carries the accent-colored outline, and its controls appear below the bar.
• Delete a stop: select it, then click Delete. Delete is disabled when only two stops remain.

Per-stop color, opacity, and position

With a stop selected, the controls below the bar edit just that stop.

When Main color is on, the stop tracks the color picker, so the gradient updates as you change the active color. The default Color to clear ramp uses Main color on both stops, which is why it always blends the current color into transparent.

Shape, Reverse, and Dither

Below the separator at the bottom of the editor:

Shapes

The five shapes all use the same start-to-end drag:

Saving and removing custom presets

• Save the current gradient: click the Save button at the end of the preset row. The current gradient (its stops, shape, reverse, and dither) is added as a new preset and saved to your settings.
• Remove a saved preset: right-click a saved preset swatch and choose Remove preset, or click the saved preset and use the Delete button. Built-in presets cannot be removed.

Saved presets persist across sessions in your settings file.

Tips

• Hold the current color as one stop and transparent as the other to paint a soft glow or vignette.
• Turn on Dither for long, subtle ramps (skies, soft backgrounds) where 8-bit banding would otherwise show.
• Use Reverse to flip a gradient without re-dragging.

Related

• Color - picking and managing the active paint color the gradient can follow.
• Layers - the Gradient tool paints onto the active raster layer at its blend mode and depth.
• Selections - an active selection clips the gradient fill.

• Rectangle and Ellipse lay down a solid figure (filled or just an outline) in the current paint colour.
• Line is drawn with the active brush, so a pencil line looks like pencil and an inked line looks like ink. After you release, the line drops into an on-canvas editing state where you can nudge either end before committing. Curve is the same gesture with a bend: drag out the chord, then pull any of its four points, which all sit on the curve itself, so the handle you hold is the ink.

On a vector layer, Rectangle and Ellipse behave differently: instead of pixels they create an editable closed vector stroke. See the vector mode notes below.

Choosing a tool

The Line and Curve tools ship without a default key. All four are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Drawing a rectangle or ellipse

1. Pick the Rectangle or Ellipse tool.
2. Set the paint colour. Both tools deposit the current paint colour at full opacity, and the colour is added to the Color History strip when you start the drag.
3. Drag from one corner to the opposite corner. Rectangle draws the box through those two corners. Ellipse fits an ellipse inside that box.
4. Release to commit onto the active layer.

A live preview follows your drag and updates once per frame, so it stays smooth even on large canvases. The figure is selection-clipped, so if you have an active selection the shape is masked to it.

Notes:

• An ellipse is only drawn once it is at least about 1 pixel across in each direction. A tiny drag draws nothing.
• A figure dragged entirely off-canvas draws nothing.

Rectangle and Ellipse options

These appear in the tool options bar when Rectangle or Ellipse is active. The same controls, plus an Opacity slider, also sit at the top of the Tool Settings panel while a shape tool is chosen; either surface drives the same values.

The Size control is the same value the Line tool uses, so changing it for one affects the other.

Drawing a line

1. Pick the Line tool.
2. Pick the brush you want the line drawn with (the line carries that brush's tip, texture, and grit), and set the paint colour.
3. Drag from the start point to the end point.
4. Release. If the line is at least 3 pixels long it enters on-canvas re-editing (below). A shorter line is discarded.

The line is rendered with the active brush at a constant width set by the Size control, rather than as a flat fill.

Constraining and railing the angle

• Shift constrains the line to 15 degree steps (0, 15, 30, 45, and so on) measured from the start point.
• When a perspective ruler is in use with Snap on, the Line tool instead rails toward the matching vanishing point. In that case Shift's 15 degree constraint does not apply. The Curve tool's opening drag rails and constrains exactly like the Line tool. Rectangle, Ellipse, and Gradient stay free axis drags and are not affected by perspective railing. See Construction Aids for rulers and vanishing points.

Re-editing the line before you commit

After you release a line of 3 pixels or more, it does not commit immediately. Instead it floats as an editable preview with handles on each endpoint:

• Drag either endpoint to reposition it. Hold Shift while dragging an endpoint to constrain that end to 15 degree steps.
• A rotation handle sits above the line; drag it to rotate the whole line.
• Enter (or tap off the line, away from the handles) commits the line onto the active layer.
• Esc cancels and leaves the layer untouched.
• Switching tools also commits the line.

Line options

A caption in the bar reads "Drawn with the active brush; Shift constrains the angle." With the Curve tool it reads "Drag out the line, then drag its points to bend it. Enter commits, Esc cancels."

On a vector layer

When the active layer is a vector layer, the shape tools change behaviour:

• Rectangle and Ellipse create an editable closed vector stroke (an outline) drawn with the active brush, rather than rasterized pixels. This matches the convention that figures on vector layers are outline strokes. If Filled is on, the shape is still drawn unfilled and Limner prints a notice that vector layers hold outlines. After committing, you can reshape it with the vector editing tools.
• Line and Curve still drop into the same on-canvas re-edit; on a vector layer the committed figure becomes an editable stroke.

For more on working with vector strokes, see Vector Mode.

Tips and gotchas

• All three tools fold their result with Normal blending. They do not use a brush's per-brush ink blend mode, even when the active brush has one set.
• Rectangle and Ellipse paint the current colour at full opacity. To make a softer or semi-transparent figure, lower the layer opacity after committing, or use the Brush tool instead.
• The Line tool is the right choice when you want a straight stroke that still looks like your brush. The Rectangle and Ellipse outline mode gives you a crisp, even-width border in a flat colour.
• These tools also respect the active selection as a clip, so you can confine a figure to a masked region.

Related pages

• Construction Aids for rulers, perspective, and snapping.
• Vector Mode and Vector Editing for shapes on vector layers.
• Brush Tool for the brush a line is drawn with.
• Gradient Tool, which shares the same shape rasterizer.
• Selections for clipping a shape to a region.
• Preferences and Shortcuts to rebind these tools.

At a glance

How text works in Limner

When you place text, Limner creates a text layer. The layer stores the words and all their styling (font, size, alignment, colour, position, rotation), and it generates its pixels from that stored data. Because the styling is the source of truth, you can click the text again later and re-edit everything without losing crispness: the glyphs are re-rasterized at the new size, not stretched.

Fonts come from your installed system fonts. Limner scans your fonts folder on a background thread when it starts, so the very first time you reach for the Text tool the list may still be filling in. If you click before fonts finish loading, nothing happens yet (Limner is still building the list); just try again in a moment. Missing fonts after opening a document are listed after the system font scan: a document whose text uses a family this machine does not have raises a Fonts unavailable notice naming it. Saved raster pixels stay unchanged until you edit that text; while you edit, the text previews in an installed fallback, confirming can change the layout, and Limner keeps the missing family name unless you choose another font. After installing the original font, restart Limner and reopen the document before editing or exporting changed text. If no system fonts are found at all, the panel shows "No system fonts were found, so text can't be placed."

Placing new text

1. Select the Text tool (press T or pick it from the tool strip).
2. Click on the canvas where you want the text. A text box appears and the text editor opens in the Tool Settings panel. A click always starts single-line point text; to make the words wrap, drag the grip on the right edge of the box, or tick Wrap text in the panel and set the width there.
3. Type into the text box at the top of the panel, then set the font, size, colour, and other options below.
4. Click Confirm to commit the text (or Cancel to discard it).

A new text layer is named automatically from the text you typed. The text colour of a brand new text block starts from your current brush colour, so the text matches whatever you were just painting with. See color.md for how the brush colour is chosen.

If you confirm with the text box empty (or only whitespace), nothing is placed. Limner treats an empty confirm the same as a cancel.

Editing existing text

With the Text tool active, click directly on an existing text layer's box to re-open it for editing. The panel re-loads that layer's words and styling, and you can change anything. Clicking off the box confirms the current edit; clicking on a different text layer confirms the current one and opens the next.

Switching to another tool also finishes the current edit: it is confirmed if it has text, or cancelled if it is empty.

Moving, scaling, and rotating on the canvas

While you are editing, the text box shows handles directly on the canvas. Drag them to reposition the block:

• Move: drag inside the box.
• Scale: drag any of the four corner handles. Scaling changes the font size (so the text stays crisp), not the pixel resolution, and the wrap width and any outline scale by the same factor, so a resized block keeps its shape instead of rewrapping. Size is clamped to the 4 px to 1024 px range while dragging the box.
• Rotate: drag the rotate handle that sits just off the box. A fifth grip on the right edge of the box sets the wrap width; on point text it is what turns the block into a wrapping box.

The "Drag the on-canvas box to move, scale, or rotate." hint at the bottom of the panel is a reminder of this.

The text editor

The text editor is drawn in the Tool Settings panel, the way the panel follows the active tool. Edit the fields, watch the live preview update on the canvas, then Confirm or Cancel.

While you are editing, a small floating toolbar on the canvas also offers Confirm and Cancel, so you do not have to reach back to the panel.

Styling part of the text

The editor's controls set the style of the whole layer. To style only some characters, select them in the editor's text box (drag, or Shift with the arrow keys) and use the Text tool's options bar at the top of the window: B and I toggle bold and italic over the selection, the color swatch recolors it, and the size field resizes it. The bar reads the style of the first selected character, so a toggle flips what you see. Plain gives the selected characters the layer's own style back. The controls are grayed out until characters are selected, and the hover says so.

A styled run keeps its place as you type: characters typed inside a bold word are bold, and a run after an insertion moves with the text. Runs of different sizes share one baseline. A run's size is its own: changing the editor's Size afterwards changes only the characters without a size of their own, and Plain gives a run the layer's size back. The styling is saved with the document and reopens editable; a Photoshop or SVG export writes the layer's one style and names the loss in the export notice.

Vector text objects (the Type tool in Vector mode) style the same way: select characters in the words box of the Character settings (in the Properties panel or the Typography panel), or in the words while typing them on the canvas, and use the Type tool's options bar (B, I, size and Plain; a text object's color is its fill, so there is no swatch). The outlines update as you go and the runs save with the document.

Characters the font does not have

When the layer's font has no glyph for a character (Japanese text in a Latin font, an emoji, a symbol), Limner draws that character from another installed font that has it, at the layer's size and color, instead of an empty box. The rest of the text stays in the font you chose. The same applies to vector text objects. The substitute is picked from the fonts on this machine, so the same document can show a different substitute elsewhere; install the font you want and pick it for the layer to make it explicit.

Alignment options

The four Align buttons map to these behaviors:

• Left: every line starts at the left edge of the block.
• Center: every line is centered within the block.
• Right: every line ends at the right edge of the block.
• Justify: inter-word spacing is stretched so every line except the last fills the block width. A last line, or any line with no spaces, stays left-aligned (the standard typographic behavior).

Committing and undo

Clicking Confirm bakes the rasterized text into the layer and stores the re-editable data, all as a single undo step. Editing existing text and confirming is also one undo step that records the change from the old text to the new.

Rasterizing a text layer

When you want to paint over the text with a brush, treat it as plain pixels, or simply lock in the look, flatten it with Layer ▸ Rasterize ▸ Rasterize Text. This drops the re-editable text data so the layer becomes an ordinary raster layer (the pixels are already there, so nothing visibly changes). It is a single undo step, and Limner commits any in-progress edit first. After rasterizing, the text is no longer editable as text. The menu entry's hover reads "Flatten the active text layer to plain pixels (no longer editable)."

Tips and limits

• The live preview on the canvas is pixel-identical to the committed result, so what you see while editing is exactly what you get.
• Very large blocks have a hard cap: if a block would need to rasterize larger than 16384 px on a side, Limner skips it and draws nothing (this only happens with extreme size or pasted text).
• Font discovery follows each platform: Windows enumerates the Windows Fonts folder, and macOS and iPadOS walk the system and per-user font roots, including their subfolders.

See also

• Layers - how layers, locking, and layer order work.
• Color - choosing the brush colour that seeds new text.
• transform-move.md - free transform and Layer Move for moving committed pixels.

New in 0.9.0

• Real typesetting. Text is shaped with OpenType features: ligatures, joining scripts such as Arabic and Hebrew, and right-to-left runs; kerning is read from the font's GPOS table and line spacing matches browsers, InDesign and Krita.
• Old documents do not move. Kerning and line spacing are recorded per text layer, so reopening an older document lays its text out by the old rules; new text uses the new ones.
• Style part of the text. Select characters and set bold, italic, size or color on them alone from the Text tool's options bar; the runs save with the document and reopen editable. See Styling part of the text.
• Missing characters come from another font. A character the layer's font lacks is drawn from another installed font that has it, instead of an empty box.
• Small fixes. Ctrl+Enter reliably finishes an edit.
• In the Vector workspace the Type tool sets point, area and on-path text objects and edits them on the canvas; see Vector Editing and Output.
• Text that wraps in a box. Drag out a box with the Text tool instead of clicking, and your words wrap inside it. Resize the box and the text reflows to fit, with the edge you are not dragging staying exactly where it was. Click and type still places single-line point text, exactly as before.
• A wrap width you can set exactly. The width grip on the right edge of the box and the wrap-width control in the Tool Settings panel are the same measure, so you can drag it by eye or type an exact value.
• Justify. Alignment gains Justify, which stretches the spaces on every line except the last so the paragraph fills the box.
• Text outline. A text layer can carry an outline with its own colour and thickness, starting at white and 3 px. It is the standard look for dialogue over art, it stays exact where the text meets the canvas edge, and the fill inside the glyph is left intact.
• Scaling keeps the proportions. Dragging a corner of the text frame scales the type and the wrap width by the same factor, so a resized block keeps its shape instead of rewrapping into a different one.
• A text layer is named from its text. New text layers take their name from what you typed, and the name follows the text when you edit it.
• Transform is refused, not silently destructive. A text layer rebuilds its pixels from the text, so a transform baked into it would be lost the next time you edit. Limner now explains that instead of quietly discarding your editable text.

Transform

The Transform tool (default shortcut Ctrl+T) lifts the selected pixels of every eligible layer into a free transform.

With nothing selected, Transform selects the whole canvas and lifts the active layer, the way Photoshop's Ctrl+T does on a layer. It does nothing only when a transform is already running, or when the pixels cannot be lifted. On a graphic layer it hands you the Vector workspace's Selection tool instead, and if the only thing selected is a text layer it explains why it will not lift it. If any selected layer (other than the paper base) is locked, the whole transform is cancelled before it starts.

What it lifts

• The selected, non-transparent pixels of every selected layer, except the paper base, vector and graphic layers, fill and adjustment layers, text layers, and any layer the current animation frame shows through a transform keyframe. Each of those rebuilds its pixels from data of its own, so a transform baked into them would be discarded.
• The base paper layer (index 0) is always excluded.
• Vector layers are skipped. They have their own transform path through the Object tool. When the only selected layer is a vector layer, Transform switches you to the Object tool with that layer selected instead.
• When more than one layer is selected, the handles wrap the union of all the lifted content, and every layer is previewed and committed together.

Lifting erases the pixels from their original spot, clears the marching ants, and floats the content above the canvas so you can reposition it freely. The lift and the eventual commit fold into a single undo step.

Moving, scaling, and rotating

The free transform draws a bounding box with handles:

• Move: drag anywhere inside the box.
• Modifiers: while scaling, the opposite corner stays put by default and Alt scales about the centre instead (press or release Alt in the middle of a drag and the anchor changes at once); while rotating, Shift snaps to 15 degree stops.
• Scale: drag any of the four corner handles.
• Rotate: drag the rotate handle, which sits just off the box.

The handle grab tolerance is 14 window pixels. This is measured on screen rather than in canvas pixels, so handles stay equally easy to grab whether you are zoomed in or out.

Scale factors are clamped away from zero on each axis (a factor smaller than 0.05 snaps to 0.05), so you cannot collapse the content to nothing by accident.

Constraining aspect ratio

Hold Shift while dragging a corner to scale uniformly and keep the box proportions. You can also leave the constraint on permanently with the Lock toggle on the floating toolbar (see below); Shift acts as a live override on top of it. Uniform scaling drives both axes by the larger relative change and preserves any flip signs.

Modes and numeric fields

The tool options bar carries four modes. Free is the affine box (scale from the corners, rotate from the handle, move inside); Distort drags each corner freely; Perspective mirrors a corner's diagonal opposite through the centre; Skew slides a corner's edge parallel. Beside them sit five fields for exact values: W and H as percentages, Angle in degrees, and X and Y as pixel offsets. The three projective modes edit the four corners directly, so they have no single scale or angle and the fields are hidden rather than showing a value that means nothing.

The floating toolbar

While a transform is active, a small floating toolbar appears near the box:

Aspect lock control

Confirm versus Cancel

• Confirm bakes the transformed pixels back onto each layer they came from. The whole lift-and-commit sequence is one undo step.
• Cancel restores the lifted pixels exactly as they were, byte for byte, including the graded coverage of a feathered selection, and discards the lift so the undo stack stays clean.

