Limner User Manual v0.8.3

Getting Started

Welcome to Limner, a Windows-native raster and vector painting app. This page walks you from the installer to your first finished PNG: installing and updating, creating and opening documents, saving your work, and a quick five-minute drawing exercise.

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

Limner ships as a signed Windows installer. Download it from the releases page, then run it. The installed program is Limner.exe.

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

The app starts blank, with no canvas open. What happens next 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.
• Open your last project. If there is no recovery to do but you have a recent file, Limner shows a "Welcome back" prompt offering to reopen your most recent project. Choose Open to reopen it, or Start blank to begin with an empty app.
• Nothing pending. With neither of the above, the app simply waits for you to choose File ▸ New or File ▸ Open.

Double-clicking a .limner file in Windows Explorer launches Limner and opens that document directly.

Keeping Limner up to date

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. No identifiers are sent, and you can turn the whole feature off.

Check for updates

• Manual check. Help ▸ Check for updates... checks immediately and tells you whether you are up to date or shows an available update.
• Automatic daily check. Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Check for updates automatically is a checkbox (hover text: "Once a day on launch. No data is sent beyond the version check."). When it is on, Limner checks at most once every 24 hours on launch.
• Version readout. Help ▸ "Limner {version}" 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 Authenticode signature (the signer must match the verified publisher), and then offers Install now. Installing closes Limner so the installer can replace the running program, then reopens it.
• Skip this version to silence the automatic check for that release (a manual check still surfaces it).
• Later to dismiss the prompt for now.

The auto-updater is Windows-only. For the full update workflow, see Updating.

Creating a document

Choose File ▸ New... to open the New Project dialog.

New Project dialog

Below the fields, the dialog shows the resolved size as "Canvas: W x H px".

Size and resolution limits. The final pixel dimensions are clamped to a minimum of 16 px and a maximum of 8192 px per side, and forced to an even number (H.264 timelapse requires even width and height, and even dimensions tile cleanly). DPI is forced to at least 1.

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. 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.
• File ▸ Import PSD... imports a Photoshop .psd file as a new document, with each PSD layer becoming a Limner layer. The import canvas limit is 8192 x 8192 px.
• File ▸ Import Image as Layer... brings a PNG, JPG, or JPEG into the current document as a new layer, centered at its native scale. This item is enabled only when a document is open.

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. Note the drag-and-drop image list is wider than the File ▸ Import Image dialog filter, which accepts PNG, JPG, and JPEG only.

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").

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

<a id="crash-recovery-autosave"></a>

Autosave and crash recovery

While you work, Limner periodically writes a background backup of each modified document (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, 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 x 2048 px, 96 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 current color also shows as a "#RRGGBB" swatch at the right end of the status bar. 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 ▸ 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. In the File menu, under the Export section, choose PNG... (default shortcut: Ctrl+E), pick a location, and save. 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. From here, explore The Interface to learn the workspace zones, dig into the tools, or read up on File Formats.

Limner Plus

Limner has a free core for everyday raster art, and a Plus tier that adds the vector, animation, comic, and pro-production tools. During the open beta, Plus is free: request a key, paste it in, and everything unlocks. Plus will become a paid upgrade once the beta ends.

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

Free and Plus

Everything in the core painting studio is free, and the core stays free. Plus unlocks 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, Blur, and the rest.
• Opening and saving .limner, and importing and exporting PNG, JPEG, and PSD.
• The auto-updater, autosave and crash recovery, rulers, symmetry, and the rest of the core workspace.

Limner Plus adds:

• Vector design workspace and editable vector layers, plus SVG export.
• Brush Studio: build your own brushes, with .abr import and export.
• Animation studio: the cel timeline, a keyframed 2D camera, layer motion and opacity keyframes, composited onion skin, and GIF, MP4, and PNG export (with GIF and image-sequence import).
• Comic and manga studio (Book projects).
• Advanced timelapse: batch, social presets, and end cards.
• Pro export: batch, multi-resolution, and watermarking.
• Every future Limner Plus feature.

On Limner Free, the Plus tools are simply hidden until you unlock them. The Vector, Animation, and Book workspace tabs stay visible with a ✦ mark; choosing one opens the unlock window instead of switching workspaces.

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.

Plus is free while Limner is in beta. It will become a paid upgrade after the beta.

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.

Activation happens online and ties the key to the computer you activate on (one device per beta key). As soon as it succeeds, the Plus tools appear, and the status line at the bottom of the Help menu changes from "Limner Free" to "Limner Plus".

Staying activated and privacy

Limner re-checks your key quietly on its once-a-day update check, so you do not have to do anything to stay activated. Plus keeps working offline for a grace period of about three weeks before it needs to reconnect.

A beta key is tied to one computer. If you need to move to a new machine, contact limnersupport@limnerart.com.

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

If a feature is locked

A workspace tab or menu item marked with ✦, or a panel that reads "... is a Limner Plus feature", is part of Plus. Click Get Limner Plus on that panel, or open Help ▸ Enter Limner Plus key..., to unlock it with a key. If you do not have one yet, request a free beta key from the website.

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.

The Interface

Limner keeps every painting control inside one window, arranged so the canvas stays front and centre and the tools sit close to your hand. This page walks through each zone of the window from top to bottom, then covers the things you will touch most: the tool strip, the status bar, the document tabs, and how to rearrange the panels into a workspace that suits you.

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.

New in 0.8.3

This release files the interface the way Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint do, and adds a round of desktop comforts:

• Menus, refiled the standard way. Colour and tone adjustments now live under Image ▸ Adjustments, selection edits and Free Transform under Edit, Expand / Contract / Border / Feather under Select ▸ Modify, and app settings under Edit ▸ Preferences. Every action itself is unchanged. See Menus Reference.
• Brush families. Pen, Pencil, and Airbrush sit on the tool strip as their own keys beside Brush; each drives the full brush engine and remembers the last brush you picked in it, across restarts.
• Tool groups select first. Clicking a grouped tool key selects the tool shown on it; a second click (or a double-click) opens the flyout.
• Borderless fullscreen. F11 (or View ▸ Fullscreen) gives the canvas the whole screen; F11 again brings the window back.
• Fit and 100% zoom. Two view buttons snap the canvas to fit-the-window or to true pixel-for-pixel, and Ctrl+1 jumps to 100% from the keyboard.
• Pick your status readout. The status bar’s info slot can show canvas dimensions, the active layer’s name, or nothing; the choice is remembered.
• Layers panel upgrades. The active layer’s lock / transparency lock / clip / reference toggles live in the always-visible strip at the top of the panel, and a mask button on the action bar adds or manages layer masks. See Layers.

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.

Workspace mode switcher

The thin strip above the menu bar is the workspace switcher. It shows a weak "Workspace" label followed by one button per mode. The active mode is highlighted; clicking a different one switches the current document into it.

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 toggles Illustration and Vector only. Animation is

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.

Books

A Book is a multi-page comic or manga project. It is not a fourth workspace: the switcher still offers only Illustration, Vector, and Animation. A Book is a separate axis that wraps a sequence of pages, and each page is its own document that you still paint in one of the three modes.

A Book lives in the File menu rather than the workspace switcher:

• 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, left to right: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, Help. A "Limner" wordmark with a palette icon sits at the right end. Every command and its shortcut is documented in Menus.

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.

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 Brush Settings button that opens the deeper Brush 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 pixels.

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.

• Tap a single-tool key to select that tool.
• Tap a grouped key to select the tool shown on it; tap again (or double-click) to open the flyout and pick another member.
• Each flyout row also has a small "out" button whose hover reads "Move this tool

to its own slot", which pops that tool out onto its own key.

In Illustration mode the strip starts with these ten groups (flyout order shown):

In Vector mode the strip is a fixed set built for path work: Selection, Direct Select, Pen, Pencil, a Shapes group (Rectangle, Ellipse, Line, Polygon, Star), Gradient, and a Scissors / Join group. The Vector strip is not customizable.

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

Rearranging the strip (Illustration)

In Illustration mode you can reorder and regroup the keys:

1. Long-press a tool key (hold for about half a second).
2. A drag arms, and a ghost of the tool follows the pointer.
3. Drop it onto another tool to group the two together, or drop it into the empty

strip area to give it its own key. An insertion line or a ring shows where the drop will land.

To undo your changes, choose Window ▸ Reset tool strip layout, which restores the default tool order.

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 ▸ Brush-size cursor and the centre crosshair with View ▸ 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:

At the right end of the bar:

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. The left area stays hidden until you put a panel in it. 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: click the X on a tab to close it. 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:

• 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

reopens every closed panel and re-docks every floating window.

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 the View menu:

• 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 ▸ View for the full list of theme controls, and Preferences and Shortcuts for how the choice is remembered between sessions.

Menus Reference

This page lists every item in Limner's nine menus: File, Edit, Image, Layer, Select, Filter, View, Window, and Help. For each item you get the exact on-screen label, what it does, the named shortcut where one exists, and when the item is greyed out (disabled).

A few things worth knowing up front:

• The menus appear left to right along the top menu bar, with the "Limner" wordmark pinned to the far right.
• Menu items do not carry their own visible accelerator keys. The shortcuts named below are the real global key handlers. The named commands (the ones that appear in the Keyboard Shortcuts dialog) are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts; see Preferences and Shortcuts for the full list. A few behaviours 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 cannot be reassigned.
• 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.
• "Active layer" means the layer currently selected in the Layers panel. "Selection" means an active marquee made with a selection tool (see Selections).

File

Create, open, import, save, and export documents.

Open Recent

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

Export

The Export section sits below a separator under a weak "Export" heading. See File formats for what each exporter writes.

Edit

Undo and redo, the clipboard, selection edits, Free Transform, and the Preferences submenu.

Preferences

Edit ▸ Preferences gathers the app settings that used to sit in Edit, View, and Help. Each entry keeps its original behavior. See Preferences and Shortcuts for details.

Image

Pixel adjustments and document-wide canvas operations.

Adjustments

Image ▸ Adjustments holds the colour and tone dialogs (they lived in the Filter menu before 0.8.3). Each one acts on the active layer’s pixels, clipped to the selection if one is active, and every item is disabled when no document is open. See Filters and Adjustments for the controls inside each dialog.

View

Display and canvas-view settings, fullscreen, zoom, and view rotation. The View menu stays open while you click items, so you can toggle several at once. Theming moved to Edit ▸ Preferences in 0.8.3.

Display toggles

Flip the view

A separator divides the display toggles from the flip controls. Both flips are non-destructive: they mirror only the view, the artwork is unchanged.

Fullscreen

Fullscreen (F11) switches the window to borderless fullscreen so the canvas gets the whole screen; press F11 (or click the item) again to come back. The shortcut is rebindable like any other.

Zoom

A separator precedes a weak "Zoom" label and a row of buttons, followed by a live zoom readout.

Rotate view

A Rotate view row turns the view in 15 degree steps: Left, Right, and a Reset that returns to upright. Rotation is non-destructive (the artwork is unchanged) and can also be set from the status bar. See Interface.

The theme controls (Light / Dark, Customize Theme, Reset Theme) moved to Edit ▸ Preferences in 0.8.3; see Preferences and Shortcuts.

Window

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

The menu opens with a weak "Panels" heading. Its hover explains: a checked panel is open (docked or floating); drag a panel's tab to rearrange it, drag it out of the dock to float it, drop it on a window edge to dock it there, or close it with its X and reopen it here.

Panels

There is one checkbox per panel available in the current workspace mode, labelled with the panel's icon and name. Toggling a checkbox opens or closes that panel. The list changes with the active mode: Illustration and Animation show the raster panels, Vector shows the vector panels.

Illustration-mode panels:

Animation mode shows the same panel list as Illustration (the raster panels above). The full-width Animation Timeline is a fixed bottom panel in that mode, not a Window-menu checkbox. By default Animation docks Layers and Color on the right and the Brush picker and Brush Settings on the left, with the rest reachable from this menu.

Vector-mode panels:

Workspace

A separator divides the panel checkboxes from the layout resets.

Help

The update check, version, and the built-in shortcut reference. The automatic-update checkbox lives in Edit ▸ Preferences since 0.8.3.

Built-in shortcuts shown in Help

The Help menu shows this reference verbatim. The full, editable list is in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts (see Preferences and Shortcuts).

Note: this reference block is shown verbatim from the app. Plain B selects the Brush tool and Shift+B cycles the blend mode. For the full, rebindable defaults see Preferences and Shortcuts.

The Help block also notes these view and tool behaviours:

• View: Space-drag pans, Space+Ctrl-drag zooms, the wheel zooms.
• Selection: Shift adds, Alt or Ctrl subtracts.
• The fill bucket fills the active layer, or every selected layer.
• Filter menu: HSL / Levels / Curves / Gaussian Blur (active layer, or selection).

Other chords named in menu hovers: Ctrl+J (Duplicate Layer), Ctrl+Shift+V (Paste onto active layer), Ctrl+V (Paste as new layer), and Ctrl+U (Smart Guides, Vector mode).

See also

• 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.
• File formats for what each import and export item reads and writes.
• Interface for the menu bar's place in the overall layout.

Tools Reference

Limner's tools live on the left tool strip. Click a tool to select it, or press its keyboard shortcut. Many tools share a group with a flyout (a small popup): the first click selects the tool shown on the key, a second click (or a double-click) opens the flyout. Since 0.8.3, 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.

The contextual options bar at the top of the window changes to match the active tool. Each tool page below lists its options with exact ranges and defaults.

Painting and erasing

Fills and shapes

Move, transform, and warp

Sampling and selecting

Construction aids

The ruler, symmetry, and perspective tools snap your strokes. They are documented together on Construction Aids: Linear Ruler, Parallel Ruler, Radial Ruler, Concentric Ruler, Symmetry, and Perspective.