A hidden source layer still transforms and commits (so it moves along with a multi-layer selection), but it is left out of the live preview.

Re-editing a transform (retained source)

Confirm keeps more than the pixels it bakes. Each transformed layer remembers the pixels it lifted, the pixels that were under the placed result, and the box's position, scale, rotation and mode. Layer ▸ Transform ▸ Edit Transform puts the original pixels back and re-opens the box exactly where you left it, so a second adjustment resamples the original once instead of resampling an already resampled result: rotate by 45 degrees, confirm, edit the transform back to 0 and confirm again, and the layer is the original again. Cancel in a re-opened session keeps the previous result.

The way back exists only while the layer's pixels are still that result. Paint over the transformed area, run a filter on the layer, merge it or resize the canvas, and Edit Transform reports that the transform stays as pixels (a merge drops the record, undoably). Layer ▸ Transform ▸ Rasterize Transform lets a record go on purpose; the pixels do not change. A record counts against the document's memory readout and, like an embedded smart object, is not kept past 256 MiB (the status line says so, and the transform is still applied). The record is saved with the document (which then needs this build or newer) and re-opens after a relaunch; PSD, SVG and OpenRaster exports get the transformed pixels only, and the export notice names "Re-editable transforms" as what stays in the Limner document. The same applies to a committed Mesh Warp: Edit Transform brings its lattice back with every node where it was.

Layer Move

The Layer Move tool (default shortcut V) is the quick way to reposition an entire layer. It selects the whole canvas and lifts the complete active layer into the same free transform described above.

Layer Move is ignored in two cases:

• The active layer is the base paper layer (index 0).
• The active layer is locked.

In every other respect it behaves exactly like Transform: drag inside to move, drag a corner to scale, drag the rotate handle to rotate, hold Shift (or use the Lock toggle) to constrain aspect, and Confirm, Cancel, or Flip from the floating toolbar. Because Layer Move first selects the whole canvas, there is no need to make a selection first.

Reaching Free Transform from the menu

You can also start a transform from the menu: Edit ▸ Free Transform (also in the command palette). This runs the same Transform action as the Ctrl+T shortcut: with a selection it lifts the selected pixels, and with none it transforms the whole active layer. One difference: a transform started from the menu or the palette hands you back the tool you were using when you confirm or cancel it, while the Ctrl+T key selects the Transform tool and stays on it. A Free Transform that is refused (on a vector layer, a locked or generated layer, or with nothing to lift) changes nothing, so a later transform never returns to a tool from that earlier attempt. Layer ▸ Transform ▸ Edit Transform on a retained Mesh Warp likewise returns to the tool it was opened from when you confirm.

Notes

• A live text edit is baked first before either tool opens its transform, so unconfirmed text is committed rather than lost.
• Both default shortcuts (Ctrl+T for Transform, V for Layer Move) are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Related pages

• Selections for making the selection that Transform lifts.
• Layers for layer locking, the paper base, and the active layer.

New in 0.9.0

• Alt anchoring is live. Holding or releasing Alt in the middle of a drag switches between scaling from the centre and from the opposite edge.
• Feathered selections lift exactly. Free Transform and Mesh Warp lift a feathered selection at its exact coverage, and a mixed selection of raster and text layers no longer erases the text pixels.
• Safe mid-transform. Hiding or reordering a layer while a transform is live no longer makes the content vanish.
• Transform by the numbers. Free Transform gains numeric fields for exact position, scale, and rotation, Shift constrains a drag, and rotation snaps at the common angles.
• Text layers are protected. Transforming a text layer used to destroy its editability silently. It is now refused with an explanation of what to do instead.
• Transforms you can go back into. A committed transform or Mesh Warp keeps its source, so Layer ▸ Transform ▸ Edit Transform reopens it on the original pixels. See Re-editing a transform.

Use it for organic reshaping where a straight scale or rotate is too rigid: curving a banner, fitting a label onto a tilted surface, adjusting a pose, or correcting perspective on hand-drawn line art.

On-screen label: "Mesh Warp" (this is the tool palette button label).

Where it fits

• For a straight move, scale, rotate, or flip, use the Transform / Move tool. Mesh Warp is for free-form deformation, not affine transforms.
• For brush-driven push, pinch, bloat, and twirl with no visible grid, use the Liquefy tool. Liquefy commits each stroke on its own as you lift the pen; Mesh Warp keeps the whole warp open until you Confirm or Cancel.

Default shortcut

Mesh Warp has no default keyboard shortcut. You can assign one in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

How it works

Selecting the Mesh Warp tool starts a warp session right away. There is no click-to-begin step.

1. Limner lifts the active layer's non-transparent pixels into a floating copy and clears them from the layer underneath. An active selection clips what gets lifted (see below); once the pixels are lifted, the selection is dropped and the grid becomes the editing surface.
2. A grid of control points appears over the lifted pixels, at the density set in the options bar (5x5 unless you change it).
3. Drag any control point. The nearest point to your press is grabbed, and dragging it deforms the surrounding pixels with a live preview.
4. Use the floating toolbar to Confirm, Cancel, or Reset.

What gets lifted

• If there is an active selection, only the selected pixels are lifted and the grid frames the selection bounds.
• If there is no selection, the whole layer is lifted and the grid frames the bounding box of the drawn content, so the handles sit around the artwork rather than the entire canvas.
• Only non-transparent pixels are lifted. If the active layer has no pixels in range, the session does not start and Limner says "The selected area has no pixels to warp on this layer."

The control grid

The mesh is a square lattice of control points at the density you chose: 3x3 (9 points), 5x5 (25 points, the default), 7x7 (49) or 9x9 (81). The points start in a regular grid that exactly matches the lifted pixels. Dragging a point bends the pixels in the cells that touch it, leaving the rest in place. There are no size or strength settings: the grid and its density are the control.

To grab a point, click within about 16 screen pixels of it. The closest point inside that range is selected, so you do not have to be pixel-perfect.

Tool options bar

The tool options bar carries one control, Grid, plus a one-line reminder.

The reminder reads: Drag the grid points to warp; Confirm / Cancel / Reset from the floating toolbar.

Floating toolbar (during a warp)

While a warp is in progress, a small toolbar floats below the artwork.

Reset appears only in Mesh Warp. The matching toolbar is a Mesh Warp feature: Liquefy has no toolbar at all and commits per stroke. Cancel restores the lifted pixels exactly, including the graded coverage of a feathered selection.

Committing and undo

• The whole operation (lifting the pixels, then committing the warped result) folds into one undo step. A single Undo after Confirm restores the layer to how it looked before you started.
• Confirm and Cancel only touch the tiles the grid covers, so the edit stays fast and the undo entry stays small.
• Reset does not end the session and does not create its own undo step. It just returns the grid to identity so you can keep working.

Limits and notes

• Raster layers only. On a vector layer the tool is blocked with the on-screen notice "Mesh is not available on a vector layer. Rasterize the layer to use it." (vector pixels are regenerated, so a warp would be wiped). The notice offers a Rasterize Layer button.
• The base paper layer (the bottom layer) cannot be warped. Choosing it puts "Mesh Warp: the paper base cannot be warped" on the status line; pick a layer above it.
• A locked layer cannot be warped. Unlock it first. Fill and adjustment layers are refused too, since their pixels are regenerated, and a text layer is refused with "A text layer rebuilds its pixels from the text, so a warp baked into it would be lost the next time you edit the text. Use Layer ▸ Rasterize ▸ Rasterize Text first." See Layers for locking.
• Only one warp or transform session can run at a time. Finish or cancel the current one before starting another.
• Switching to another tool commits the in-progress warp. Coming back to Mesh Warp then lifts the layer again into a fresh session. (Re-clicking Mesh Warp while a warp is already running does nothing; the current session stays active.)
• A committed warp keeps its source: Layer ▸ Transform ▸ Edit Transform re-opens the lattice on the original pixels with every node where it was, and Layer ▸ Transform ▸ Rasterize Transform lets that go. See Re-editing a transform.

See also

• Transform / Move tool
• Liquefy tool
• Layers
• Selections

Liquefy is a close relative of the Mesh Warp tool. Mesh Warp lifts the layer onto a grid of draggable points, 3x3 up to 9x9, that you confirm or cancel as a session. Liquefy is a direct brush instead: no session, no grid, no Confirm button. You just paint deformation, stroke by stroke, with a smooth falloff at the brush edge.

When to reach for it

• Reshape an outline or a blob of colour by dragging.
• Slim, widen, or swell a region with Pinch and Expand.
• Add a swirl, a curl, or a sense of motion with Twirl.
• Make small, painterly corrections that would be fiddly with selections.

For straight, structured deformation with visible handles (like a CSP mesh transform), use Mesh Warp instead.

How it works

1. Select the Liquefy tool. Selecting it changes nothing on its own, and a tap with no drag changes nothing either: no history entry, no modified flag.
2. Pick a Mode in the tool-options bar (Push, Pinch, Expand, or Twirl), and set Size and Strength. The same settings appear in Tool Settings, and the two stay in step.
3. Drag on the canvas. The stroke deforms the pixels live under your brush, with a smooth falloff that fades the effect to nothing at the brush edge. Pinch, Expand, and Twirl keep accumulating while you hold the pen still.
4. Lift the pen. The stroke commits on its own as one undo step; one Ctrl+Z restores everything that stroke moved. Liquefy needs no selection and will not run with one: clear the selection first, or Limner says "Clear the pixel selection before using Liquefy. Selection-clipped Liquefy is not available yet." If more than one raster layer is selected, they all deform together, and one undo restores them all.

Liquefy works on raster layer pixels only. It is refused, with a message saying why, on a layer mask, on the bottom paper layer, on a locked layer, on vector and graphic layers, on fill and adjustment layers, and on text layers. Each of those either has no pixels of its own or regenerates them, so a warp baked in would be wiped.

The four modes

Choose a mode with the segmented buttons at the left of the tool-options bar. The default mode is Push.

A Reverse toggle inverts whichever mode is active: with Reverse on, Pinch expands, Expand pinches, and Twirl swirls the other way. On desktop, holding Alt flips Reverse temporarily while you drag. Pen pressure modulates the effect: a lighter touch warps less, a firmer touch warps more.

Options bar

A Help button in the bar (and a caption in Tool Settings) reminds you: "Pinch, Expand, and Twirl repeat while held. On desktop, Alt temporarily flips Reverse."

Notes on the ranges:

• Strength is held to the 0.0 to 1.0 range.
• Size, Strength, Mode, and Reverse are shared with Tool Settings: change them in either place and the other follows.

Committing and undo

There is no Liquefy session and no floating toolbar: every stroke commits by itself the moment you lift the pen, as one entry in the undo history.

• Undo (Ctrl+Z) restores everything the last stroke moved, across every layer it touched.
• To discard an in-progress stroke, undo it after lifting; there is nothing to cancel or confirm.
• Mesh Warp keeps its Confirm / Cancel toolbar; that workflow is a Mesh Warp feature, not a Liquefy one.

Because each stroke stands alone, you can switch tools, run commands, or save at any time without losing or baking anything unexpectedly.

Keyboard shortcut

Liquefy has no default keyboard shortcut. You can assign one in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

The only modifier the tool itself uses is Alt, which temporarily flips the Reverse toggle while you drag (desktop only).

Tips

• Start with a low Strength and build up the deformation in passes. It is easier to add more than to undo a heavy push.
• Match the Size to the feature you are sculpting: a large brush for broad shape changes, a small brush for fine corrections.
• Liquefy does not work through a selection yet, so clear the selection before you start. To protect part of the artwork, put the region you want to sculpt on its own layer.
• If you do not see any effect, check that you are on a raster layer above the paper base and that the layer actually has pixels where you are dragging.

See also

• Mesh Warp tool for grid-handle deformation.
• Transform and Move for scale, rotate, and flip.
• Tools overview

On-screen label: "Crop". Its hover reads "Crop: Drag out the crop, then drag its edges and corners. Enter applies, Esc cancels". Applying resizes the canvas through the same step Image ▸ Canvas Size… uses, so every layer keeps its pixels and moves with the crop, and the whole crop is one undo step.

Where to find it

• Tool strip: Crop has a key of its own, after the Mesh Warp / Liquefy key and before the construction-aid key. See The Interface.
• Shortcut: C selects it in the Illustration and Animation workspaces. Rebind it as "Tool: Crop" in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.
• Vector workspace: there is no Crop tool there, and C picks the Scissors. Use Canvas Size in the command palette (Ctrl+K) to change the canvas instead.

Using the crop box

1. Select Crop. The box appears around the whole canvas at once, with eight handles (the four corners and the middle of each edge) and rule-of-thirds guides. The pointer is a crosshair.
2. Shape the box. Drag a handle to move that corner or edge (a handle drag keeps the box at least 8 pixels wide and tall), drag inside the box to move it without resizing it, or drag on the canvas outside the box to draw a new box from scratch.
3. Apply the crop with Enter, or with Apply on the small floating toolbar that sits just below the box or on the tool options bar.
4. Or cancel with Esc, or Cancel on either toolbar. The box snaps back to the whole canvas and the Crop tool stays selected.

After applying, the box re-arms around the new canvas, so you can crop again straight away.

What applying does

• The canvas takes the box's size and position. Width and height are rounded to whole pixels and then down to an even number, within 16 to 16384 pixels (8192 on iPad), the same limits as the New Document and Canvas Size dialogs.
• Every layer, layer mask, text layer, vector object, saved selection channel, and animation frame moves with the crop. Nothing is resampled, and the document's DPI stays the same.
• The box may reach past the canvas edge. That part becomes new canvas: it is transparent on every layer except the bottom one (normally the paper), whose edge pixels repeat outward to fill it.

Tool options bar

The floating toolbar under the box carries the same two buttons. Their hovers read "Apply the crop (Enter)" and "Reset the crop box (Esc)".

Keys

Enter, Esc, and Ctrl+Z act on the crop only once the box has been changed. While it still covers the whole canvas, they do what they do with any other tool. On a Mac, use Cmd+Z.

Undo

A crop is one undo step: Ctrl+Z puts back the previous canvas size and every layer's pixels, and Ctrl+Shift+Z redoes it. While the Crop tool is selected, an undo or redo of a crop, Canvas Size, Image Size, or Rotate Canvas re-arms the box around the canvas it leaves behind.

When an unapplied box is dropped

Only Enter and Apply crop the document. An unapplied box is discarded, never applied, when you:

• switch to another tool;
• save (Save or Save As);
• switch to another document tab, or create, open, or import a document;
• close the document or quit Limner.

Coming back to a document with the Crop tool still selected shows a fresh box around that document's own canvas. A box drawn on one document never carries over to another, even when the two are different sizes.

Crop to Selection

Image ▸ Crop to Selection crops the canvas to the bounding box of the active selection in one step, with no box to adjust. It works from any tool, applies the same way as the Crop tool, and is one undo step. The row is unavailable until you have a selection. It is also in the command palette.

Canvas Size and Image Size

• Image ▸ Canvas Size… does the same thing by numbers: set the new width and height and choose an Anchor for where the old canvas sits. Like Crop, it never resamples.
• Image ▸ Image Size… is different: it scales the artwork itself (or changes only the print resolution), so the pixels are resampled.
• To crop only an exported image and leave the document as it is, use Crop to in File ▸ Export As… instead. See Crop and aspect presets.

Books

Every page in a Book shares the Book's canvas size, so a single page cannot be cropped. You can select the Crop tool and drag a box on a page, but Apply (or Enter) is refused with "Book page size is fixed": "Every page in a Book uses the Book's shared canvas size. Close the Book to crop a standalone document." The box is removed. Image Size, Canvas Size, and Crop to Selection are unavailable while a Book is open. See Book.

Limits and notes

• If the document has artboards (made in the Vector workspace) that the new canvas would cut, the crop is refused with "Canvas resize would cut an artboard". Resize or move those artboards first.
• If the new size would push a layer's live effects past Limner's safe memory limit, the crop is refused with "Canvas resize is too large for live effects".

Related pages

• Transform and Layer Move for moving, scaling and rotating pixels instead of the canvas.
• Selections for the selection Crop to Selection uses.
• Layers for what moves with the crop.
• Book: Comics and Manga for the shared page size.
• Menus Reference for the Image menu.

How it works

Select the Eyedropper, then click a pixel on the canvas. With Sample all layers on, which is how it ships, Limner samples the composite color at that point, the blended result of every visible layer exactly as it appears on screen, and sets it as your brush color; it does not matter which layer is active, you pick what your eye sees. Turn Sample all layers off and the pick reads only the active layer instead.