Vector tools

The vector tools appear on the tool strip in Vector mode. See Vector Mode and Tools: Selection (Object), Direct Select, Pen, Pencil, the live shapes (Rectangle, Ellipse, Line, Polygon, Star), Scissors, Join, Gradient, and the line-edit tools.

Brush Tool

The Brush is Limner's main painting tool. It lays down colour with the active brush, dab by dab, along the path you draw. Strokes are stamped on a background worker thread, so the canvas stays responsive even with a large brush on a big document: you draw, the worker stamps, and the live preview appears as it catches up.

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 Brush 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 0.85, flow 0.9, stabilizer 0.3.)

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 Brush Settings panel. The bar keeps only the controls you reach for constantly.

Blend modes

The Blend control offers the full set of modes, 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. The blend mode is applied once when the stroke commits. It is hidden for smudge and blur 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 or blur flag, including the wet-mixing oils in the Painting folder) keeps the Brush tool selected but smears (smudge) or softens (blur) instead of depositing colour. The Erase toggle wins over this rerouting: with Erase on, any brush erases, Blend brushes included. See Smudge and Blur 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).

See also

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

Eraser Tool

The Eraser clears pixels back to transparency. It shares the same stroke engine as the Brush, so it feels identical to paint: same size ring, same pressure response, same stabilizer. The only difference is that instead of laying down colour, it removes it.

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.

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.

Smudge and Blur Tools

The Smudge and Blur tools are Limner's two "blend" tools. They do not lay down new paint from your colour swatch. Instead they rework the colour that is already on the canvas: Smudge drags it along your stroke, and Blur softens it. Both are great for finishing work, like pulling highlights into shadow, melting hard edges, or adding depth-of-field haze.

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

Where to find them

These tools ship in two places, and they behave identically either way:

• 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.

• As the dedicated Smudge and Blur tools. (In v0.6.7 the tool-options bar

shows only a header for them, because the controls now live in the Blend-folder brushes. 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 Brush Settings panel or pick a different Blend-folder brush.

Keyboard shortcuts

Neither Smudge nor Blur has a default keyboard shortcut. Both appear 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

• Both tools work on normal raster layers and layer masks.
• Both are 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.

• Both respect 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 or blurred.

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 feeds itself, so colour keeps travelling along the whole stroke

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.

Blur

Blur softens the active layer. At the moment you press down, Limner takes a snapshot of the layer's own pixels, box-blurs it once (colour and coverage together), and then each dab paints that softened colour onto the layer under a round tip. Building up overlapping dabs deepens the softening. Because only the layer's own pixels are sampled, blurring never pulls in colour from the layers below or the white paper: edges soften into real transparency instead of being haloed with the backdrop.

How it behaves:

• Flow sets the strength of the softening per dab. Higher Flow blends the

blurred colour in more heavily.

• The blur amount scales with brush size by default, so a large soft brush

softens more than a tiny one. See the radius rule below.

• Like Smudge, Blur respects selection, symmetry, and the perspective ruler.

Blur radius

The blur radius (how far each pixel spreads) is decided once at pen-down:

• If the brush has an explicit blur radius set (greater than 0), that value is

rounded and clamped to the range 1 to 24.

• Otherwise Limner uses the automatic rule: brush Size divided by 6, rounded,

then clamped to the range 1 to 24.

So with the default Blur brush Size of 40.0 the automatic radius works out to 7 (40 divided by 6 is about 6.67, rounded to 7), and no brush can blur with a radius wider than 24 pixels in a single pass. Stack strokes to soften further.

Blur options

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

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.

• Blur reads the canvas only at pen-down, so to soften an area you have just

edited, lift the pen and start a fresh stroke.

• To soften past the 24-pixel radius cap, run several Blur strokes over the same

area instead of reaching for one huge brush.

• Both tools commit on pen-up and add one stroke to the Session Stats count. See

the Stats panel.

Related pages

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

both tools rail toward.

Fill Bucket Tool

The Fill Bucket floods a region of the canvas with the active color in one click. Click inside an area and Limner finds the connected patch of similar color around the point and pours paint into it, stopping at edges where the color changes (your line art, for example). It is the fastest way to lay down flats under inked drawings or to block in solid shapes.

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 To darkest is the standard flatting combination: it pushes the flat color under anti-aliased ink so there is no gap, without spilling into open areas.
• 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.

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.

Gradient Tool

The Gradient tool fills an area with a smooth blend between two or more colors. Pick a gradient, then drag across the canvas: the start of your drag is the beginning of the ramp and the end of your drag is the end of it. The drag direction and length set the angle and the spread.

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 window. 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. 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, Ellipse, and Line Tools

Limner has three raster shape tools for drawing clean geometry by dragging on the canvas: Rectangle, Ellipse, and Line. They all draw onto the active layer and fold into the same undo history as a brush stroke, so anything they place can be undone or re-edited.

• 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.

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 tool ships without a default key. All three 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 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. 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."

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 still drops into the same endpoint re-edit; on a vector layer the committed line 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.

Text Tool

Click anywhere on the canvas to place editable text. Limner keeps the text re-editable on its own text layer: change the words, font, size, colour, or position any time, then flatten to plain pixels only when you are ready. Default shortcut: T (rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts).

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. 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 floating Text panel opens.
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. 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.

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 panel

The Text panel is a movable, non-dimming window titled Text (default width 320 px, resizable). 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.

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 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 is Windows-first: it scans your Windows Fonts directory for every installed family. The rasterizer itself is portable, but font discovery targets Windows today.

See also

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

Transform and Layer Move

Transform and Layer Move both lift pixels off your layers into a single free transform, where you can move, scale, rotate, and flip them on the canvas before committing. The two tools differ only in what they pick up: Transform works on the current selection, while Layer Move grabs the whole active layer.

Transform

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

Transform needs an active selection. If nothing is selected, or a transform is already running, the tool does nothing. 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 and any vector layers.
• 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.
• 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.

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 resets the transform to identity, re-composites the originals in place, and discards the change 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.

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. This runs the same Transform action as the Ctrl+T shortcut, so it requires an active selection in the same way.

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.

Mesh Warp Tool

The Mesh Warp tool lifts the active layer onto a small grid of draggable control points so you can bend, stretch, and reshape the artwork by hand. Grab a point, pull it, and the pixels follow with a live preview. When the shape looks right, confirm it. If not, reset the grid or cancel and nothing changes.

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 and Mesh Warp share the same lift-and-commit workflow.

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 5x5 grid of control points appears over the lifted pixels.
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 simply does not start (nothing happens on screen).

The 5x5 grid

The mesh is a fixed 5x5 lattice of control points (25 points total, 4 cells across by 4 cells down). 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 itself is 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

Mesh Warp has no adjustable options. The tool options bar shows a one-line reminder:

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 in Liquefy shows Confirm and Cancel only.

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 / Liquefy 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 shortcut.
• The base paper layer (the bottom layer) cannot be warped. Pick a layer above it; on the paper layer the tool simply does nothing.
• A locked layer cannot be warped. Unlock it 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.)