The sample is read from the up-to-date, flushed composite, so the color is always correct. If you paint a stroke and immediately pick from it, you get the true painted color, never a stale or partial value. Internally, Limner answers from a cached composite when nothing has changed since the last read, and otherwise reads back just the single clicked pixel rather than the whole canvas, so picking stays instant even on large documents.

Click, or drag, to sample. A click sets the color under the tip, and dragging scrubs the color as you move. What the sample reads is the square set by the Sample control, centered on the pixel under the cursor.

Options

The Eyedropper's tool options bar carries three controls:

Hold Alt to pick without switching tools

You do not have to leave your brush to grab a color. While almost any paint tool is active, hold Alt and the cursor temporarily becomes the Eyedropper. Press to pick, and you can keep the button down and scrub across the canvas to preview colors as you move; the brush color follows the cursor until you release. The moment you let go of Alt, your previous tool is back exactly as it was, with no extra clicks.

For speed during an Alt scrub, Limner takes one snapshot of the composite when you press, then samples from that snapshot as you move, so dragging across a big canvas stays smooth.

Alt acts as the temporary eyedropper for the painting tools (Brush, Eraser, and similar). It does not do this for the selection tools, the Magic Wand, Transform, Crop, Layer Move, Mesh Warp, Liquefy, the Eyedropper tool itself, Clone Stamp and Heal, or any Vector mode tool, because Alt already has another meaning for those (it subtracts from a selection, and it aims the source for Clone Stamp and Heal).

Picking from the Reference board

When the Eyedropper tool is active and the Reference board is open (in its dock tab or as a pop-out window), you can sample colors straight from your reference images. Click any image on the board and Limner reads the pixel under the cursor into the brush color, without selecting or moving the image, so picking a color never disturbs your board layout. Over a reference image, the cursor shows a crosshair to confirm you are in pick mode.

Cursor

Over the canvas the Eyedropper shows a crosshair, so you keep an exact aim point while you sample. It never hides the cursor the way the Brush and Eraser can. The same crosshair appears over reference images when you pick from the Reference board.

Keyboard shortcut

The tool shortcut is rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts. The Alt hold behavior is a fixed modifier, not a separate binding.

Tool shortcuts apply in Illustration mode. In Vector mode the bare letter keys select the vector tools instead.

New in 0.9.0

• Radius and Sample all layers. A sampling Radius from 0 to 300 px averages the colour under the tip, and Sample all layers reads the composite instead of the active layer.
• On iPad, hold a finger. Holding one finger on the artwork opens the colour loupe; see Limner on iPad.

See also

• Color: the brush color, color history, and saved palettes that the Eyedropper feeds into.
• Reference panel: importing and arranging reference images you can sample from.
• Brush Tool: the tool you most often pair with Alt-pick while painting.

The Layers panel is one of the dockable panels (Window menu). For the full list of layer commands see the Layer menu. Layer masks and selections work hand in hand, so you may also want Selections. Editable line and shape layers are covered in Vector mode.

The stack, top to bottom

Layers paint on top of one another from the bottom up: the bottom layer is the background, and every layer above composites over what is beneath it. In the panel the order is reversed for reading: the top row is the topmost layer, the bottom row is the background.

Exactly one layer is active at a time. The active layer is the target of new brush strokes, fills, filters, and most single-layer commands. The active row is drawn as a solid accent block with dark text; any other layers that are part of a multi-selection get a faint accent wash.

Layer types

A layer is exactly one kind, decided by what data is attached to it.

Fill, adjustment, clone and Colorize color layers are generated rather than painted: their pixels come from settings, from the layers below, or from another layer, so the brush does not paint on them. A fill layer (a solid color, a gradient, or a pattern brought in from a PSD) is named Fill N, and an adjustment layer, which transforms everything below it and owns no pixels, is named Adjustment N. Fill and adjustment layers also come from the arrow menu beside the panel's Add button. See Fill and adjustment layers and the Colorize Tool.

About the Paper layer

The bottom layer (index 0) is special and is named Paper rather than "Layer 1". It cannot be moved, grouped, or dragged into a folder, and nothing can be placed below it. The eraser leaves it alone.

If you start a stroke while the Paper layer is active, Limner automatically inserts a fresh transparent layer above it and paints there instead, so your paint always lands somewhere it can be erased. The console notes this with "auto-added a layer above the paper".

Blend modes

The blend mode controls how a layer's pixels combine with everything beneath it. Limner ships 30 blend modes. Blending runs in gamma (sRGB) space, so results match Clip Studio Paint, Photoshop, and Procreate.

The default blend mode for a new layer is Normal.

Dissolve turns the layer's coverage into a per-pixel coin flip, so a half-opacity layer renders as a speckle of solid pixels rather than a translucent wash; the pattern holds still while you pan and zoom, and a Photoshop file's Dissolve layers import as themselves. Grain Merge, Grain Extract and Hard Mix (Soft) are the GIMP and Krita modes of the same names. Folders offer Pass Through as well, which lets their members blend with the layers below as if the folder were not there.

Setting the blend mode

• Panel combo box: the blend-mode dropdown in the top strip of the Layers panel sets the active layer's mode.
• Cycle: press Shift+B to step to the next mode (the console prints "blend mode: <name>"). It is moved off plain B so the brush keeps B. Shortcuts are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.
• Folders have their own blend-mode combo (see Groups, below).

Opacity

Opacity is a layer-wide multiplier applied on top of each pixel's own transparency.

The Opacity slider sits in the top strip of the panel and reads "Opacity NNN%". You can also nudge it with the keyboard: = raises opacity and - lowers it (rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts).

Visibility

Each layer has an eye toggle on the far left of its row that shows or hides it without deleting anything. Hidden layers do not composite and are skipped by Merge Visible.

• Click any row's eye to toggle that layer.
• Press H to toggle the active layer's visibility.

A folder also has its own eye in the header. A layer is only visible on the canvas if both its own eye and its folder's eye are on.

Locks and the reference flag

The four toggles (lock, transparency lock, clip, reference) sit in the always-visible active-layer strip at the top of the panel, wrapping to fit narrow docks. On layer rows, any engaged state appears as a quiet accent badge; click the layer to make it active, then use the strip. Full lock, transparency lock, clip, and reference state are all saved with the document.

Tooltips you will see on the active row:

• Lock layer: "Lock layer: blocks painting, transforms, moving, and merging"
• Lock transparency: "Lock transparency: paint only where the layer already has pixels"
• Clip: "Clip to the layer below (mask to its shape)"
• Reference: "Reference layer: Fill and Magic Wand read this layer's lines"

Layer masks

A layer mask is a non-destructive grayscale stencil attached to a layer. Where the mask is white the layer shows; where it is black the layer is hidden; gray is partial. A fresh mask is "reveal all" (everything visible) until you paint on it.

When a mask is the active edit target, your brush and eraser paint on the mask instead of the pixels: paint black to hide, white to show (the eraser hides). A color paints its lightness, the same while you draw and after: pure red hides about 70% and pure green about 40%. The panel shows the mask as a small grayscale thumbnail next to the layer thumbnail.

With the mask as the edit target, Edit ▸ Cut and Copy act on the mask: they copy the mask under the selection as a grayscale image (white where it shows the layer, black where it hides it), and Cut then hides that area on the mask in one undo step, leaving the layer's pixels untouched. Paste puts that image on a layer's pixels, not into a mask.

All mask commands live in the Layer menu's Mask submenu (see Menus). They no-op if the layer is locked.

The mask thumbnail in the panel

Clicking the mask thumbnail:

• On the active layer, switches between editing the mask and editing the pixels.
• On another layer, makes that layer active and targets its mask.

An accent ring around the thumbnail means the mask is the live edit target. A dimmed (struck-through) thumbnail means the mask is disabled. Tooltips:

• Disabled: "Layer mask (disabled; Layer > Mask > Enable/Disable Layer Mask)"
• Targeted: "Editing the MASK: paint black to hide, white to show; click to edit pixels again"
• Default: "Layer mask: click to paint on the mask instead of the pixels"

Folder masks

A folder can carry a raster mask of its own, applied once to everything inside it, exactly as Photoshop applies a group mask. Right-click the folder header and choose Add Folder Mask to make one from the current selection; the same menu switches it off and on or deletes it. A folder mask survives undo, canvas resizing and rotation, applies to a Pass Through folder too (where it hides the folder, the layers below show as if the folder's members were not there), travels to and from PSD, and is applied to the folder's contents in OpenRaster and SVG exports. See Layer folders.

Groups (folders)

A folder collects a run of layers so you can move, hide, and blend them as a unit. Folders can nest inside other folders up to 8 levels deep, and a folder's members always stay together in the stack. A folder can also sit empty without being removed. See Layer folders for the full guide.

A folder composites its members into their own buffer first, then blends that result as one with the folder's own blend mode and opacity, so a folder behaves like a single layer relative to the rest of the stack. A Pass Through folder is the exception: its members blend straight into the layers below the folder, as if the folder were not there. When a Pass Through folder has a mask or is below 100% opacity, the mask and the opacity fade that effect, as in Photoshop, instead of turning it into an ordinary isolated folder.

New-folder defaults:

Folder header controls

A faint accent wash on the header marks the folder that holds the active layer.

Making and dissolving folders

• Group: choose Folder from selected layers on the arrow menu beside the Add button ("Group the checked layers into a folder"), or press Ctrl+G. An empty folder comes from Empty folder on the same arrow menu, New empty folder in the panel options menu, or Layer ▸ New ▸ New Folder (see Layer folders). Selected layers that are not already adjacent are first gathered together. The Paper layer is never included.
• Ungroup: choose Dissolve active folder from the panel options menu at the right end of the action bar. It is only enabled when the active layer is in a folder. The layers stay in place, now ungrouped.

Ctrl+G groups the checked layers into a folder and Ctrl+Shift+G dissolves the active layer's folder. The same two chords group and ungroup objects in Vector mode, so the muscle memory carries across.

Layer effects

Layer effects are drop shadow, outer glow, inner shadow, color overlay, stroke, inner glow, gradient overlay and bevel. Limner keeps them live: each effect is rendered into its own layer beside the one that wears it (the drop shadows and the outer glow below it, the rest above it, in the same folder; a stroke or bevel goes above any layers clipped to it, so they keep it as their base), and the whole set stays editable.

Adding effects. Choose Layer ▸ Layer Effects… (also Layer Effects in the command palette, and Layer Effects… in a layer's right-click menu in the Layers panel) to open the Layer Effects window on that layer. A layer without effects opens on an empty list. Choose Add Effect and pick a kind: it starts at Photoshop's default settings and shows on the canvas at once, with its section open. A drop shadow, for example, starts black, Multiply, 75% opacity, 5 px away and 5 px soft, cast down and to the right; a stroke starts as a 3 px black outline outside the edge. A layer carries up to ten of each kind, but only one outer glow and one bevel. Remove Effect, under each effect's settings, takes that effect off (and only its own layer, so a mask you gave another effect's layer stays); remove every effect and the layer is a plain layer again, without an fx button. The window previews every change live and commits the whole session, added and removed effects included, with Apply (one undo step), or reverts it exactly with Cancel or Escape.

Editing effects. A layer that carries effects shows an italic fx button on its row in the Layers panel; click it, or choose Layer ▸ Layer Effects… with the layer active, to reopen the window. Paint on the layer and its effects follow.

Where effects are not available. The window is unavailable in Animation mode. A document with animation frames keeps editing the effects its layers already wear, but Add Effect and Remove Effect are grayed out there. The Vector workspace likewise edits the effects a layer arrives with (from its fx button) but starts none, and its Layer menu has no Layer Effects row. Unlock a locked layer first. An adjustment layer, the bottom (paper) layer, a Vector workspace layer and a layer that another layer's effects draw cannot take effects; the grayed-out row says why.

From Photoshop. Effects arrive with Photoshop documents and stay live. Effects Limner cannot draw (satin, the emboss styles, a pattern overlay, a gradient or pattern stroke) are named in the import notice, and the layer keeps its pixels; a pattern overlay cannot be added in Limner either. See File Formats for how effects travel back to PSD.

Reordering and grouping by drag

Drag any non-Paper layer row to move it. The drop position within the target row decides what happens:

The Paper layer cannot be moved, and nothing can be dropped below it. A locked layer will not move. Limner draws an insertion line for a reorder and a whole-row outline when a drop would group.

Layer commands

These are the per-layer operations. Most are on the action bar at the bottom of the panel and also in the Layer menu. Default shortcuts are listed where they exist and are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Merging a vector layer rasterizes it (its stroke data is dropped, undoably), matching Clip Studio Paint.

Selecting layers

The multi-selection lets Move, Transform, and merge act on every checked layer at once. The active layer is always part of the selection, and the last remaining selected layer cannot be unchecked.

Panel anatomy

The Layers panel has three regions, top to bottom.

1. Top strip: an "Active" label with the active layer's name in bold, the blend-mode combo (all 30 modes), and the Opacity slider (0.0 to 1.0).
2. Layer stack: a scrollable list, top layer first, with folder headers and indented members. A folder's members are joined by a vertical line in the indent gutter.
3. Action bar: wrapping icon buttons. In order: the split Add button (its arrow menu holds Raster layer, Raster layer below, Vector layer, Duplicate layer, Solid colour fill, Gradient fill, an Adjustment layer submenu, Folder from selected layers, and Empty folder), the mask button, the Merge button, Delete, and the panel options menu (New empty folder, Dissolve active folder, Merge all visible layers, and the row size: Compact, Comfortable, or Large, remembered between sessions). Click Merge for Merge Down; Merge Visible is in the panel options menu, the Layer menu, and the command palette. Buttons disable when they do not apply (for example Delete is off with only one layer and Merge down is off on the bottom layer). With a folder selected, Delete targets the folder and its contents; see Layer folders.

Each layer row, left to right: the colour-label bar (if one is set, chosen from eight colours in the row menu and saved with the file), the eye toggle, the selection checkbox, the thumbnail (26 px at the default Comfortable row size, over a checkerboard so transparency reads), the mask thumbnail (if a mask exists), and the name. Any engaged state trails the name as quiet marks: an fx button for live effects, then lock, transparency lock, clip, reference, a curve badge on a vector layer, and a bucket badge on a fill layer. Right-click a layer or folder (long-press on touch) for the full per-layer menu: rename, duplicate, delete, merge, masks, colour label, and more.

New in 0.9.0

• Four more blend modes. Dissolve, Grain Merge, Grain Extract and Hard Mix (Soft) bring the count to 30, on layers and folders alike.
• Folder masks. A folder can carry a raster mask of its own, made from the selection through the folder's context menu.
• The Merge button is Merge Down. Merge Visible moved to the Layer menu, so a held click can no longer flatten the document by accident.
• Undo covers more. Disabling a layer mask is an undo step, canvas resize and crop keep every layer's locks, alpha lock and clip flag, and hiding or reordering a layer in the middle of a transform no longer loses the content.
• Exact pixels. The transparency lock holds alpha exactly, Color Dodge and Color Burn are right at the white and black extremes, grey and feathered masks display the way they bake, and a magnified transparent edge no longer shows a dark fringe.
• Better thumbnails. Layer thumbnails keep one-pixel marks, measure a text outline correctly, and average in linear light.
• Layer effects you can add. Layer ▸ Layer Effects… adds a drop shadow, outer glow, inner shadow, color overlay, stroke, inner glow, gradient overlay or bevel, live on the canvas. See Layer effects.
• Clone layers. A live copy of a raster layer at an offset follows every stroke on its source. See Clone layers.

Related pages

• Layer menu and all menus
• Selections (used by Mask Selection and Mask Outside Selection)
• Vector mode (vector and graphic layers)

This page covers creating, nesting, filling, emptying, and deleting folders. For what a folder does to compositing (its blend mode, opacity, and visibility applied to the group as one unit), see Layers.

Creating folders

There are several ways to make a folder, and each is a single undo step.

• The New Folder button. Choose Empty folder from the arrow menu beside the Add button, New empty folder from the panel options menu at the right end of the action bar, or Layer ▸ New ▸ New Folder ("An empty folder at the top of the stack, to drag layers into"). You get an empty folder named Group N at the top of the panel, ready to drag layers into.
• Folder from selected layers. Check the layers you want (the per-row checkboxes), then open the arrow menu beside the Add button and choose Folder from selected layers. Checked layers that are not adjacent are gathered together first, and the Paper layer is never included.
• Drop one layer onto another. Drag a layer and release it on the middle of another layer's row: the pair becomes a new folder, or the dragged layer joins the target's existing folder.

Ctrl+G puts the checked layers in a new folder and Ctrl+Shift+G dissolves the active layer's folder. In Vector mode the same two chords group and ungroup objects instead.

Nesting by drag

Nesting is entirely drag and drop. Pick up a layer row by its grip, or a whole folder by its header, and the drop location decides what happens:

• Onto a folder header: a dragged layer moves into that folder; a dragged folder becomes that folder's child, bringing everything inside it along.
• Onto a row inside a folder: dropping at the top or bottom edge of a member row places the dragged item beside that member, inside the same folder. Use this to land in an exact spot instead of at the folder's mouth.
• Below the list: dropping in the empty space under the last row pulls the dragged layer or folder out to the top level (see Moving layers out, below).

What the drop indicators mean

While you hover, the panel shows exactly what a release will do:

The depth limit

Folders nest up to 8 levels deep. A drag that would push past the cap shows the dimmed indicator, and releasing it anyway flashes a notice over the panel that fades after a couple of seconds:

Dropping a folder into itself or into one of its own descendants is refused the same way, with "You cannot nest a folder inside itself." In practice two or three levels keep a stack readable; the cap exists to keep files sane.

Empty folders persist

A folder does not dissolve itself when its last member leaves. Drag the last layer out and the folder stays, keeping its name, color label, blend settings, and place in the hierarchy.

• Where it appears: an empty folder renders at the top of its scope: the top of the panel if it is top level, or the top of its parent folder's contents if nested.
• Refilling it: drag any layer (or another folder) onto its header; the highlight wash confirms the drop will land inside.
• It is a full folder: rename it (double-click the name), set its color, collapse it, drag it elsewhere, or nest other folders into it while it is still empty.
• It is saved: empty folders persist in the file and come back on load, and they appear in the Animation mode timeline so the two views stay in step.

A folder now only goes away when you say so: dissolve it (ungroup, which keeps the layers), delete it with its contents, or undo its creation.

Selecting and deleting a whole folder

Click a folder's name, or any empty stretch of its header, to select the folder itself. The header lights up with a stronger accent wash and a border so it is clearly the target; clicking any layer clears the folder selection again.

• Trash button: with a folder selected, the trash button in the action bar reads "Delete the selected folder and its contents" and removes the folder, every layer inside it, and all of its sub-folders.
• Right-click menu: right-click the folder name (long-press on touch) and choose Delete folder and contents.
• One undo step: either way, a single undo brings back the folder, its sub-folders, and every layer's pixels.

To remove only the folder shell and keep its layers, use Dissolve active folder in the panel options menu (the list button at the right end of the action bar). It is enabled while the active layer sits in a folder.

Moving layers out

• Remove from folder (one level up): right-click a layer row and choose Remove from folder. The layer pops out exactly one level: nested in Folder A ▸ Folder B, it lands in Folder A; in a top-level folder, it becomes ungrouped.
• Drag below the list (fully out): drop the layer in the empty space below the last row to leave every folder in one motion. The same drop pulls a whole nested folder to the top level. Anything already at the top level stays exactly where it is.
• Reorder out: dropping at the edge of any row outside the folder also works, since a dropped layer always adopts the folder of the row it lands beside.

Add below or leave the folder scope. Layer ▸ New ▸ Add Layer Below inserts a raster layer directly beneath the active layer in its current folder scope. You can also choose Raster layer below from the panel's Add menu, Ctrl+click Add, use the command palette, or bind a shortcut. Clicking the empty panel area under the list exits the current folder scope without moving a layer, so the next ordinary Add Layer lands at the top level.

Merge without leaving the folder. Merge Down and Merge Visible accept eligible layers inside folders. Merge Visible needs every visible layer to sit in the same folder scope: a set that spans folders is refused rather than mis-composited, and it is unavailable on a multi-frame animation. The merge bakes each layer's own opacity while applying the folder's blend mode and opacity exactly once. Click the action bar's Merge button for Merge Down. Merge Visible is in the panel options menu, the Layer menu, and the command palette.

Folder appearance

• The whole header is a drag grip. Press and move on the folder glyph, the name, or the empty stretch of the header to start dragging the folder; a plain click still selects it and a double-click still renames.
• Color swatch: the small chip on the header sets a color label in one click: Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple, Pink, or Gray. The label draws a slim bar along the row's left edge (the same cue layer rows use) and stays visible while the folder is collapsed. Pick the current color again to clear it; the same picker is on the right-click menu.
• Per-level indentation: each nesting level steps its rows in one notch, and a folder's members are joined by a connector line in the indent gutter, so depth reads at a glance.
• Blend and opacity: the folder's blend-mode combo and Folder Opacity slider appear under the header while the folder holds the active layer.
• Mask glyph: a masked folder wears a half-circle beside its name, dimmed while the mask is disabled, so the gate is visible even when the folder is collapsed.
• The timeline matches: in Animation mode, the timeline's layer column indents by the same folder depth as the panel, and empty folders appear there too, so the two views never disagree about structure.

Folder masks

A folder can carry a raster mask of its own, applied once to everything inside it, exactly as Photoshop applies a group mask. Right-click the folder header in the Layers panel and choose Add Folder Mask to make one from the current selection; once it has one the same menu offers Enable Folder Mask / Disable Folder Mask and Delete Folder Mask.

• The mask applies to the folder's composite, so two overlapping members are masked once, not twice.
• It applies to a Pass Through folder as well (folders imported from Photoshop default to Pass Through): where the mask hides the folder, the layers below show as if the folder's members were not there, and where it shows, the members' blend modes and adjustments still act on the layers below.
• It survives undo, Image ▸ Canvas Size and Image ▸ Rotate Canvas, saves in the document, travels to and from PSD as a group mask, and is applied to the folder's contents in OpenRaster and SVG exports.
• Deleting the folder and undoing brings the mask back with it.

Folders and older Limner versions

Every save writes the current document format, which needs Limner 0.9.0 or later to open, whether or not the document uses nested or empty folders. To share a working file with someone on an older Limner, send an exported image instead. See File formats.

Related

• Layers - the Layers panel, blend modes, opacity, masks, and how a folder composites as a single unit.
• File formats - what each format version saves and which Limner builds can open it.

You create both from the Layer menu (Layer ▸ New ▸ New Fill Layer for a fill, Layer ▸ New ▸ New Adjustment Layer for an adjustment) or from the arrow menu beside the Layers panel's Add button, which lists Solid colour fill, Gradient fill and the same Adjustment layer submenu. Each one lands directly above the active layer and becomes active itself, as one undo step.

What a non-destructive layer is

Most of Limner writes pixels. A brush stroke, a bucket fill, or Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Levels all change the active layer's pixels for good: undo can step back, but once you have moved on, the old pixels are gone. That is destructive editing, and it is the right default for painting.

A fill or adjustment layer works differently. It stores a recipe, not a result:

• A fill layer generates its own content from its recipe (one color, or a gradient with its stops and shape). It owns real pixels, but they are regenerated from the recipe whenever you edit it, so the recipe is the thing you actually own.
• An adjustment layer owns no pixels at all. It reads the picture composited below it, pushes it through its correction, and hands the result upward. Nothing below it is modified.

The practical payoff is the same for both: the picture below stays intact. Hide the layer and the change is gone. Drag it somewhere else in the stack and it affects a different set of layers. Delete it and your painting is exactly as it was. You can keep retuning a Curves adjustment a hundred times and the linework under it never degrades, because it was never rewritten.

Solid Color fill layers

Layer ▸ New ▸ New Fill Layer ▸ Solid Color adds a layer flooded with one color. It picks up the current paint color at the moment you create it, and it is named Fill 1, Fill 2, and so on.

Solid fills are the workhorse of flatting and grading: drop one over your art for an overall color cast, clip it to the layer below to recolor just that element, or mask it to shape the fill by hand. See Color for picking the paint color it starts from.

To edit it, select the layer. The active-layer strip at the top of the Layers panel grows a Fill row with a color swatch. Click the swatch, pick a new color, and the canvas updates as you pick.

In every other respect a fill layer is an ordinary layer. It takes a blend mode, an opacity, a mask, and a color label; you can reorder it, hide it, clip it, rename it, and drag it into a folder exactly like a raster layer.

Gradient fill layers

Layer ▸ New ▸ New Fill Layer ▸ Gradient adds a layer filled with an editable gradient. It starts as a horizontal linear ramp spanning the canvas, running from the current paint color to the same color at zero opacity.

Unlike the Gradient tool, whose default ramp follows the active paint color, a gradient fill layer's stops hold fixed colors. Once created, it is self-contained: changing your paint color later will not move it. Everything about the ramp is re-editable from the Layers panel instead.

Editing the stops

Select the gradient fill layer and the active-layer strip shows the stop bar: the ramp with one marker per stop. It behaves like the stop bar in the Gradient editor.

• Add a stop: click an empty spot on the bar. The new stop samples the ramp's color at that position, so it is invisible until you recolor it.
• Select a stop: click its marker. Its controls appear below the bar.
• Move a stop: drag its marker along the bar. That is how you set a stop's position; a stop is clamped between its neighbors so the order holds.
• Recolor a stop: click the color swatch below the bar.
• Fade a stop: drag the Alpha slider, from 0% to 100%.
• Delete a stop: select it and click the trash button. It is disabled when only two stops remain, because a gradient always keeps at least two.

Shape, Dither, and Reverse

Below the stop controls sit the same render options the Gradient tool uses:

The Direction buttons

A gradient fill layer's endpoints live in canvas coordinates, and the Direction row re-aims them across the whole canvas in one click: Horizontal (left to right), Vertical (top to bottom), or Diagonal (corner to corner). Hover a button to see which is which.

These three presets are the only way to change the angle at the moment. There are no draggable endpoint handles on the canvas yet, so an arbitrary angle is not reachable from a gradient fill layer. If you need one, drag it with the Gradient tool on a normal raster layer instead.

Pattern fill layers

A pattern fill arrives from a Photoshop document rather than being created in Limner: a PSD Pattern Fill layer imports live and tiles exactly as Photoshop tiles it. With one active, the strip's editor names the tile and its size and offers a Scale slider, an X and Y Offset, and Reset.

Adjustment layers

Layer ▸ New ▸ New Adjustment Layer opens a submenu of twenty corrections. Pick one and it is added above the active layer, named Adjustment 1, Adjustment 2, and so on.

An adjustment layer carries no pixels. It transforms the composite below it live on the GPU, so it costs almost nothing to leave one sitting on top of a painting for the whole job, and you can restack, retune, or throw it away at any point.

The twenty kinds

The editable kinds first, then the four one-shot transforms (Invert, Posterize, Threshold, Gradient Map), which the menu sets apart with a rule. The controls are the same widgets the matching filter dialog uses, so see Filters and Adjustments for what each one's sliders and graphs do.

The floating editor

Creating an adjustment layer opens its editor right away, in a movable window titled for the kind, for example Levels (adjustment layer). This is deliberate: Levels, Curves, Brightness / Contrast, and Color Balance all start at identity, so without the editor a new layer would look like nothing had happened.

The editor is a floating window rather than part of the Layers panel, so the layer list keeps its full height and stays clickable while you work. It follows your selection: click a different adjustment layer and the editor retargets to it; click an ordinary layer and it quietly steps aside. Close it whenever you like and reopen it with the Edit button that sits next to the kind's name in the active-layer strip.

The canvas updates live as you drag. A whole slider drag is one undo step, not one per frame, so a single Ctrl+Z takes you back to where the value was before you grabbed the slider. Painting below an adjustment updates through it every frame too, so you can ink underneath a Threshold layer and watch the result as you go.

Clone layers

Choose Layer ▸ New ▸ New Clone Layer (also in a raster layer's right-click menu) to add a live copy of the active raster layer directly above it. The clone shows the source's pixels and follows every edit to the source, stroke by stroke; paint on the source, not on the clone. Select the clone to set its Offset in the Layers panel (whole pixels, X and Y), and give it its own opacity, blend mode, clipping and mask, so one drawing can appear twice, shifted, tinted or masked differently. A clone cannot be cloned again; make another clone of the source instead. Clone layers are an Illustration feature: a document with a frame timeline cannot take one, and switching a document with clone layers to Animation asks you to break the links first.

Break Link (in the Layer menu, the row's right-click menu and the panel strip, or Layer ▸ Rasterize ▸ Rasterize Layer) stops the clone following its source and keeps the pixels it shows as an ordinary raster layer. Deleting the source breaks every clone of it the same way, and undo restores source and links together. A file saved with a clone layer in it needs this version of Limner or newer (an older build refuses it, as with every newer file); break the link before sharing such a file with an older build. Exports keep the pixels, not the link.

Scope and masking

By default an adjustment layer affects everything below it in the stack, and a fill layer covers everything below it. Three controls narrow that down, and where you put the layer narrows it further.

Opacity, clipping, and masks

An adjustment layer is never a clip base: other layers cannot clip to it, because it has no coverage of its own to clip against. A fill layer, which does own pixels, can be a clip base like any raster layer.

An adjustment inside a folder

Scope follows the folder you put the layer in. An adjustment layer at the top level of the stack affects every visible layer below it. Drag that same adjustment into a folder and it affects only the layers below it inside that folder, and nothing outside it. That is the standard way to grade one group of art in isolation without clipping to a single layer.

Folders nest, and so does the scoping: an adjustment inside a folder inside a folder is scoped to its innermost folder. See Layers for how folders and nesting work.

No blend mode of its own

An adjustment layer has no blend mode of its own: it always applies as Normal, and the compositor blends its result over the picture below by opacity, clipping, and mask only. The blend mode combo still appears in the active-layer strip (it is shared by every layer kind) but it has no effect on an adjustment layer, so ignore it there. A Photoshop adjustment layer in another blend mode keeps that mode for saving back to PSD, and the import notice says it looks different in Limner. Fill layers, which composite like ordinary raster layers, honor their blend mode normally.

Painting on a fill or adjustment layer

You cannot paint on the body of a fill or adjustment layer (or of a clone or Colorize color layer), and this is deliberate rather than an oversight. Its pixels are generated from its recipe, so any stroke you made would be silently wiped the next time the recipe was re-evaluated (on the next color edit, or on a canvas resize). Rather than lose your work later, Limner declines now.

On a fill or adjustment layer, these do nothing to the layer's body:

• Brush, eraser, smudge, and the other pixel tools
• The bucket fill and the Gradient tool
• Transform, move, and warp
• The destructive filters and adjustments under Image ▸ Adjustments
• Cut, delete, and paste onto the layer

They no-op quietly, the same way they do on a locked layer; the layer's badge in the Layers panel is the signal that it is a generated layer rather than a paintable one.

Two things do rewrite a generated layer, and both are honest about it. Merge Down and Merge Visible into a fill layer rasterize the target first, as one undo step, because the merged result cannot be expressed as a fill recipe any more. And Rasterize Layer, below, converts on purpose.

Rasterize Layer

When you want to paint on a fill, adjustment, clone or Colorize color layer, bake it into an ordinary layer first. Layer ▸ Rasterize ▸ Rasterize Layer, or right-click the layer's row in the Layers panel and choose Rasterize layer, converts it in place.

What you get back:

• A fill layer bakes to exactly the pixels you were already seeing. The result is byte for byte what the fill was rendering, so nothing shifts visually.
• An adjustment layer keeps the picture: it bakes what the canvas shows, through a Pass Through folder and over the page color, and sets the baked layer's blend mode to Normal.
• A clone layer keeps the pixels it shows, the same as Break Link, and a Colorize color layer keeps its colors and drops its hints.
• The layer's mask, opacity, clip flag, name, and position in the stack all carry over. Only the live recipe is dropped.
• It is one undo step. Ctrl+Z brings the live layer straight back.

The same command works on a Vector workspace (graphic) layer: it keeps exactly the pixels the layer shows and drops its objects, so the Brush, filters and the other raster tools can work on it, and Undo brings the objects back. The Rasterize Layer button on the "not available on a vector layer" notice does the same.

Rasterizing an adjustment layer is refused, with a notice that says why, when the result would look different from the live layer:

• a Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Sharpen or Median layer that reaches transparent pixels (put an opaque layer or a page color under it first);
• one of those layers that the canvas does not draw live (only the lowest one outside a folder of its own draws);
• any adjustment that a clipped layer above it reads through, since the baked layer would become that layer's clipping base.

The menu item is grayed out unless the active layer is a fill, adjustment, clone, Colorize color or graphic layer and is unlocked; the grayed-out row says why.