See also

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

Liquefy Tool

The Liquefy tool lets you push, pinch, bloat, and twirl the pixels of the active layer with a brush, as if the artwork were wet paint. It is perfect for nudging a silhouette, fixing a wobbly line, tweaking a facial feature, or adding a bit of organic flow. Nothing is permanent until you confirm, so you can experiment freely.

Liquefy is a close relative of the Mesh Warp tool. Both lift the layer onto an invisible control lattice and deform it, then bake the result back when you confirm. The difference: Mesh Warp gives you a coarse 5x5 grid of draggable points, while Liquefy hides the grid entirely and lets you sculpt it with a falloff brush.

When to reach for it

• Reshape an outline or a blob of colour by dragging.
• Slim, widen, or swell a region with Pinch and Bloat.
• 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. Limner immediately lifts the active layer's content onto a fine, invisible warp lattice and shows the floating warp toolbar. (If there is no selection, the whole layer is lifted; if a selection is active, only the selected pixels are lifted.)
2. Pick a Mode in the tool-options bar (Push, Pinch, Bloat, or Twirl).
3. Drag on the canvas. Each stroke displaces the lattice under your brush, and the layer reshapes live. A smooth falloff fades the effect to nothing at the brush edge, so the deformation blends naturally.
4. When you like the result, click Confirm on the floating toolbar. To throw the change away, click Cancel.

Liquefy works on raster layers only. On a vector layer it does nothing and shows a notice, because a vector layer's pixels are regenerated on the next render and would wipe out the warp. It also will not act on the bottom paper layer or on a locked layer.

The four modes

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

Pen pressure modulates the effect: a lighter touch warps less, a firmer touch warps more.

Options bar

A caption under the sliders reminds you: "Alt reverses Twirl · Confirm / Cancel from the toolbar".

Notes on the ranges:

• The Size slider runs 8 to 512, but Limner accepts sizes up to 1024 (for example through a rebound shortcut or a settings file); the value is clamped to that wider 8 to 1024 band internally.
• Strength is held to the 0.0 to 1.0 range.

Finishing a Liquefy session

The floating warp toolbar that appears while you are liquefying carries:

• Confirm: bakes the deformed pixels back onto the layer as a single undo step.
• Cancel: discards every change and restores the original pixels.

There is no Reset button in Liquefy. (Reset is a Mesh Warp control, because it restores the visible lattice; Liquefy has no lattice to reset.)

If you switch to another tool, switch workspace mode, or run a layer command while a warp is in progress, Limner automatically confirms it for you (the deformation is baked in). To throw the warp away instead, click Cancel before you leave the tool. Closing the document without saving discards the document and any in-progress warp with it.

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 reverses the Twirl direction while you drag.

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.
• Combine a selection with Liquefy to protect the rest of the layer: make a selection first, then enter the tool, and only the selected pixels are lifted and warped.
• 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

Eyedropper Tool

The Eyedropper picks up a color from your canvas and makes it the active brush color. Click anywhere on the artwork and Limner reads the color you see at that point, then loads it ready to paint with. It is the fastest way to match an existing color exactly, whether you are continuing a stroke, building a palette, or sampling from a photo.

How it works

Select the Eyedropper, then click a pixel on the canvas. 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 always pick what your eye sees.

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.

Sampling is a single click action. There is no drag or marquee; one click sets the color and you are done.

Options

The Eyedropper has no adjustable settings. Its tool options bar shows only a reminder:

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, Layer Move, Mesh Warp, Liquefy, or the Eyedropper tool itself, because Alt already has another meaning for those (for example, Alt subtracts from a selection).

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 keeps the normal pointer. Unlike the Brush and Eraser, it does not hide the cursor, so you keep a visible aim point while you sample. A crosshair cursor appears only over reference images when you pick from the Reference board, to confirm you are in pick mode there.

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.

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.

Layers

Layers let you build an image in independent, stackable pieces: line art on top, flat colours below, a background at the bottom. Each layer keeps its own pixels, blend mode, opacity, visibility, and locks, so you can change one part without disturbing the rest. This page is both the concept guide and the reference for the Layers panel.

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.

New in 0.8.3

• Toggles in one strip. The active layer’s lock, transparency-lock, clip, and reference toggles moved from the active row into the always-visible strip at the top of the panel, wrapping to fit narrow docks. Layer rows keep quiet accent badges for anything engaged.
• Masks from the action bar. A mask button on the Layers action bar adds a reveal-all mask to the active layer, or opens a small menu to target, enable, apply, or delete the one it has.

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.

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 18 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.

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

Since 0.8.3 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. Locks and the clip flag are session state and are not saved in the file; the reference flag is saved.

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). The panel shows the mask as a small grayscale thumbnail next to the layer thumbnail.

All mask commands live in the Layer menu. 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 ▸ 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"

Groups (folders)

A folder collects a run of layers so you can move, hide, and blend them as a unit. Folders are single level (a folder cannot contain another folder), and a folder's members always stay together in the stack.

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.

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: use the folder-plus button in the action bar ("Group the selected layers into a folder"). Selected layers that are not already adjacent are first gathered together. The Paper layer is never included.
• Ungroup: use the folder-minus button ("Dissolve the active layer's folder"). It is only enabled when the active layer is in a folder. The layers stay in place, now ungrouped.

Layer folders have no default keyboard shortcut. Ctrl+G and Ctrl+Shift+G are bound to Vector-mode object grouping, which is different from layer folders.

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 18 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: Add layer, Duplicate, New vector layer, Group, Ungroup, then Merge down, Merge visible, then Delete. Buttons disable when they do not apply (for example Delete is off with only one layer, Merge down is off on the bottom layer, Merge visible needs at least two visible layers).

Each layer row, left to right: the eye toggle, the selection checkbox, the 26x26 thumbnail (over a checkerboard so transparency reads), the mask thumbnail (if a mask exists), a curve badge (if it is a vector layer), and the name.

Related pages

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

Selections

A selection limits where your edits land. Draw one with a marquee, lasso, polygon, or the Magic Wand, then paint, fill, transform, copy, or delete only inside it. With nothing selected, every tool acts on the whole canvas.

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). Only the Tolerance slider is shown on the wand's own options bar.

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 reads 0 to 100 pixels; the value is clamped to a maximum of 250 pixels internally. The tooltip reads "Soften the next selection's edge by this many pixels."

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 and paste move pixels through an in-app clipboard. 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.
• The Keyboard Shortcuts dialog still labels these "Copy (to new layer)" and "Cut (to new layer)". That wording is historical; the current commands do not make a layer.

Invert and Deselect

Both commands sit on the floating toolbar and in the Select menu (see Menus). Neither has a default keyboard shortcut, but both are bindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

• 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.

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.

Color

The Color panel is where you choose what you paint with. Pick a color on the HSV wheel, fine-tune it with channel sliders, type an exact hex value, build up palettes you reuse, and let harmony modes suggest colors that go together. This page is both the concept guide and the full reference for every control on the Color tab.