Current limitations

These are the rough edges we know about, so you are not caught out by them mid-job:

• Mask strokes on an adjustment layer preview at pen-up. Painting an adjustment's mask works and commits correctly, but you see the result when you lift the pen rather than during the drag. Fill-layer masks are unaffected.
• In Animation mode. Fill layers are not available there: New Fill Layer says so rather than doing nothing. Adjustment layers are: they own no pixels, so they sit outside the per-frame cel swap, apply to every frame, and can be created and retuned while animating, and Brightness / Contrast, Exposure, Hue / Saturation, Levels, Threshold and Posterize can be keyed on the timeline. Neither kind can be rasterized there, because only the current frame would be baked; a graphic layer cannot be rasterized in Animation or in any document with more than one frame, for the same reason. See Animation mode.
• A canvas resize regenerates fills. Resizing or cropping the canvas re-renders every fill layer over the new bounds: a solid fill re-covers the whole canvas, and a gradient re-renders between its endpoints in the new canvas space. This is usually what you want, but a gradient will not keep its old proportions.
• Fill content edits are not undoable yet. Changing a fill layer's color, stops, shape, or direction takes effect immediately but does not add an undo step, and it clears the redo stack. Creating and deleting the layer are undoable; recoloring it is not, so the way back is to set the value again.
• No on-canvas gradient handles. A gradient fill layer's angle comes from the three Direction buttons only; there are no draggable endpoints on the canvas.

New in 0.9.0

• Twenty adjustment kinds. Exposure, Black and White, Vibrance, Color Lookup, Photo Filter, Selective Color, Channel Mixer and live Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Sharpen and Median join the original nine, and a Photoshop file's adjustment layers import live with their settings.
• Clone layers. A live copy of a raster layer at an offset follows every stroke on its source. See Clone layers.
• Rasterize keeps the picture. Rasterize Layer bakes what the canvas shows, refuses when the bake would differ from the live layer, and also works on clone, Colorize color and graphic layers.
• In Animation mode too. Adjustment layers can be created and edited while animating and apply to every frame, and six of the kinds can be keyed on the timeline. Fill layers stay an Illustration and Vector feature.
• Curves in floating point. Curves adjustment layers compose in floating point, so a master curve stacked on per-channel curves renders slightly differently, and more accurately, than before. Color Balance adjustment layers no longer carry a Preserve Lightness switch.

Related

• Layers - the stack, folders, masks, clipping, blend modes, and opacity these layers ride on.
• Filters and Adjustments - the one-shot dialogs, and the controls each adjustment kind uses.
• Gradient tool - dragging a gradient onto a raster layer, the ramp shapes, and the stop editor.
• Color - the paint color a new fill layer starts from.
• Menus - where the New and Rasterize submenus sit in the Layer menu.

Under the hood a selection is a coverage mask, not a crisp on/off region: edges are anti-aliased and an optional feather softens them further, so strokes and fills fade smoothly at the boundary. The marching ants you see trace the halfway point of that coverage.

The selection tools

All five selection tools live in the tool strip and share the same combine modes and Feather control in the tool options bar. The default keys are shown below and are all rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Rect Select and Ellipse Select

Press and drag to rubber-band the shape, then release to commit. While you drag, the selection refreshes live (rebuilt once per frame, so even a fast drag stays smooth). Both shapes are anti-aliased.

Lasso

Hold and drag to trace a freehand outline. The path is sampled as you move and filled as a polygon, so concave and self-crossing shapes fill correctly. Release to commit. A path needs at least three points to become a selection.

Polygon Select

Each click drops one vertex and the live preview appears once you have placed three. To close the shape, click within 25 pixels of the first vertex (with at least three vertices placed). The tool options bar shows the hint "Click vertices; click the first point to close." A polygon can hold up to 2000 vertices.

Magic Wand

Click a pixel and the wand selects the connected region of similar color. It reads the visible composite, unless a Reference layer is set and visible, in which case that layer drives the color match. When a symmetry ruler is active, the wand also floods from each mirrored copy of the seed point, so a symmetric area selects symmetrically.

The wand shares the Fill tool's Contiguous and Refer image border settings (see Fill). The wand's own options bar shows Tolerance and the Sample Size combo (Point, 3 × 3, 5 × 5) it shares with the bucket, then the combine-mode buttons and Feather. Sample Size decides how big a patch under the cursor is averaged to pick the seed colour, so aiming inside an anti-aliased edge does not anchor the flood to a blend that exists nowhere else. A wand selection carries the same graded edge as a bucket fill, so a cutout no longer keeps a one-pixel rim of the old background.

Combine modes

Every new selection combines with the one already on the canvas in one of four ways. Pick the mode with the segmented buttons in the tool options bar, or hold a modifier key to override it for a single gesture.

The tool options bar shows the same reminder: "Shift adds · Alt/Ctrl subtracts · Shift+Alt intersects".

A few things worth knowing:

• The mode is locked in at the moment a gesture starts. Releasing a modifier mid-drag does not change the result.
• For selection tools Alt means Subtract, not the temporary eyedropper that Alt triggers for the paint tools.
• A no-drag click (or a lasso tap with no real path) deselects, but only in Replace mode. In Add, Subtract, or Intersect mode that same click does nothing, so you cannot lose your selection by accident.

Feather

Feather softens the edge of the next selection you draw. It blurs the freshly rasterized shape before it combines, fading the boundary over roughly twice the feather radius. It does not retroactively soften a selection you already have.

The slider is logarithmic and runs from 0 to 250 pixels, and it keeps its decimals, so 1.5 px is distinct from 1 and 2. The tooltip reads "Soften the next selection's edge by this many pixels."

Feather applies to the selections you draw and to the Magic Wand. Commands that load an existing shape load it exactly, without the Feather: Select ▸ Selection from Layer, Layer ▸ Mask ▸ Mask to Selection and Path to Selection, and Load Selection.

The floating selection toolbar

Once you have an active selection, a small toolbar floats just below it (pinned to the selection's bottom-center). It collects the most common selection actions in one place. It only appears after a selection is finished, so it never flashes mid-drag.

The Cut, Delete In, and Delete Out buttons stay disabled on the base paper layer (the bottom layer is never erased).

Copy, cut, and paste

Copy puts your selection on the system clipboard as well, so it pastes into other programs, and paste brings an image copied elsewhere straight into your document. The two paste commands differ only in where the pixels land.

Notes:

• Ctrl+V pastes as a new layer (the usual copy-and-paste workflow, matching Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint). Ctrl+Shift+V pastes in place onto the current layer when you want it merged in.
• Copy and Cut copy only the pixels that are both inside the selection and not transparent.
• Cut and pasting onto the active layer are blocked on vector layers and on the locked paper layer. Pasting onto either of those falls back to a new layer.

Invert and Deselect

Both commands sit on the floating toolbar and in the Select menu (see Menus). Deselect is Ctrl+D and Invert is Ctrl+Shift+I by default, and both are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts. Select ▸ Reselect (Ctrl+Shift+D) brings back the selection you just dropped; it works without a prior selection and is greyed out until something has been deselected. Select ▸ Selection from Layer selects exactly the active layer's pixels, needs no prior selection, ships unbound, and takes Shift to add and Alt to subtract. Select ▸ Modify holds Expand, Contract, Border and Feather, each with an amount dialog, and Edit ▸ Fill Selection with Foreground (Ctrl+comma) fills the selection with the foreground colour, soft edges kept.

• Invert (Select ▸ Invert): flips the mask so the selected and unselected regions swap.
• Deselect (Select ▸ Deselect): clears the selection and any in-progress drag.

Delete Inside and Delete Outside

These erase pixels relative to the selection, on every selected non-paper layer, folded into one undo step.

• Delete Inside (Edit ▸ Delete Inside): erases the pixels inside the selection.
• Delete Outside (Edit ▸ Delete Outside): erases everything outside the selection.

Both skip the locked paper layer and vector layers, and both leave the selection itself in place. They are also on the floating toolbar as Delete In and Delete Out, enabled only when the active layer sits above the paper layer. There is no default shortcut for either.

Quick Mask

Select ▸ Quick Mask shows the selection as a translucent red overlay you can paint on with any brush, the way Photoshop's Quick Mask works. Paint to protect, erase to select, use a soft brush for a soft edge, then switch Quick Mask off and the overlay becomes the selection again. It is the quickest way to hand-shape a selection that no marquee tool draws well.

Enclose and Fill

Edit ▸ Enclose and Fill fills the areas the selection encloses, the way Clip Studio Paint's Enclose and Fill does: draw a rough lasso around a region of line art and every closed gap inside it is filled with the foreground colour, while regions that open to the outside are left alone. Large enclosures are budgeted rather than refused, so a lasso around a whole page still finishes. Edit ▸ Fill Selection with Foreground fills the plain selection instead.

Masks and selections

The Layer menu's Mask submenu converts between masks and selections in both directions. Mask to Selection loads the active layer's mask as a selection, Path to Selection loads its vector mask, and Vector Mask from Selection turns the current selection outline into a vector mask on the active layer, a path you can keep editing point by point. See Layers.

Free Transform of a selection

To scale, rotate, or move the selected pixels, start a Free Transform:

• Edit ▸ Free Transform, or
• the Transform button on the floating toolbar, or
• the Transform tool (Ctrl+T).

This hands off to the Transform subsystem. See Transform and Move for handles, aspect lock, flip, and confirm or cancel.

Related pages

• Menus for the full Select and Edit menus.
• Transform and Move for transforming a selection.
• Fill for the Contiguous and Refer image border settings the Magic Wand shares.
• Layers for using a selection to build a layer mask.
• Named selection channels for saving a selection with the document and loading it back later.

New in 0.9.0

• Quick Mask. Paint the selection as a red overlay with any brush; see above.
• Enclose and Fill, and Fill Selection with Foreground. Two new Edit commands for filling line art.
• Masks both ways. Mask to Selection, Path to Selection and Vector Mask from Selection under Layer ▸ Mask.
• The floating toolbar gains Expand and Contract beside Invert, and Feather keeps its decimals, so 1.5 px is distinct from 1 and 2.
• Calmer marching ants. The outline animates at a slower, zoom-independent cadence, and a rotated or diagonal selection draws dotted instead of as a solid line.
• Magic Wand edges. The wand grades its edges the way a bucket fill does and no longer leaks paint outside its selection.
• Reselect. Bring back the selection you just dropped, instead of redrawing it. It greys out in the menu when there is nothing to restore.
• Select Layer’s Shape. Select exactly the pixels a layer holds, which is the fastest way to mask to existing artwork.

All four channel commands live in their own group at the bottom of the Select menu. Save is available whenever a selection is active; the other three stay greyed out until the document has at least one saved channel.

What a channel is

A channel is a snapshot of the selection mask: the per-pixel coverage, soft edges included, exactly as it stood the moment you saved. It belongs to the document, not the app, so it is written into the file when you save and is still there when you reopen the piece next week. Each document keeps its own channel list.

A saved channel is invisible until you load it. It does not tint the canvas, add a layer, or change any pixels; it simply waits in the Select menu. There is no dedicated channels panel: the four menu commands are the whole interface.

Saving a selection as a channel

Make a selection with any selection tool (or any combination of them), then choose Select ▸ Save Selection…. The command is greyed out until a document is open and a selection is active. The live selection is untouched by the save; you keep working with it as if nothing happened.

New channels are named Channel 1, Channel 2, and so on. The numbering always picks one past the highest number in use and never reuses a name a delete freed up, so two channels can never end up sharing a default name. If you plan to keep several, rename them right away so the load menu stays readable.

Saving is undoable: Ctrl+Z removes the channel again, and redo brings it back. The snapshot is frozen at save time, so changing the selection afterwards does not update the channel. Save again if you want the new shape; you get a second channel and the first is preserved.

Loading a channel

Choose Select ▸ Load Selection, pick a channel by name, then pick how it should combine with whatever is selected right now. The four modes mirror the combine modes of the selection tools (see Selections).

The four load modes

With no selection active, Replace and Add both simply select the channel. Subtract and Intersect against an empty selection produce an empty result, so those two are only useful when something is already selected.

A load behaves like finishing a selection gesture: it is one undo step (undo restores the selection you had before), and the floating selection toolbar appears beneath the result, ready for Transform, Copy, and the rest.

Softness comes back exactly as saved

The mask is stored with its anti-aliasing and any feather baked in, and loading bypasses the Feather value in the tool options bar entirely. The channel comes back exactly as saved: a hard-edged channel stays hard even with Feather set to 40, and a feathered channel is not softened a second time. To soften a loaded channel, load it first, then use Select ▸ Modify ▸ Feather.

Renaming and deleting channels

Rename a channel

Choose Select ▸ Rename Saved Selection and pick the channel. A small Rename Channel prompt opens with the current name pre-filled: type the new name and press Enter (or click Rename). Esc or Cancel discards the change, and a blank name is refused (the Rename button stays disabled until you type something).

Renaming is the one channel command that is not undoable: Ctrl+Z will not bring the old name back, so double-check before you commit. It does mark the document as modified, so a rename-only change is still picked up by the next save.

Delete a channel

Choose Select ▸ Delete Saved Selection and pick the channel. It disappears from all three channel submenus immediately. Deleting is undoable: Ctrl+Z restores the channel, mask and all, in its old spot in the list. Deleting a channel never touches the live selection or any layer.

Channels and canvas changes

A channel remembers the canvas size it was saved at. If the canvas has been resized or cropped since, loading fits the stored mask to the current canvas rather than stretching it: the two are lined up at the top left corner, any saved area that now falls outside the canvas is cropped away, and any canvas area beyond the saved size loads as unselected. Your selection stays pixel-aligned with the artwork instead of drifting or scaling.

Image ▸ Rotate Canvas is different: a quarter turn, a half turn or a flip moves every saved channel by an exact pixel map along with the artwork, so a channel stays on its subject rather than being re-fitted at load time.

The fit happens at load time only; the stored channel itself is never rewritten. Shrink the canvas, load the channel, then enlarge the canvas again, and the full saved mask is once more available.

Good to know

• Channels never touch your pixels. Saving, loading, renaming, and deleting only ever affect the selection mask and the channel list; no layer content changes.
• The channel commands stand down while the document is mid-gesture: during a live transform, warp, crop, text, or shape gesture, or while a filter preview is open, they quietly do nothing. Finish or cancel the gesture, then run the command again.
• Channels are per document. Each open document keeps its own list, and there is no command to copy a channel from one document to another.

Related

• Selections - drawing selections, the combine modes, and Feather.
• Menus - the full Select menu and the rest of the menu bar.
• File formats - format versions and what older versions of Limner can open.

Working color space and imported profiles

Limner edits 8-bit sRGB documents. When a PNG, JPEG, GIF, WebP, BMP V5, TIFF, or PSD contains a supported embedded RGB ICC profile, Limner converts its pixels to sRGB during document import and tells you which source profile was converted. The original file is not changed. Untagged images are assumed to be sRGB, including PSD files explicitly marked "intentionally untagged." Calibrated or unknown BMP V4/V5 color metadata is refused rather than guessed. PNG cICP is accepted only when it describes full-range sRGB; other cICP color spaces and PNG HDR mastering/light-level metadata are also refused.

Limner does not currently offer Display P3 or other wide-gamut document spaces, HDR editing, 16-bit-per-channel editing, or CMYK/Lab document editing. A supported Display P3 image can be imported, but it becomes an 8-bit sRGB document. A malformed or unsupported profile, or a profile-tagged high-bit-depth image, is refused with an explanation instead of being imported with incorrect colors.

Soft proofing

View ▸ Proofing ▸ Soft Proof (Ctrl+Y) simulates a chosen press profile on screen, so colors preview the way they print: saturated colors a press cannot reproduce pull into its gamut, while in-gamut colors and neutrals barely move (the simulation is relative colorimetric with black point compensation). The proof is display-only. The document pixels never change, the eyedropper still picks the true document color, and every export is byte-identical with the proof on or off. The canvas stays fully interactive while proofing, including live brush strokes.

View ▸ Proofing ▸ Proof Setup chooses the profile, filed the way Photoshop files its proof conditions: the submenu lists the press profiles installed with Limner (GRACoL2013_CRPC6, SWOP2006_Coated3v2, and ISO Coated v2 300%) first, then any CMYK profiles found in the operating system's color directory, each shown by its embedded profile name with a checkmark on the active one. Picking one applies immediately. "Custom" at the top of the submenu opens a dialog with the same list plus "Load profile", which opens any .icc or .icm file and is the recommended route: your print provider's own profile is the most accurate proofing target for that provider. Only CMYK press profiles are accepted; a monitor or working-space RGB profile is refused with an explanation. Picks and the Soft proof toggle apply live in the dialog; OK keeps them, while Cancel, Esc, or the window close button restores the profile and the toggle the dialog opened with. The chosen profile is remembered across sessions; the Soft Proof toggle itself always starts off, so a session never opens onto a silently color-shifted canvas.

CMYK export

File ▸ Export As… with CMYK TIFF chosen flattens the canvas over white, converts it to CMYK through the press profile chosen in Proof Setup (relative colorimetric with black point compensation), and writes an 8-bit CMYK TIFF with that profile embedded, ready for a print workflow. The exported separation matches what Soft Proof showed on screen. If no press profile has been chosen yet, the export opens Proof Setup instead of guessing.

One brush color, plus a history

Limner keeps an active brush colour and a background colour, shown as the foreground and background pair at the top of the Color panel: X swaps them and D restores black over white, on every platform. Every color you actually paint with is also added to the Color History strip, so your recent colors are always one tap away. See Color History below.

In Vector mode the same picker edits the Fill or Stroke color of the selected object instead of the brush color (see Vector mode in the picker).

Layout at a glance

The Color tab is laid out top to bottom:

1. Target selector (Vector mode only)
2. The foreground and background pair beside the Harmony selector (raster modes only): X swaps them and D resets to black over white
3. HSV color wheel
4. Harmony swatches (only when a harmony is active)
5. Exact / hex entry plus the RGB / HEX readout
6. Channel sliders (choose a color space, then drag the channels)
7. The CMYK profile caption (only with the CMYK sliders showing, naming the press profile the numbers convert through)
8. Color History
9. Palette section

The HSV color wheel

The wheel is the primary picker. It has two parts:

• The outer hue ring sets the hue. Click or drag around the ring to rotate to a new hue.
• The inner square sets saturation (left to right, 0 to full) and value (top to bottom, full to dark).

The region you grab (ring or square) is locked when you start a drag, so a stroke that begins on the ring stays on the ring and a drag in the square never jumps to the hue ring. A click works the same as a quick drag.

The wheel remembers the hue and saturation you set even when you drag the square all the way to black or to grey, so you do not lose your chosen hue when you darken or desaturate a color. Setting a color from somewhere else (a swatch, the hex field, a slider) reseeds the wheel from that color.

Color harmony

A harmony mode overlays the wheel with the partner hues of your current color and offers them as one-tap swatches. With a harmony on, the ring darkens everywhere except a lit window at the base hue and at each partner, and each partner shows as a pickable dot inside its window. Partner dots take your current color's saturation and value, so they read as variations of the same tone rather than pure bright hues. Clicking a partner dot snaps the base hue exactly to it at full saturation and value, ready to be re-toned in the square.

Choose a mode from the Harmony selector. The choice persists for the session.

Harmony swatches

When a harmony is active, a row of swatches appears below the wheel: first your current color (hover label "Current"), then one swatch per partner (hover label is the harmony name, for example "Triadic"). Click any of them to make it the active color.

Exact and hex entry

For precise input, the Exact button opens a popup with per-channel sliders and a hex field. Below it, a read-only readout always shows the current color as decimal RGB and as a 6-digit uppercase hex value:

RGB  128  64  32
HEX  #804020

The hex readout has no alpha channel.

Channel sliders

The slider strips let you edit the color one channel at a time. Pick a color space from the Sliders selector, then drag the channels. The chosen space persists for the session.

Notes:

• The HSV, HLS, and CMYK sliders remember the working channels across frames, so dragging a value to a grey or black does not throw away the hue. Setting the color from the wheel, a swatch, or the hex field reseeds them.
• With a press profile chosen in View ▸ Proofing ▸ Proof Setup, the CMYK sliders convert through that profile, so the numbers are real ink percentages for that press; the caption under the sliders names the profile in effect. With no profile chosen they fall back to a simple formula, and the caption says so.

Color History

Every color you actually paint with lands in the History strip, most recent first. Click any swatch to make it active again. Until you have painted anything, the strip shows the hint "Colors you paint with appear here."

History records a color when it is committed to paint (a brush, shape, or fill stroke), not while you scrub the picker, so dragging the wheel never floods the list. Erasing and transparent strokes do not record (there is no color to keep). The shape tools and the Fill bucket also skip history when they are editing a layer mask. Identical colors are not duplicated: an existing entry moves to the front instead. The strip holds up to 24 colors.

Palettes

The Palette section is for the colors you want to keep on hand: named, saved swatch sets that survive across sessions (they are stored in your settings and saved on every change).

Managing palettes

The header row has a palette selector and four icon buttons. A new install starts with a palette called Basics: a five-step grey ramp plus the six primaries and secondaries, yours to edit or delete. If you do delete every palette the selector reads "No palettes yet" and only the new-palette and import buttons remain.

The rename and delete buttons appear only once at least one palette exists.

Adding and removing swatches

The swatch grid shows the active palette's colors as 22 by 22 squares, followed by a plus tile.

• Single click a swatch to select that color.
• Right-click a swatch for a menu: "Set to current color" replaces it with the current brush color, and "Remove" deletes it.
• The trailing plus tile adds the current color to the palette. Hover: "Add current color to palette".
• On a touch screen, double-tap a swatch to arm it. An X badge appears on its corner (hover: "Remove this color"); tap the badge to delete the swatch. Any press elsewhere disarms it.

Vector mode: Fill and Stroke

In Vector mode the Color tab gains a Target row at the top with Fill and Stroke choices. The picker then edits whichever target is selected for the current object (or the default for new objects when nothing is selected). The wheel, sliders, hex field, history, and palettes all work the same; they just write to the object's Fill or Stroke color, with full opacity.

The Eyedropper

The Eyedropper samples a color straight from your canvas. Its tool-options bar holds Sample (Point, 3 × 3, 5 × 5 or 11 × 11), Radius, and Sample all layers. With Sample all layers on (the default) it samples the composite, meaning all visible layers blended together; off, it samples only the active layer.

• Default shortcut: I (rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts).
• Click, or drag, to sample. Dragging scrubs the color under the cursor as you move.

For full details, see the Eyedropper tool page.

Hold Alt to sample temporarily

While using most paint tools, hold Alt to borrow the eyedropper without switching tools: press or drag to pick a color, then release Alt to return to your tool. The decision is locked at the moment you press, so toggling Alt in the middle of a stroke cannot hijack a stroke already underway.

Alt-sampling is available for painting tools but is excluded for the selection tools (Rect Select, Ellipse Select, Lasso, Polygon Select), the Magic Wand, Transform, Crop, Layer Move, Mesh Warp, Liquefy, Clone Stamp, Heal, and the Eyedropper itself, where Alt already has another meaning (for example, Alt subtracts from a selection, and on Clone Stamp and Heal it aims the source).

Sampling from the reference board

When the Eyedropper is active and the reference board (the image board or its pop-out) is open, clicking an image samples that image's pixel directly into the brush color instead of selecting or moving the image. The cursor shows a crosshair over the board. See the Reference panel.

Reference layer

A reference layer is a different idea from the reference board. It is a normal layer you flag so that the Fill bucket and the Magic Wand read its pixels for color matching and boundary detection instead of the active layer or the composite. This is the classic "use the lineart layer as my fill guide" workflow: keep your line work on a reference layer, fill on a separate color layer, and the fill follows the lines.

• The paint still lands on the active layer. Only the color-match source changes.
• Only one reference layer is honored at a time (the first visible flagged layer). Setting a new one clears any other.
• The reference flag is saved in the document, so a reopened file keeps it.

Turning it on

In the Layers panel the reference toggle is the crosshair segment of the active-layer strip at the top of the panel; it lights to the accent colour when on. Hover text: "Reference layer: Fill and Magic Wand read this layer's lines". Any row that is flagged wears a quiet crosshair mark after its name (hover: "Reference layer (toggle in the active-layer strip)"), and the row's right-click menu carries the same toggle.

Related: the Fill "Reference all layers" option

The Fill tool has a separate "Reference all layers" checkbox (default on). It is not the same as a reference layer. When on, Fill matches color against the whole composite (every visible layer) rather than the active or reference layer. See Fill and Selections for how the Magic Wand uses the same sources.

Related pages

• Eyedropper tool
• Brush tool
• Brush settings panel
• Fill
• Selections
• Layers
• Reference panel

Defaults summary

New in 0.9.0

• A foreground and background pair. The panel shows both, X swaps them and D restores the defaults; in Vector mode the same keys work the Fill and Stroke stack.
• Eyedropper controls. The Eyedropper has a sampling Radius (0 to 300 px, averaged) and a Sample all layers switch, and the Color panel imports GIMP .gpl palettes.
• Sixteen-bit compositing. The compositor accumulates layers in 16-bit float and dithers the final 8-bit picture, so gradients stay smooth and exact black and white survive export.
• A starter palette. A new install begins with a usable set of swatches instead of an empty palette.

This page is about choosing and managing brushes. For the meaning of each individual setting, see the Tool Settings panel. For how the Brush tool itself behaves on the canvas, see the Brush tool.

The brush engine in brief

A brush is a parameter set the stamp engine reads as you draw. A few terms are worth knowing up front, because they recur throughout the picker and the settings:

• Tip: the shape of one stamp. A brush either uses the built-in procedural round dab or a grayscale image you import.
• Opacity: the per-stroke ceiling. Overlapping dabs build up only to this level, then stop. Applied once when the stroke commits.
• Flow: the per-dab deposit. Lower flow lays paint down more gradually within a single stroke.
• Spacing: the gap between stamps, measured as a fraction of the tip diameter. Limner's default of 0.08 (8 percent) reads as a continuous ribbon rather than visible dots.

The largest diameter any brush can reach is 2000 canvas pixels, the upper bound on every Size slider. Most brushes paint colour. The pure blenders in the Blend folder deposit no colour of their own; they smear what is already on the canvas. The wet oils in Painting (and the wet-mix brushes in Blend) do both: they smear the canvas while they lay down the drawing colour. Picking any of these keeps the Brush tool selected; the engine simply routes the stroke through the smudge path.

The three brush tabs

Brushes live across three dock tabs:

The Tool Settings panel docks on the left by default. All three are also reachable from the Window menu.

The Brush picker

The Brush tab is styled after Procreate's Library: a slim vertical rail of folders down the left side, beside a responsive grid of stroke-preview thumbnails for the active folder. The active brush is highlighted with a faint accent wash.

Top controls

How the body adapts

The grid rearranges itself to fit the panel:

• While searching, every folder collapses into one flat result grid across the whole library, headed by a count like "5 results". This jumps you straight to a brush by name.
• With a single folder (for example a fresh install with only the built-ins), the rail is hidden and the grid fills the panel.
• With several folders and a wide enough panel (104 px folder rail plus a usable grid, so at least 224 px total), you get the folder rail beside the grid.
• With several folders but a narrow panel (under 224 px), the rail collapses into a folder dropdown above a full-width grid.

The grid itself is responsive: it fits as many columns as the width allows (around a 148 px target cell), and collapses to a single column when very narrow.

Working with folders

Folders are derived from each brush's category. The built-in "Basic" group leads, imported .abr sets follow in import order, and your own empty folders appear after that. Folder organisation is remembered by name across sessions. The list follows the tool: picking Brush, Pen, Pencil, or Airbrush moves the rail to that tool's family (Painting, Inking, Pencils, Airbrush) and brings back the brush you last used with it, with Tool Settings following along. Smudge shows the Blend folder and nothing else; every other tool hides Blend and shows only paint brushes. Browsing to another folder stays put until you change tools again.

• Select a folder: click its row in the rail (or pick it from the dropdown). Each row shows the folder name and its brush count.
• Move a brush: drag a brush's grip handle (the dotted handle at the bottom of its cell) onto a folder row in the rail. The grip is the only drag source, so a tap on the thumbnail or name reliably selects the brush instead of picking it up.
• Rename a folder (your own folders only): click the pencil button, type, then press Enter or click away. Press Escape to cancel.
• Delete a folder (your own folders only): click the trash button. Its brushes return to the Basic folder rather than being deleted.

A brush cell

Each cell is a wide stroke-preview thumbnail with the brush name below it. Click or tap either the thumbnail or the name to select that brush. Picking a brush while the Eraser is active also switches back to the Brush tool. Picking one while Smudge is active stays on Smudge and sets that tool's brush.

Right-click a cell for its menu:

Deleting a user brush asks for confirmation first ("Delete this brush?"). Built-in presets are protected: they show no trash button and cannot be deleted or renamed in place. To customise one, duplicate it first.

The built-in library

Limner ships 52 brushes across six folders. The built-ins are regenerated at every launch and are never written to disk, so editing one only changes a saved override (see On-disk format below). The full list:

Pencils

Pencil (HB), Pencil (2B), Pencil (Hard 2H), Mechanical Pencil, Charcoal, Sketch (light), Soft Pencil (6B). Graphite and charcoal marks that bite the paper, most with a procedural paper tooth.

Inking

G-Pen, Mapping Pen, Fineliner, Ink Brush, Dip Pen, Tapered Pen, Marker, Real G-Pen, Turnip Pen, Felt Pen, Sumi Ink Brush, Dry Ink, Light Ink. Pressure-driven line art with entry and exit tapers and post-correction for clean curves. Mapping Pen and Fineliner use aliased (crisp) edges for fine line and screentone work.

Painting

Round (soft), Round (hard), Bristle, Flat / Chisel, Oil / Impasto, Watercolor, Oil (Perceptual), Gouache, Acrylic Flat, Watercolor Wash. From clean round tips to bristle and chisel shapes. Several of the oils, gouache, and washes carry wet-mixing settings, so they smear and blend colour as you drag.

Airbrush

Airbrush (soft), Airbrush (hard), Spray, Splatter, Spray Can, Droplet, Toner Spray. Soft gradual build-up plus scatter-and-count sprays for particles and spatter.

Texture

Chalk, Pastel (soft), Crayon, Stipple, Grunge. Rough, broken marks on toothy surfaces, including a large grunge stamp.

Blend

Smudge, Soft Blend, Strong Smear, Wet Mix, Wet Blend, Bristle Smudge, Grainy Smudge, Chalk Smudge, Perceptual Wet Mix, Palette Knife. These deposit no colour of their own; they smear what is already on the canvas, with varying amounts of paint pickup and colour stretch, and the pigment a stroke picks up runs out as it travels.

Creating and editing brushes

The Create Brush wizard

Open it with New brush in the picker, or the Create Brush tab. The header reads "Create a brush", with a Guided / Advanced switch on the right. While you build, the draft IS the active painting brush, so the canvas doubles as a test pad (Ctrl+Z erases your test doodles), and a live stroke ribbon shows the brush updating with every change.

Guided mode walks five steps:

1. Type: pick one of eight starting archetypes. Each is a card with a real stroke preview: Plain round, Inking pen, Pencil, Paint brush, Airbrush, Spray / spatter, Chalk & charcoal, and Blender. Re-picking a type restarts the draft fresh.
2. Tip: choose the round tip or import an image, then set hardness (round) or invert and flip (image), and roundness.
3. Pen: set size, whether pressure changes the size (with a Soft / Steady / Firm response and a draggable curve), whether pressure changes the ink amount, and the stroke ends (Blunt, Tapered, or Long taper).
4. Character: stroke body (Smooth / Normal / Grainy / Dotted spacing), paper grain, scatter, and colour life (per-stamp colour jitter).
5. Name: name the brush (default "My Brush") and choose a folder. New brushes default into the "Created Brushes" folder, which appears once the first brush lands there.

Each step shows footer buttons for Cancel, Back, Next, and finally Create brush.

Advanced mode skips the wizard. Pick a starting point (any archetype, or "Current brush" to copy the selected library brush), then edit the full nine-page settings editor on the draft, name it, and create it.

Editing an existing brush

Select a brush, then open the Tool Settings panel. Its editor has nine pages in a left rail: Basic, Tip shape, Ink, Color, Stroke, Texture, Dual brush, Taper, and Correction. A live stroke ribbon at the top regenerates on every change using the real stamp engine, so what you see is exactly what you will paint. The Basic page gathers the most-used controls (size, hardness, opacity and flow, blending mode, brush type, and the stabilizer with its delay radius) in one place; the same controls also appear on their detailed pages.

The full meaning, range, and default of every control on those nine pages is documented in Tool Settings.

Importing and exporting Photoshop .abr

Limner reads and writes the .abr brush format, so brushes travel between Limner, Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Krita, and GIMP.

Import

Click Import… in the picker. Limner reads ABR versions 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10, and extracts the sampled (bitmap-backed) brushes; computed or purely parametric brushes are skipped. Where the file carries them, spacing, diameter, hardness, scatter, texture, dual tip, and colour dynamics are mapped onto the new brush. Imported brushes land in a folder named after the file, with category "Imported" if the file gives no name.

Export

Two routes:

• One brush: right-click its cell and choose Export as .abr....
• A whole folder: right-click the folder row in the rail and choose Export folder as .abr....

Exports are written as ABR version 2, the flat sampled format every major app imports. That format has no slots for dynamics, texture, or colour, so what travels is the tip bitmap, the name, and the spacing; the receiving app supplies its own dynamics, exactly as it would for any classic .abr.

On-disk format (brushes.dat)

Your imported and created brushes, plus any edits you make to the built-in presets, are saved to brushes.dat in Limner's config folder (%APPDATA%/Limner, alongside settings.toml). The current on-disk version is 21. Imported .abr records are keyed by pack and name, so the same brush name from two different packs stays distinct. On macOS and iPad the same files live under Application Support.