One brush color, plus a history

Limner keeps a single active brush color rather than a Photoshop-style foreground/background swatch pair. There is no swap key and no background swatch. Instead, every color you actually paint with is 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. Harmony selector
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. Color History
8. 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.
• CMYK here is a display and entry convenience only. It uses a simple conversion with no ICC color profile, so it is not a print-accurate proof.

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 "Colours 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 three icon buttons. When you have no palettes yet, the selector reads "No palettes yet" and only the new-palette button is shown.

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 reads "Click to sample colour from the composite." It samples the composite, meaning all visible layers blended together, not just 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, Layer Move, Mesh Warp, Liquefy, and the Eyedropper itself, where Alt already has another meaning (for example, Alt subtracts from a selection).

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 .limner and .artpaint files (format version 16 and later). Older version 15 files have no reference flag, so all layers load as normal.

Turning it on

In the Layers panel, the active layer's row has a crosshair button. It is tinted to the accent color when on and dimmed when off. Hover text: "Reference layer: Fill and Magic Wand read this layer's lines". Non-active rows show a static crosshair indicator (hover: "Reference layer (click the layer to manage)").

Related: the Fill "Reference all layers" option

The Fill tool has a separate "Reference all layers" checkbox (default off). 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

Brushes: Library and Picker

Every mark the Brush tool makes comes from a brush: a preset that bundles a tip shape, pressure dynamics, spacing, texture, and dozens of other settings. Limner ships a full library of brushes, lets you organise them into folders, build your own, and trade them with other apps as Photoshop .abr files.

This page is about choosing and managing brushes. For the meaning of each individual setting, see the Brush 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 or blur 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 or blur path.

The three brush tabs

Brushes live across three dock tabs:

The Brush 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 124 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.

• 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, Smudge, or Blur path is active also switches back to the Brush tool.

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 53 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, Blur, Perceptual Wet Mix, Palette Knife. These deposit no colour of their own; they smear or blur what is already on the canvas. Blur is the one blur brush; the rest are smudges with varying amounts of paint pickup and color stretch.

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 Brush 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, stabilizer) 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 Brush 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 .abr... 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 17.

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

Brush Settings Panel

The Brush Settings panel is Limner's deep per-brush editor. It is where every detail of the active brush lives: size and hardness, opacity and flow, the pressure and tilt response, taper, the stabilizer, multi-tip sets, grain and texture, scatter, the per-brush blend (Ink) mode, and wet color mixing. Edit anything here and the change applies to the active brush immediately.

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

Opening the panel

Brush Settings is one of the three brush dock tabs, labeled Brush Settings. 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, Smudge, or Blur tool is active, the header instead shows "Eraser", "Smudge", or "Blur" with no library verbs, because those tools carry their own parameter set. While the Create Brush wizard has a draft going, it shows "New brush (draft)".

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.

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).

Blur (Blur brushes)

When the brush type is Blur, a single Intensity slider appears in place of the color-mixing controls.

Color mixing and Blur Intensity never appear 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 plus its speed coupling 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.

See also

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

Filters and Adjustments

Limner's filters are non-destructive-feeling tonal and colour adjustments you preview live and then commit in one step. Every filter lives under the Filter menu and works the same way: open the dialog, watch the preview update on your canvas as you drag, then press Apply to keep the result or Cancel to throw it away.

This page covers all ten adjustments in menu order: Hue / Saturation / Lightness, Levels, Curves, Color Balance, Gradient Map, Gaussian Blur, Brightness / Contrast, Invert, Posterize, and Binarize.

See also: Menus for where these sit in the menu bar, and Layers for active layers, selections, and masks.

How filters work (read this first)

All ten filters share one dialog and one workflow, so once you know one you know them all.

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, Binarize, 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.
• Locked layers are skipped. Preview and commit do nothing on a locked layer.

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. The histogram is the layer's luma (transparent pixels are skipped). 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. Since 0.8.3 the colour and tone adjustments live under Image ▸ Adjustments while Gaussian Blur, Sharpen, and Repeat Last Filter stay in the Filter menu; both menus carry the reminder "Acts on the active layer (or the selection)."
• Filters have no default keyboard shortcuts. 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 / Lightness

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Hue / Saturation / Lightness

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), 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.
• 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.

Binarize

Image ▸ Adjustments ▸ Binarize

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. Binarize always changes the image, so it is never treated as a no-op.

Vector Mode and Tools

Vector mode is Limner's Illustrator-style workspace for drawing editable shapes. Instead of painting pixels, you build resolution-independent paths (cubic Bezier curves) with a fill and a stroke, then keep editing the points, the colors, and the line weight forever without losing quality. This page covers entering Vector mode and every tool in the Vector tool strip.

For editing existing paths in depth (anchors, handles, live corners, pathfinder booleans, transform, align), see Vector Editing. For how vector layers sit in the document, see Layers. For rulers, symmetry, and perspective aids that also work here, see Construction Aids.

Entering Vector mode

Vector mode is one of Limner's workspaces. The workspace switcher is the slim strip above the menu bar, labeled "Workspace", with one button per workspace.

• Click the Vector segment in the Workspace switcher to enter Vector mode.
• Or press Ctrl+Shift+M to switch workspaces.

The three workspaces are:

Workspace is set per document.

What changes when you switch

Switching to Vector mode reconfigures two things and leaves everything else alone:

• The tool strip swaps to the fixed Vector tool set (described below). The Vector strip is not customizable, unlike the Illustration strip.
• The panels swap to the Vector set: a Properties hub, Object Layers (the scene graph), Swatches, an object Gradient panel, plus the shared Layers and Color panels.

What does NOT change: switching workspaces never converts your layer stack. Your raster layers stay raster, your vector layers stay vector. Mode is just a different set of tools and panels over the same document.

The Vector tool strip

The Vector strip is fixed (not reorderable). Top to bottom:

1. Selection (the black arrow)
2. Direct Select (the white arrow)
3. Pen
4. Pencil
5. A shapes flyout: Rectangle, Ellipse, Line, Polygon, Star
6. Gradient
7. A path-edit flyout: Scissors, Join, Knife, Eraser (the Vector Eraser)
8. A combine flyout: Pathfinder and Shape Builder

A slot with more than one tool shows a small corner triangle. Click the slot to open a flyout, then pick a sub-tool from it.

Tool letter keys

In Vector mode a bare letter key picks a tool (Illustrator style). These letters are active only in Vector mode and are not part of the rebindable Keyboard Shortcuts list (those rows are for the Illustration raster tools).

Polygon, Star, and Join have no letter key; pick them from the tool strip. Holding Ctrl or Alt suppresses the letter shortcuts so those modifier chords stay free.

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 act only on shapes that carry a visible fill; open, stroke-only paths are left to Scissors and Join.

A locked active layer blocks all of these.

Selection (the black arrow)

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

• Click an object to select it. Shift-click to add more objects to the selection.
• Drag empty canvas to marquee-select objects inside the box.
• Drag inside the bounding box to move the selection.
• Drag a corner handle to scale.
• Drag the rotation handle (above the box) to rotate.
• Double-click a group to enter it (group isolation), so you can work on its children. Press Esc or double-click empty canvas to step back out.