A few details worth knowing:

• The built-in presets themselves are not stored. They are regenerated at launch, and only your edits to them ("overrides", keyed by name) are saved over the factory list.
• Folder organisation is not stored in brushes.dat. It lives in the app settings and is re-applied by brush name.
• The format is versioned and migrates older files forward. A file from an older version still loads; a file from a newer version than this build understands is ignored rather than risked.

See also

• Brush tool: painting on the canvas.
• Tool Settings panel: every setting in full detail.
• Color: the paint colour brushes use.
• Preferences and shortcuts: rebinding the brush size keys and others.

For choosing, organizing, importing, and creating brushes, see Brushes. For painting with the result, see the Brush tool.

Opening the panel

Tool Settings is one of the three brush dock tabs, labeled Tool Settings (it was called Brush Settings before it learned to follow the tool). By default it docks on the left side of the window. The same editor is also embedded in the Advanced mode of the Create Brush wizard (see Brushes).

The whole panel is mouse and pen driven. There are no dedicated keyboard shortcuts in this panel itself, though the global brush-size keys still apply: ] grows the brush and [ shrinks it (rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts).

Anatomy

The panel has three parts, top to bottom:

1. Header. An icon plus the brush name. For your own brushes, double-click

the name to rename it in place. Built-in presets cannot be renamed (the name shows the hint "Built-in preset; duplicate it to rename"). The header also carries verbs, right-aligned:

• Reset (counter-clockwise arrow): "Restore initial settings". Built-in

presets return to their shipped values; your own brushes return to their last-saved state.

• Delete (trash): shown only for your own brushes, not built-ins.
• New (wand, accent color): opens the Create Brush wizard.

When the Eraser tool is active, the header instead shows "Eraser" with no library verbs, because the eraser carries its own parameter set. (The Smudge tool shows its selected Blend-folder brush here, editable like any other brush.) While the Create Brush wizard has a draft going, it shows "New brush (draft)". What the panel shows follows the tool. The brush-driven tools (the paint brushes, Eraser, Blend, Clone Stamp and Heal) show the deep per-brush editor described on this page. With Rectangle, Ellipse, Line or Curve active, that tool's Filled, Width and Opacity controls sit above the editor, and a line or curve is stamped with the active brush. With Gradient active the panel becomes the Gradient editor: presets, the stop bar, the selected stop's color and opacity, and the shape. With Text active it becomes the text editor while a text is placed or edited. With Liquefy active the whole panel becomes the Liquefy editor: Mode (Push, Pinch, Expand, Twirl), Size (12.0 to 1024.0, logarithmic, default 96.0), Strength (0.0 to 1.0, default 0.5) and Reverse, the same four values as the tool options bar, each surface an exact mirror of the other; the controls are disabled during a stroke, with the note "Finish the current contact to change Liquefy settings." Every other tool shows its full parameter list, or a one-line hint of its gesture when it has no parameters (Pan, Zoom).

1. Live stroke ribbon. A preview rendered by the real stamp engine, with

every setting applied. It regenerates on any change, so edits read instantly. Hover text: "Live preview: the actual engine, every setting applied".

1. Category rail plus the selected page. A narrow rail of nine categories on

the left; the chosen category's controls on the right.

The nine category pages

The rail lists these categories in stroke-pipeline order, with the most-used controls gathered first:

Basic, Tip shape, Ink, Color, Stroke, Texture, Dual brush, Taper, Correction.

The Basic page is an additive view: each control on it is the same widget that appears on its detailed page, emitting the same action, so editing on either surface stays in sync. There is no duplicated state.

All defaults below come from Brush::default() in src/brush.rs. Built-in presets override these per preset.

Basic

The everyday controls in one place: Size, Hardness, Opacity, Flow, Blending mode, Brush type, and the Stabilizer with its delay radius.

Opacity and Flow are independent. Flow sets the per-dab deposit, so overlapping passes build up within a single stroke; Opacity is the ceiling that buildup cannot exceed. Lower Flow paints more gradually; lower Opacity caps the whole stroke at a fixed solidity.

Hardness applies only to the round tip. When an image tip is loaded its softness comes from the bitmap, so the Basic page hides the Hardness slider (and the Tip shape page replaces it with the image-tip toggles). On the Brush tool options bar the same control is greyed out rather than hidden for a sampled-tip brush, with a hover that explains why.

The Size and Flow sliders each have a small pulse-glyph dynamics button beside them, opening the dynamics popover (see Dynamics popover). The button lights up in the accent color when any pen-driven source is active.

Tip shape

Controls the shape and orientation of the tip.

Shape source

Two choices, "Round" and "Image...":

When an image tip is loaded, the panel reports its pixel size and shows five toggles instead of the Hardness slider:

When the tip is Round, a Hardness slider appears here instead (same range and default as on the Basic page: 0.0 to 1.0, default 0.85).

Multi-tip set (Repeat method)

Shape and orientation

Note: the stored anti-aliasing value is a pixel band, but the control shows the four CSP-style named levels. If the stored value does not match one exactly, the control falls back to displaying "Weak".

Ink

The per-brush blend mode plus paint deposit and wet mixing. This page repeats Opacity, Flow, Blending mode, and Brush type from Basic, then adds the type-specific mixing controls.

Blending mode

The per-brush "Ink" blend mode controls how the finished stroke composites onto the active layer's existing pixels. It uses the same blend math as a per-layer blend mode but is independent of it, and it applies only to Paint brushes.

Color mixing (Smudge brushes)

These wet-mixing controls appear only when the brush type is Smudge. With every value at its default the brush behaves as a classic smudge (no drawing color mixed in). A blender carries a finite amount of the color it picks up, so a long smear runs out the way real paint does instead of feeding itself from its own trail, and per-dab strength is normalized for spacing, so a stroke builds toward the Flow you set rather than saturating instantly on a closely spaced tip.

Color mixing never appears for a plain Paint brush, which has no ground to mix with.

Color

Per-dab and per-stroke color jitter. Each group has Hue, Saturation, and Brightness sliders, shown as percentages.

Per-stamp jitter

Every stamp of the tip shifts the color, so foliage, spatter, and particle brushes feel alive. Hue at 100% means anywhere on the wheel.

Per-stroke jitter

Each new stroke starts at a shifted color, then stays consistent for the rest of that stroke.

Stroke

Spacing, overlap behavior, and spray/scatter.

Spray

Texture

A procedural paper grain plus an optional imported texture pattern.

When a texture pattern is loaded, these controls appear:

An imported .abr set's texture lands in this slot.

Dual brush

A second tip that masks every stamp of the main tip: texture inside the shape, like Photoshop's Dual Brush. It reuses the same grain controls as Texture, but the wording targets the second tip and the texture-only controls (Scale, Mode, Rotation) are omitted.

An imported .abr set's dual tip lands in this slot.

Taper

The entry and exit taper lengths (CSP "Starting and ending").

Correction

The stabilizer and its delay radius, the speed coupling, tail aggressiveness, and the pen-up post-correction.

Dynamics popover

Each dynamizable slider (Size, Flow, and Roundness) carries a small pulse-glyph button. It lights up in the accent color when any pen-driven source is active, and its hover text summarizes which sources are driving the value. Clicking it opens the dynamics popover, the per-parameter mapping of pen input to the value's strength.

Defaults per parameter, from Brush::default():

• Size dynamics: pressure on, linear curve, Minimum 10%.
• Flow dynamics: pressure on, linear curve, Minimum 0%.
• Roundness dynamics: all sources off.

Response curve editor

The popover's curve editor maps pressure (0 to 1) to a factor (0 to 1). The two endpoints are pinned at (0, 0) and (1, 1); the Minimum slider, not the curve, owns the output floor.

• Drag an interior point to move it.
• Click empty space to add a point (up to 8 points total).
• Double-click a point to remove it. Dropping back to two points returns the

curve to a straight linear response.

A gamma curve converts to draggable points on its first edit, seeded from its own shape so nothing jumps.

New in 0.9.0

• Automatic spacing. Spacing follows a square-root law from the size, and a flattened nib measures its projected width, so the edge of a tilted flat brush stays continuous.
• Tail Aggressiveness. A control on the Correction page sets how firmly a stroke's taper is pulled in at its end.
• A stabiliser that can hold still. The stabiliser's Delay radius lets the pen move inside a small circle before the line follows, so a held pen draws nothing until you mean it.
• Small and flat brushes. Brushes under 5 px no longer pulse light and dark, very small brushes lay a line instead of beads (down to 0.5 px), and a flat nib's long edges are no longer ragged.
• Symmetry mirrors the tip. A handed or shaped tip is genuinely mirrored across the symmetry axis.
• Not pixel-identical. Because curve following, small dabs and close spacing changed, the same gesture does not produce the same pixels as earlier builds. Existing artwork is untouched.

See also

• Brushes: choosing, organizing, importing, and creating brushes.
• Brush tool: painting with the active brush.

This page covers Image ▸ Adjustments in menu order (Brightness / Contrast, Levels, Curves, Hue / Saturation, Color Balance, Invert, Posterize, Threshold, Halftone, Gradient Map, Color to Alpha), then the Filter menu in menu order (Gaussian Blur, Lens Blur, Motion Blur, Sharpen, Median, Emboss, Edge Detect), and finally Image ▸ Rotate Canvas.

See also: Menus for where these sit in the menu bar, and Layers for active layers, selections, and masks. Every adjustment on this page commits into the active layer's pixels; for the re-editable version that leaves the artwork below untouched, see Fill and adjustment layers.

How filters work (read this first)

All eighteen filters share one dialog and one workflow, so once you know one you know them all. Judge a preview at the zoom that matters: at 200 percent and above the canvas draws pixels as pixels, with no smoothing, so fine detail reads true. View ▸ Proofing ▸ Soft Proof is display-only and never changes what a filter writes.

The live-preview dialog

• One movable, non-dimming window. The dialog is a floating window titled for the filter you opened, not a dimming modal. The artwork behind it stays at true brightness, and you can drag the window off your art to judge the preview clearly. It first appears top-centre, clear of the canvas, and remembers wherever you drag it.
• Live preview on any change. The moment you move a slider or handle, the active layer updates so you see the result in place. Filters whose default already changes the image (Invert, Posterize, Threshold, Gradient Map) preview the instant you open them, before you touch anything.
• Apply / Cancel. The bottom row has Apply (bold) and Cancel. Apply commits the result as a single undo step (one press of undo removes the whole adjustment). Cancel reverts the layer to exactly how it looked before you opened the dialog.
• Closing also cancels. The title-bar close button and the Esc key both cancel, exactly like the Cancel button.
• Painting is paused. While a filter dialog is open, drawing on the canvas is blocked so a stray stroke cannot corrupt the preview. Switching documents closes the dialog.

What a filter acts on

• The active layer, clipped to the selection. Adjustments edit the active layer's own pixels, not the merged composite. If a selection is active, only pixels inside it change. Feathered or anti-aliased selection edges blend the adjustment by coverage, so the transition is smooth instead of a hard stair-step.
• Layer masks. If you are editing a layer's mask (rather than its pixels), the filter acts on the mask's coverage instead of the colour. This lets you use Levels to tighten a mask edge or Gaussian Blur to feather one.
• Vector layers must be rasterized first. Filters write pixels, and a vector layer's pixels are generated from its paths. Running a filter on a vector layer (when you are not editing its mask) shows a notice and refuses. Rasterize the layer first, then filter it. See Layers.
• Fill, adjustment and Colorize color layers are generated. Their pixels come from their settings, so a filter cannot change them. Choosing a filter on one closes the dialog with a notice that says so (for example "Filtering is not available on a fill layer") and where to go instead: Layer ▸ Rasterize ▸ Rasterize Layer, or the layer's mask if it has one.
• Lock Transparency holds. On a layer with transparency locked, a filter keeps every pixel's alpha: a blur recolors inside the shape and leaves its edges exactly as they were, and thin or faint paint keeps its color. Color to Alpha, whose whole result is transparency, is refused there with "Transparency is locked".
• Locked layers are skipped. Preview and commit do nothing on a locked layer.
• On iPad, memory is checked first. A filter whose working copies would not fit in the memory the iPad can safely give it is refused with "Not enough memory for this filter", which names the amount needed, instead of risking the app being closed.

The histogram behind Levels and Curves

Both Levels and Curves draw a 256-bin histogram of the active layer's tones behind their main widget, so you can place handles and points against the real distribution of lights and darks. Levels draws the layer's luma (transparent pixels are skipped). Curves draws the luma while you edit the composite RGB curve and switches to that channel's own histogram the moment you pick Red, Green, or Blue. While you are editing a layer mask, the histogram shows the mask's own values instead, and Levels Auto works from them. While it is being computed, the widget shows a brief "computing histogram" placeholder.

Menu notes

• Every filter and adjustment is greyed out until a document is open. The colour and tone adjustments live under Image ▸ Adjustments; the Filter menu holds Repeat Last Filter and then the spatial filters in three groups: blurs (Gaussian Blur, Lens Blur, Motion Blur), sharpening and noise (Sharpen, Median), and stylize (Emboss, Edge Detect). Both menus carry the reminder "Acts on the active layer (or the selection)."
• Only Repeat Last Filter has a default chord, Ctrl+Alt+F (Cmd+Option+F on a Mac): it re-applies the last committed filter with the same settings, and is greyed out until one has run. The individual filters ship unbound, and as with all commands you can assign your own in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.
• Items with options end in an ellipsis. Invert has no options, so it carries none.

Hue / Saturation

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Hue / Saturation

Shifts the hue, intensity, and brightness of the layer's colours all at once. It rotates the hue wheel, scales saturation, and blends each pixel toward black or white. Useful for recolouring, warming or cooling an image, or knocking colours back. With all three sliders at 0 it does nothing.

Note: Lightness is asymmetric. Positive values lift colours toward white, negative values pull them toward black. Alpha is preserved.

Levels

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Levels

Remaps the tonal range: pick the input black and white points to set contrast, slide the midpoint to brighten or darken the midtones (gamma), and pick output black and white points to limit the final range. The main control is the histogram with five draggable handles, just like Photoshop.

The same five values are also available as precise sliders in the collapsible Numeric values section. A Log scale checkbox switches the histogram to log heights (so a single stray pixel stays on the floor instead of lifting into noise); Auto clips 0.6 per cent from each end of red, green and blue independently and prints the ranges it chose under the row, so you can see and repeat what it did (it is greyed out until the histogram has finished computing); and Reset restores the defaults.

Handles on the histogram

Numeric values (collapsible)

Tips:

• Double-click a handle to reset just that endpoint.
• The grab radius is about 9 px, so you do not have to land exactly on the triangle.
• The current transfer curve is drawn over the histogram, with an output black-to-white gradient bar below the input handles.
• The dialog keeps input white above input black automatically, so the range can never collapse.

Curves

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Curves

The most flexible tonal tool. Drag a curve to map input tones to output tones with full control. Edit the composite RGB curve to adjust overall brightness and contrast, or switch to Red, Green, or Blue to shift colour balance per channel. Per-channel and master edits stack the way Photoshop's do.

The curve uses overshoot-free monotone-cubic interpolation, so adding a steep point will not introduce wiggles in the shadows or highlights.

Editing the curve

• Add a point: click empty space on the graph (up to 16 points per channel; a click too close to an existing point is ignored).
• Move a point: drag it. The two endpoints keep their fixed x (0 or 1) and only move vertically; interior points stay between their neighbours.
• Remove a point: drag it off the top or bottom edge, right-click it, or double-click it. The two endpoints cannot be removed, and a curve always keeps at least two points.

The active channel's curve is drawn bright; any non-identity inactive channels are drawn faint behind it. Channel colours follow their names (RGB is grey, plus red, green, and blue).

Color Balance

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Color Balance

Push colours toward warm or cool poles separately in the shadows, midtones, and highlights. Each tonal range has three bipolar sliders along the cyan to red, magenta to green, and yellow to blue axes. Positive values push toward the warm pole (red, green, or blue). The smooth tonal weighting crossfades the three ranges without banding.

The on-screen axis labels read "Cyan ↔ Red", "Magenta ↔ Green", and "Yellow ↔ Blue", grouped under "Shadows", "Midtones", and "Highlights".

Gradient Map

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Gradient Map

Recolours the image by its tonal value: each pixel's perceptual luminance is mapped to a colour along an editable gradient, so shadows take the left-end colour and highlights take the right. The default black-to-white gradient desaturates to luminance, which is why a Gradient Map always changes the image and never reports itself as a no-op.

Presets:

Tips:

• Click the bar to add a stop. It samples the existing gradient, so it is invisible until you drag it or recolour it.
• Drag a stop handle to move it; stops stay between their neighbours.
• The help line reads "Click the bar to add a stop · drag a stop to move it."
• The bar always shows the raw stop layout; Reverse only flips how tones are mapped onto it, so a handle always sits under the colour it controls.