The Selection tool has no extra options bar; the header names the active tool. Your selection survives when you hand off to Direct Select and back. See Vector Editing for groups, clipping, align, and the Transform panel.

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 sharp corner to round it.
• Marquee-drag to select several anchors at once.

Tangent handles only appear when they are long enough to grab on screen (about 6 screen pixels); zoom in to edit very short handles. Direct Select has no extra options bar. Full anchor and handle workflow is in Vector Editing.

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).
• 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 the cursor.

Adding, deleting, and converting anchors are automatic Pen sub-behaviors, not separate tools.

The draft path commits to a finished object when you close it, press Enter, or switch tool or workspace. Press Esc to discard the draft.

• An open path gets a stroke only (no fill).
• A closed path gets the default fill plus the default stroke.

Smart Guides help the Pen too: with Smart Guides on, candidate points snap plumb or level to existing anchors. Holding Shift turns that into a lock with a wider pull so you stay on the straight line; with no alignment nearby, Shift falls back to constraining to 15 degree steps off the last anchor. Toggle Smart Guides in View ▸ Smart Guides (Ctrl+U in Vector mode).

The Pen has no extra options bar.

Pencil

Letter key N. The Pencil draws a freehand line that is fitted to a smooth, editable Bezier path on release.

• Drag to draw. While you drag, the live preview shows your raw line. On release, Limner fits it to a clean open Bezier path you can then edit with Direct Select.

Live shapes

The shape tools drag out parametric "live" shapes: the object remembers its parameters (sides, radius, corner rounding) so you can keep adjusting them after drawing. The exact parameters are also editable in the Properties panel's Shape section once the object is selected; see Vector Editing.

Rectangle

Letter key M. Drag out a rectangle. The corners can be rounded with the live-corner widget or the Shape section.

Ellipse

Letter key L. Drag out an ellipse.

Line

Letter key \ (backslash). Drag out a straight line. A line is drawn with a stroke and no fill.

Polygon

No letter key (pick from the strip). Drag out a regular polygon.

Star

No letter key (pick from the strip). Drag out a star.

Gradient

Letter key G. The Gradient tool is an on-canvas annotator for an object's gradient fill (or stroke).

• Drag across an object to place and aim the gradient axis. The start and end of the drag set the gradient's direction and extent on the picked object.
• Edit the actual color stops, the gradient type (Linear or Radial), opacity, and position in the Gradient panel.

The Gradient tool places the gradient on the object you drag over; if the drag starts over an object, that object is selected and gets the gradient. There is no options bar, because placement happens directly on the canvas.

Scissors

Letter key C. Scissors cut a path at the point you click (within about 6 screen pixels of the outline).

• Cutting an open path splits it into two independent objects, so each half can be selected and moved on its own.
• Cutting a closed path opens it in place (it stays one object).

The cut path drops its live-shape parameters (it becomes a plain editable path). Both resulting pieces are left selected so you can edit them immediately with Direct Select. No options bar.

Join

No letter key (pick from the strip). Join connects open path endpoints into one continuous path.

• With two objects selected, Join bridges their nearest open endpoints and merges them into one object.
• Otherwise, Join acts on the open path under the cursor: it bridges two open ends of that path, or, if the path is a single open run, closes it by connecting its last anchor back to its first.

No options bar.

Knife

Letter key K. The Knife slices filled shapes along a cut line you draw across them.

• Drag a freehand cut line across the canvas. On release, every filled shape the line fully crosses splits into separate closed objects along the cut.
• Hold Shift while dragging for a straight cut at any angle (the line follows the cursor).
• Hold Alt while dragging for a straight cut snapped to 15 degree steps, for clean horizontal, vertical, or diagonal cuts.

Only shapes with a visible fill are cut. Open, stroke-only paths are the Scissors tool's job, so the Knife leaves them alone. With objects selected, only the selected shapes are cut; with nothing selected, every unlocked filled shape the line divides is cut. A cut only happens where the line passes all the way through a shape; a partial slash leaves the shape whole. The new pieces are left selected so you can move or restyle them at once. The options bar shows the modifier reminder, with no other controls.

Pathfinder

Letter key F. Pathfinder is a tool for combining selected shapes with boolean and split operations. Its pointer behaves like the Selection tool (click and Shift-click to choose objects, marquee to box-select), and the operations sit on its options bar. The same operations also live in the Properties panel's Pathfinder section.

The options bar buttons (most need two or more objects selected):

The bar also carries Compound (make a compound path so holes punch through, for letter-style cutouts) and Release (break a compound path back into separate objects). Compound paths use the even-odd fill rule. For the full Pathfinder and Compound Path workflow, see Vector Editing.

Shape Builder

Letter key B. Shape Builder merges or removes the atomic regions formed where two or more selected shapes overlap, in the style of Illustrator's Shape Builder.

• Select two or more overlapping shapes first.
• Hover a region to highlight the atomic area under the cursor.
• Click or drag across regions to merge the touched ones into a single shape.
• Alt-click or Alt-drag to delete the touched regions instead.

Anything you do not touch is left as it was. The merged or trimmed result is left selected. The options bar shows a short reminder, with no other controls.

Eraser (Vector Eraser)

Letter key E. The Vector Eraser subtracts a band from the filled shapes it crosses, leaving editable vector results (this is different from the raster vector-erase, which re-renders brush strokes).

• Drag a round band across the canvas. A ring at the cursor previews the band width. On release, the swept band is subtracted from every filled shape it crossed, and each crossed shape is replaced in place by its remainder (or removed if fully erased).
• Only shapes with a visible fill are erased; open, stroke-only paths are skipped.
• With objects selected, only the selected shapes are erased; with nothing selected, every unlocked filled shape the band crosses is erased.

Line-editing tools (CSP brush-vector layers)

Limner also has an older, separate "vector lines" family that re-renders brush strokes through the brush engine on CSP-style vector layers. These tools live in the Illustration workspace (under the Vector tool group in that strip), not in the Vector workspace, but they belong to the same idea of editable lines:

• Object (the Operate tool, palette label "Object"): click a line to select it, Shift-click to add, drag empty space to box-select, drag the bounding box to move, scale, or rotate, and restyle the selected lines (size, opacity, recolor, redraw with the active brush) from its options bar. Its one persistent toggle is Scale width (default on), which scales a line's stroke thickness along with it when you resize.
• Line Edit: edit those vector lines point by point with modes for move, add, delete, adjust width, adjust opacity, split, pinch, simplify, and connect.

These are distinct from the retained Bezier path model described above. The Object and Line Edit tools are documented with their full options in Vector Editing.

Related pages

• Vector Editing: anchors and handles, fill and stroke appearance, object gradients, pathfinder booleans, path operations, grouping and clipping, align and distribute, the Transform panel, and the Object / Line Edit tools.
• Layers: how vector layers sit alongside raster layers.
• Construction Aids: rulers, symmetry, and perspective, which work in Vector mode too.

New in 0.8.0

Version 0.8.0 rebuilds the Vector tools around Adobe Illustrator’s muscle memory. If you know Illustrator, your hands already know these:

• Modifier keys everywhere. Shift constrains a dragged shape to a square, circle, or 45° line; Alt draws from the center; Alt-dragging a selection makes a duplicate; arrow keys nudge the selection or the selected anchors 1 px (Shift for 10 px); Up and Down change a polygon’s sides or a star’s points mid-drag.
• The Pen edits paths in place. Click a segment to add an anchor, click an anchor to delete it (the path stays connected and keeps its shape), Alt-click an anchor to convert it between corner and smooth, and click an open path’s endpoint to pick the path up and keep drawing. A selected path shows its anchors while the Pen is active.
• Direct Select goes deeper. Drag a curve segment to reshape it (a straight edge slides rigidly); drag across empty canvas to rubber-band individual anchor points, even across several paths; Alt-click an object to select it inside its group, then Alt-click again to step up to the group itself.
• Place shapes by numbers. Click any shape tool on the canvas without dragging to type exact dimensions (length and angle for the Line).
• Illustrator shortcuts. Ctrl+J joins the selected paths, Ctrl+8 makes a compound path, Ctrl+Alt+8 releases it, and the bracket keys resize the Vector Eraser band.

Vector Editing and Output

This page covers everything you do after you draw a vector object: setting its fill and stroke, moving and resizing it precisely, combining shapes with booleans, grouping and clipping, aligning, and finally getting the artwork out of Limner as SVG. It applies to Vector mode (the Illustrator style editable path model). For drawing the objects in the first place (Pen, Pencil, live shapes, Direct Select, and the rest), see Vector Mode.

Most editing happens in the Properties panel (the Vector hub), with named swatches in the Swatches panel and gradient ramps in the Gradient panel. All three open from the Window menu and are docked by default in Vector mode.

Appearance: fill and stroke

Every vector object carries an appearance: a fill, a stroke, an object opacity, and a blend mode. You edit them in the Properties panel under the Appearance section (open by default).

When nothing is selected, the Appearance edits set the defaults that new shapes will inherit ("Edits below set the defaults for new shapes."). The default appearance is a solid white fill and a solid black stroke at width 1.0, with the Fill chosen as the active paint target.

Fill and stroke rows

Each of Fill and Stroke shows a visibility checkbox, the label, and a colour swatch. Click the swatch to pick a colour. If the row is currently a gradient, the swatch is replaced by a small "Gradient" hint (edit the ramp in the Gradient panel instead).

An open path takes a stroke only (no fill); a closed path takes the default fill plus stroke.

Stroke shape

Below the colour rows, the stroke has a weight slider, line cap and join selectors, and a dash toggle.

The "Dashed" checkbox builds a simple dash plus gap pattern that scales with the stroke weight, so a dashed line reads correctly at any width. Turning it off makes the stroke solid again.

Stroke alignment is fixed to Center in this version (Inside and Outside are reserved in the model but not yet exposed).

Object opacity

When an object is selected, an Opacity slider appears at the bottom of the Appearance section.

The Properties hub

The Properties panel is the single hub for editing a selected object. It is a stack of collapsing sections, top to bottom:

• Transform (open by default): numeric position, size, rotate, and shear.
• Appearance (open by default): fill, stroke, dash, and opacity (above).
• Shape: live shape parameters, shown only when a parametric live shape (a

rectangle, ellipse, polygon, star, or line) is selected. See Vector Mode.

• Arrange: Group / Ungroup and clipping masks.
• Align: align and distribute.
• Pathfinder: a Path block (Offset Path and Outline Stroke) above the

boolean Pathfinder buttons.

When an object is selected the panel header shows the object label as a heading. With nothing selected it reads "Nothing selected" and notes that the edits set the defaults for new shapes.

The Transform panel (numeric)

The Transform section gives you exact numeric control over the selection. With nothing selected it shows "Select an object."

Reference origin

A 3 by 3 grid of dots (labelled "Ref") picks the reference origin: the point that stays fixed while W/H, Rotate, and Shear are applied. The grid is numbered 0 to 8 row by row.

Position and size

X, Y, W, and H are drag values: drag on the field or type a number. The link toggle next to W/H constrains their proportions.

Rotate and Shear (live preview)

Rotate and Shear are drag value fields that preview as you scrub about the reference point, then commit as a single undo step on release. Each resets to 0 after it applies, so the next value is applied fresh rather than cumulatively.

Pathfinder (boolean operations)

Pathfinder combines two or more selected objects into one shape. It is now a tool as well as a Properties section: select the Pathfinder tool (its slot in the tool strip is shared with Shape Builder, or press F in Vector mode) and its operations appear on the tool-options bar at the top of the canvas. The same operations also live in the Properties panel's Pathfinder section, so you can run them from either place.

Select at least two objects, then click an operation. The operands are taken in z-order (bottom to top), and the result replaces them where the topmost operand sat.

Divide breaks the overlapping shapes apart at every intersection: each distinct region becomes its own separate closed object, so you can recolour or move the pieces individually. Outline discards the fills and turns each boundary segment into its own stroked edge, leaving the artwork as line work. Both Divide and Outline produce several objects rather than a single combined shape.

For Unite, Minus Front, Intersect, Exclude, and Minus Back, the result keeps the front (topmost) object's appearance, except Minus Front, which keeps the back object's appearance. The flattened boolean result is refit to smooth, corner preserving curves, so curved unions and intersections stay clean and right angles stay sharp.

Unite, Minus Front, Intersect, Exclude, Minus Back, and Divide need two or more objects; Outline acts on one or more. If the Properties section reads "Select two or more objects to combine," you do not have enough selected.

Compound Path

A compound path merges several paths into a single object whose overlaps punch see-through holes, using the even-odd fill rule. This is how you make letter-style cut-outs, like the hole in an O or the counter of an A, where an inner shape needs to show the background through it.

Both buttons sit on the Pathfinder tool-options bar (and are labelled Make Compound / Release Compound in the Properties Pathfinder section):

Make the outer shape and the hole shapes, select them all, then click Compound; the overlapping inner shapes become holes. Release reverses it, returning the pieces to ordinary separate objects.

Path operations

The Path section holds Offset Path and Outline Stroke. These work on one or more selected objects.

Offset Path

Adds a concentric copy of each selected object, grown or shrunk by a distance. The originals are kept and the new copies become the selection (one undo step).

Set the distance in the field, then click Offset Path.

Outline Stroke

Click Outline Stroke to convert each selected object's stroke into a filled path. This is useful when you want to edit the stroke outline as geometry, or to keep the stroke weight independent of later scaling. The conversion preserves the stroke's cap, join, and miter limit.

Grouping and clipping

The Arrange section handles grouping and clipping masks.