Gaussian Blur

Filter ▸ Gaussian Blur

Softens the layer with a true Gaussian blur. It blurs in premultiplied space so transparent areas do not bleed dark or coloured haloes into your artwork, and edges clamp (replicate the border pixel). The radius is the Gaussian sigma in pixels.

Notes:

• The live preview uses a fast downsampled proxy so a large radius on a big canvas stays interactive; the committed result always uses the exact full-resolution blur. The proxy is sized so the preview matches the result at small radii too.
• Blur is the one filter that moves alpha, so it can soften edges. With a feathered selection, its edge mixes alpha too.
• Unlike the other filters, blur reads neighbouring rows, so even with a selection active it runs over the whole canvas and only writes inside the selection (giving a continuous blur right up to the selection edge).

Brightness / Contrast

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Brightness / Contrast

A quick, familiar pair of sliders. Brightness adds an even tonal lift or drop; Contrast steepens or flattens the tones around mid-grey. At the extreme, contrast -1 collapses everything to a uniform grey.

Invert

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Invert

Inverts every colour: each channel becomes 255 minus itself. Alpha is left unchanged. There are no options, so this item has no ellipsis. The dialog shows a short description plus Apply and Cancel, and previews immediately on open. Invert always changes the image, so it is never treated as a no-op.

Posterize

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Posterize

Reduces each channel to a small number of evenly spaced tones for a banded, screen-printed look. The darkest tone stays pure black and the lightest stays pure white, so the full contrast range is kept.

Threshold

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Threshold

Forces every pixel to pure black or pure white by a single brightness threshold. Pixels at or above the cutoff become white; below it, black. Useful for cleaning up line art or making a quick high-contrast mask. Threshold always changes the image, so it is never treated as a no-op.

This is the same operation as the Threshold adjustment layer (Layer ▸ New ▸ New Adjustment Layer). The menu entry here bakes the result into the layer; the adjustment layer stays live and can be re-edited or removed later. It was called Binarize in earlier releases.

Halftone

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Halftone turns continuous tone into a screen of dots, the way print and screentone do. Frequency is set in lines per inch against the document's resolution, with an angle and a dot shape, and the result previews live like every other adjustment.

Sharpen

Filter ▸ Sharpen is an unsharp mask: it subtracts a blurred copy of the layer from itself, so edges gain local contrast without the whole picture lifting. Amount sets the strength, Radius the size of the local neighborhood, Lightness only sharpens brightness edges without color rims, and Threshold skips changes below a level so flat areas stay untouched. The same controls drive the live Sharpen adjustment layer.

Lens Blur

Filter ▸ Lens Blur blurs through a real aperture shape, so highlights bloom into bright discs instead of smearing into grey. Use it for depth-of-field looks; Gaussian Blur remains the neutral softening blur.

Motion Blur

Filter ▸ Motion Blur smears along a chosen angle and distance, for speed lines, movement and streaked light.

Median

Filter ▸ Median replaces each pixel with the median of its neighbourhood, or with a chosen percentile, which removes speckle and scan noise while keeping edges crisp. It is the usual cleanup for a scanned page before Threshold.

Emboss

Filter ▸ Emboss turns the layer into a relief lit from a chosen angle, for stamped and carved textures.

Edge Detect

Filter ▸ Edge Detect keeps only the edges of the layer, which pulls line work out of a painting or a photo.

Color to Alpha

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Color to Alpha turns a chosen colour transparent, GIMP style: pixels near that colour become see-through in proportion to how close they are, so a white paper background lifts off a scanned drawing while the ink stays solid and the anti-aliased edges keep their partial coverage.

Rotate Canvas

Image ▸ Rotate Canvas turns or mirrors the whole document, every layer, mask and selection with it, without resampling: Rotate 90 Clockwise, Rotate 90 Counterclockwise, Rotate 180, Flip Horizontal and Flip Vertical. The 90 degree turns are disabled in a Book, because they would swap the page dimensions. View ▸ Mirror only mirrors the view; this changes the pixels.

New in 0.9.0

• More filters. Lens Blur, Motion Blur, Median, Emboss and Edge Detect join Gaussian Blur and Sharpen under Filter, and Color to Alpha joins the adjustments.
• Rotate Canvas. Image ▸ Rotate Canvas turns or flips the whole document without resampling.
• Levels and Curves. Levels gains an Auto button, and the Curves histogram follows the channel you are editing.
• Nearest at 200 percent. The display switches to nearest sampling at 2x zoom and above, so hard pixel edges stay hard while you judge a filter.
• Halftone. A Halftone filter under Image ▸ Adjustments renders print-style dot shading.
• Threshold is called Threshold. The filter previously named Binarize now uses the name every other painting app uses, including everywhere Help refers to it.
• Levels opens on every document. The Levels editor could sit on "computing histogram..." forever on some documents.

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 fills and strokes, then keep editing the points, the colours and the line weight forever without losing quality. It is a workspace of its own, built the way Illustrator is built: its own File, Edit, Layer, Object, Path, Type, Select, View, Window and Help menus, a tool strip in Illustrator's order with section captions, a Properties panel that follows what you select, and the standard keys. This page covers entering Vector mode and every tool on the Vector strip.

For editing what you have drawn (appearance, anchors, transforms, booleans, groups, symbols, text, artboards, guides, export) see Vector Editing and Output. For how vector layers sit in the document, see Layers. For tracing a picture into vector art, see Vectorize Layer. Vector mode is a Limner Plus feature, free with a beta key on the desktop and unlocked on iPad during the beta.

Entering Vector mode

The workspace switcher sits at the right end of the menu bar: click Vector, or press Ctrl+Shift+M to cycle the workspaces. The Home screen's Vector quick start (2048 × 2048 px) and File ▸ New Vector Document... start a Vector document directly; New Document offers the same page presets in px, pt or mm.

Switching an Illustration document into Vector mode asks what you mean: Switch this document re-lenses the same document (your raster layers stay exactly as they are), New Vector document starts a fresh Vector document and leaves this one untouched, and Cancel stays put. Tick "Don't ask again when switching workspace mode" to make it immediate. Workspace is set per document.

What changes when you switch

• The menu bar. Image and Filter give way to Object, Path and Type, a Layer menu joins the bar after Edit, and the other menus gain their Vector items. Every command keeps the same name, shortcut and availability wherever you reach it: a menu, the command palette (Ctrl+K), a right-click on the canvas, or the shortcut editor. See Menus Reference.
• The tool strip swaps to the Vector strip below, with Select, Shapes, Draw, Modify, Type, View and Color captions (View ▸ Show ▸ Tool Strip Captions) and a Fill-over-Stroke stack at its foot.
• The panels swap to the Vector set: the Properties hub, and Stroke, Appearance, Align, Typography, Symbols, Pathfinder, All Vector Tools, Artboards and Export Sets, Advanced Authoring, Object Layers, Swatches and Gradient, plus the shared Layers, Color and Reference panels. Window ▸ Vector Workspaces offers three presets: Vector Essentials, Node Editing and Lettering.
• The page. A new Vector document has no Paper layer; its page colour is a property of the document, set in the Properties panel's Document section (presets, None for a transparent page, or the full picker). Illustration documents that switch keep their Paper layer.

What does not change: switching never converts your layer stack. Raster layers stay raster, graphic layers stay vector, and the layer keys and hotkeys of the raster workspace give way to the Vector letter keys below.

The Vector tool strip

The strip follows Illustrator's order in seven captioned sections. A slot with more than one tool shows a small corner triangle: the first click selects the tool shown, a second click (or a double-click) opens the flyout. Window ▸ Customize Vector Toolbar (the All Vector Tools panel) regroups the strip. Every tool's options bar carries the Fill and Stroke swatches and the stroke width (W, 0 to 4096 px) beside the tool's own controls, and the status bar names the modifiers of the tool in hand.

Tool letter keys

In Vector mode a bare letter picks a tool, Illustrator style, and the standard chords are bound: Ctrl+Y for the outline view (Soft Proof keeps Ctrl+Y outside Vector mode), Ctrl+R for the rulers, Ctrl+U for Smart Guides, Ctrl+[ and Ctrl+] to arrange, Ctrl+2 and Ctrl+3 to lock and hide, Ctrl+7 to clip, Ctrl+8 for a compound path, Ctrl+J to join paths, Ctrl+Shift+O to outline text, and X, Shift+X, D and / on the fill and stroke (target, swap, defaults, remove). Polygon, Star, Spiral and Join have no letter; pick them from the strip. Holding Ctrl or Alt suppresses the letter keys so those chords stay free. All of these are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Modifier keys

The Illustrator modifiers apply throughout: Shift constrains a dragged shape to a square, a circle or a 45 degree line, Alt draws from the centre, Alt-dragging a selection makes a duplicate, the arrow keys nudge the selection or the selected anchors by 1 px (Shift for 10 px), and Up and Down change a polygon's sides, a star's points or a spiral's turns mid-drag.

The Fill and Stroke stack

At the foot of the strip, two overlapping swatches show the fill (front) and the stroke (behind) that new shapes will take, or the selected object's. Click one to target it, so the Color, Swatches and Gradient panels and a click on a swatch apply to it; X targets the other, Shift+X swaps the two paints, D restores the defaults (white fill, black 1 px stroke) and / removes the targeted paint. The pair mirrors the Color panel's Fill / Stroke target.

Where the vector tools draw

The vector tools accept canvas input only on a vector (graphic) layer.

• The creation tools (Pen, Pencil, and the live shapes) are forgiving: if the active layer is not a vector layer, committing your first object creates a new vector layer automatically, so the shape always has a home.
• The editing tools (Selection, Direct Select, Scissors, Join, Gradient) act on path objects that already live on the active vector layer. If the active layer has no vector content, they have nothing to grab and do nothing.
• The filled-shape tools (Knife, Pathfinder, Shape Builder, Eraser) reshape existing filled objects on the active vector layer. Knife and the Eraser reshape filled shapes and also cut open, stroke-only paths; Shape Builder needs filled paths, so outline a stroke-only path first.

A locked active layer blocks all of these.

The raster tools (the Brush, the Eraser, filters, Free Transform and the rest of the Illustration tools) do not paint on a vector layer: its pixels are drawn from its objects, so the next redraw would wipe the change, and the status bar says so, for example "Painting is not available on a vector layer". To paint on the artwork as pixels, choose Layer ▸ Rasterize ▸ Rasterize Layer: the layer keeps exactly what it shows and becomes a raster layer, and Undo brings the objects back. The next shape you draw then goes on a new vector layer. See Painting on a fill or adjustment layer.

While a Vector tool is in hand the canvas shows what it is doing: a small badge follows the pointer with the size of a shape being dragged or the angle of a rotation, chips mark snapped anchors, guides and edges, and the status bar reads the modifiers (Shift to constrain, Alt from the centre, and so on).

Selection (the black arrow)

Letter key V. The Selection tool picks, moves, scales and rotates whole objects, and it is the default tool in a new Vector document.

• Click an object to select it. Shift-click adds more; Alt-drag duplicates.
• Drag empty canvas to marquee-select every object the box touches, as in Illustrator.
• Drag inside the bounding box to move the selection; drag a corner or edge handle to scale (Shift keeps the proportions, Alt scales about the centre); drag the rotation handle above the box to rotate (Shift snaps to 15 degrees).
• Double-click a group to enter it (group isolation) and edit its members; double-click empty canvas or use Object ▸ Exit Isolation to leave.

The options bar shows the selection's width and height, a Transform menu (numeric transform, reflect), an Align menu and Group. The Properties panel follows the selection with Shape, Transform, Appearance, Align and Quick Actions sections. See Vector Editing and Output.

Object Lasso

Letter key Q, in the Selection slot. Draw a loop and every object inside it is selected, which is the quick way to grab an irregular cluster that a marquee would have to include neighbours to reach. Shift adds to the selection.

Direct Select (the white arrow)

Letter key A. Direct Select edits the inside of a path: individual anchors and their tangent handles.

• Drag an anchor to move that point (both of its handles move with it). Drag a handle tip to reshape the curve into and out of the anchor.
• Drag the live-corner widget on a corner to round it; the Corners section sets the style (Round, Chamfer or Inverted) and the radius.
• Marquee-drag to select several anchors. With two or more selected, a transform box with corner, edge and rotate handles frames them: drag a handle to scale the anchors (Shift keeps proportions, Alt scales about the centre) or rotate them (Shift snaps to 45 degrees), one undo step.
• The options bar counts the selected anchors and offers the Nodes menu: Corner, Smooth, Symmetric or Auto anchors, Break at anchors, Join endpoints and Join paths. The Properties panel's Anchor section adds Align X / Y and Space X / Y for the selected anchors.

On iPad the anchor and handle hit zones are larger than on the desktop, and a finger can drag anchors even with Finger painting off. Tangent handles appear only when they are long enough to grab on screen (about 6 screen pixels); zoom in to edit very short ones. The full anchor workflow is in Vector Editing and Output.

Pen

Letter key P. The Pen draws and edits cubic Bezier paths.

• Click to drop a corner anchor (a sharp point). Click and drag to drop a smooth anchor with mirrored tangent handles, so the path curves through it.
• Hold Alt while dragging to break handle symmetry (drag one side independently). Hold Shift to constrain to 15 degree steps, or, with Smart Guides on, to lock to a level or plumb alignment with an existing anchor.
• Close the path by clicking the first anchor; the closing click can itself be a drag to curve the final segment. A rubber-band curve previews the next segment as you move.
• Click an existing anchor of the path being drawn to remove it, or a segment to add one: adding, deleting and converting anchors are Pen behaviours, not separate tools.

The options bar offers Finish, Close path and Cancel path while a draft is open. The draft commits when you close it, press Enter, or switch tool or workspace; Esc discards it. An open path takes a stroke only; a closed path takes the default fill plus the stroke. New anchors snap to whatever View ▸ Snap To ▸ Snap To allows (anchors, guides, grid, object edges).

Curvature

Key Shift+`, in the Pen slot. The Curvature tool places smooth points and bends the path through them, Illustrator style: click to add a point and the curve re-fits through every point you have placed, so a wavy line takes a few clicks and no handle dragging. Double-click a point to make it a corner. Finish, Close path and Cancel path sit on the options bar as for the Pen.

Pencil

Letter key N. The Pencil draws a freehand line that is fitted to a smooth, editable Bezier path on release. Draw over a span of a selected path and the Pencil redraws that span instead of starting a new path.

Vector Brush

Letter key B, in the Pencil slot. The Vector Brush draws like the Pencil but paints a filled shape the width of the stroke, so a calligraphic mark stays one editable object with its own fill. It shares the Pencil's Fidelity and options popup. (B in the raster workspaces is the Brush tool; the two never conflict because the letter keys are per workspace.)

Live shapes

The shape tools drag out parametric "live" shapes: the object remembers its parameters (sides, radius, corner rounding, arc angles) so you can keep adjusting them after drawing, in the Properties panel's Shape section. Click instead of dragging to type a size. Shift constrains the proportions and Alt draws from the centre. Every live shape has corner styles, and any of them becomes a plain path with Object ▸ Convert to Path.

Rectangle

Letter key M. Drag out a rectangle. Round its corners with the live-corner widget, the Corner radius slider, or the Corners section, which also offers Chamfer and Inverted styles per corner.

Ellipse

Letter key L. Drag out an ellipse. With it selected, the Shape section has a Mode row: Whole (the default), or Arc, Chord and Slice, which turn the ellipse into a part of itself with Start and End angles (degrees, clockwise from the right); a pie widget on the canvas drags the same angles. An Arc is an open curve, a Chord joins its ends with a straight line, and a Slice joins them through the centre. The part remembers its centre, so editing it never drifts.

Line

Letter key \ (backslash). Drag out a straight line, drawn with a stroke and no fill. Shift snaps the angle to 15 degree steps.

Polygon

No letter key. Drag out a regular polygon; Up and Down during the drag add or remove sides.

Star

No letter key. Drag out a star.

Spiral

No letter key. Drag out a spiral: an open path that winds from its inner radius out to the edge of the drag, eight smooth anchors per turn. Up and Down during the drag add or remove half a turn. A spiral has no fill until you give it one.

Eraser (Vector Eraser)

Letter key E. The Vector Eraser subtracts a round band from the filled shapes it crosses, leaving editable vector results. A ring at the cursor previews the band; on release, every filled shape the band crossed is replaced by its remainder, or removed if fully erased. Filled shapes lose the band from their fill; an open, stroke-only path is cut into separate pieces where the band crosses it, and a closed stroke-only loop opens with a gap. With objects selected only they are erased (a selected group is recursed into its editable member paths); with nothing selected, every unlocked filled shape the band crosses is.