The Ctrl+G and Ctrl+Shift+G shortcuts are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Clipping masks

Make Clip turns the selection into a clip group: the topmost selected object becomes the clip path, and only the artwork that falls inside it shows. The clip path itself is not drawn. The topmost selected object must be a single shape, not a group, to serve as the clip path; otherwise Limner reports an error.

Release Clip clears the clip on the selected clip group, so the cropped art draws normally again.

Group isolation

To edit inside a group without ungrouping it, double-click the group to enter it (isolation mode). While isolated, the Properties panel shows an "Inside group" banner with an Exit button. Leave the group by pressing Esc, clicking Exit, or double-clicking empty canvas.

Align and distribute

The Align section lines objects up or spaces them evenly. Select two or more objects (alignment is relative to the selection's bounding box), then click a button.

Align

Distribute

If the section reads "Select two or more objects to align," you do not have enough selected.

Smart Guides

Smart Guides give you alignment hints and snapping while you move or draw vector objects. Toggle them with View ▸ Smart Guides or Ctrl+U (rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts).

When on, Smart Guides:

• Snap the Pen tool to align (level or plumb) with existing anchors.
• Snap a moving object into alignment with its neighbours, drawing a transient

green alignment guide while it snaps.

• Snap Direct Select anchor drags to alignment.

The on screen snap distance is about 8 pixels (scaled by zoom).

Swatches panel

The Swatches panel applies colours from the active saved palette to the selected object. The hint at the top tells you whether a click sets the fill or the stroke, following the current paint target (the Fill/Stroke swap; see Color).

• Click a swatch to apply that colour to the active paint target.
• Click the + button to add the current colour to the palette.
• Right-click a swatch and choose Remove swatch to drop it.

If there is no palette yet, the panel offers a New palette button.

Object gradients (Gradient panel)

To paint an object with a gradient instead of a flat colour, use the Gradient panel together with the Gradient tool. The panel turns the active paint target (Fill or Stroke) into a gradient and lets you edit its ramp; you place and aim the gradient on the canvas with the Gradient tool. See Vector Mode for the Gradient tool itself.

On the stop bar, drag a marker to move a stop and click empty ramp space to add one. Select a stop, then click the Delete button to remove it (the ramp keeps at least two stops, so Delete is disabled when only two remain).

Object Layers panel

The Object Layers panel is the scene graph for the active graphic layer: a stack of every object you have drawn, with groups that disclose their children. It is the vector-mode counterpart to the Layers panel and docks by default in the Vector workspace. When the layer is empty it reads "No objects yet. Draw a shape with a Vector tool."

Its action bar (top of the panel):

Each object row, left to right:

• A show / hide eye toggle.
• A lock / unlock toggle.
• A folder icon for group rows (a group indents its children below it).
• The object name. Click it to select the object; double-click to rename.
• On top-level rows only, Bring forward and Send backward carets that

move the object up or down the stack.

Vector layers: the Object and Line Edit tools

These two tools belong to Limner's older "vector lines" model: brush strokes captured as editable centerlines on a CSP-style vector layer (made with Layer ▸ New Vector Layer). They live in the Illustration workspace, under the Vector tool group, not in the Vector workspace, but they are vector editing, so their full options are collected here. They are separate from the Illustrator style path objects on the rest of this page. See Vector Mode for the short introduction.

Object (Operate) options

Select a vector line, then restyle it from the options bar. Size and Opacity changes are applied when you release the slider.

Line Edit options

Line Edit reshapes vector lines point by point. Pick a mode from the options bar:

Alongside the modes, the options bar carries:

The eraser also has vector-specific modes on a vector layer: see Eraser.

SVG export (File ▸ SVG (vector))

To get vector artwork out of Limner as resolution independent geometry, choose File ▸ SVG (vector) (under the Export group of the File menu). This writes a standalone SVG 1.1 document sized to your canvas. The suggested filename is artwork.svg.

What is exported:

• Each object's path geometry (lines and cubic curves), with closed paths

marked closed.

• Fill colour, fill opacity (when not fully opaque), and the even-odd fill rule

where used.

• Stroke colour, opacity, width, cap, join, miter limit (only when it differs

from the default 4), and dash pattern with offset.

• Object opacity.
• Linear and radial gradients, written into the SVG's defs.

What is not exported (these do not exist in the Vector model yet): text objects, clipping, and live effects. Raster (Illustration) layers are skipped, since they are not vector. If the document has no vector layers with objects on them, Limner reports "Nothing to export."

For the full picture of Limner's other file formats (.limner, PSD, PNG, JPEG), see File Formats.

See also

• Vector Mode: drawing objects with the Pen, Pencil, live

shapes, Direct Select, Scissors, and Join.

• File Formats: saving and exporting in every format.
• Color: the colour picker and the Fill/Stroke paint target.
• Layers: organizing your artwork on layers.

New in 0.8.0

Editing operations catch up to Illustrator in 0.8.0:

• An eight-handle transform box. The selection box hugs the drawn shape exactly and adds edge-midpoint handles: corners scale both axes, sides scale one. Alt scales about the center, Shift keeps the scale uniform, and Shift snaps the rotate handle to 45° steps. Flip H and Flip V in the Properties panel mirror the selection in place.
• Pathfinder Trim, Merge, and Crop. The full second row joins the booleans: Trim keeps each shape’s visible area, Merge also melts same-color shapes together, and Crop clips everything to the top shape. All on the Pathfinder options bar and panel.
• Cutting tools handle lines. The Knife now slices open and stroke-only paths at every crossing, not just filled shapes.
• Gradients edit on canvas. Grab either end of the gradient annotator to re-aim an existing gradient without redrawing it; Shift snaps the axis to 45°.
• Cleaner geometry edits. Deleting an anchor re-fits the neighboring handles so the curve keeps its drawn shape; the Pencil closes into a filled shape when a long stroke ends near its start; the selection marquee picks up everything it touches, as in Illustrator.

Animation Mode

Animation mode is Limner's third workspace: a frame-by-frame (cel) animation studio built around a per-layer timeline. You draw a pose, add a frame, draw the next pose, and play it back. It uses the same brushes, layers, and painting tools as Illustration mode, and adds a full-width Timeline along the bottom, onion skin, playback, and export to GIF, MP4, or a numbered PNG sequence. This page covers entering Animation mode and every part of the timeline.

For the painting tools you draw each frame with, see Brush and the Tools index. For how the layer stack works (each layer becomes its own cel track here), see Layers. For the workspace switcher and the rest of the window, see The Interface.

Entering Animation mode

Animation is one of Limner's three workspaces. The workspace switcher is the slim strip above the menu bar, labelled "Workspace", with one button per workspace.

• Click the Animation segment in the Workspace switcher to enter Animation mode. Its tooltip reads "Frame by frame animation: draw cels on a timeline".
• The Ctrl+Shift+M workspace hotkey only flips between Illustration and Vector. Animation is reached by clicking the switcher segment, and pressing the hotkey while in Animation takes you back to Illustration.

The three workspaces are:

What changes when you switch

Switching to Animation mode does two things and leaves your artwork alone:

• The Timeline appears. A full-width dope-sheet panel docks along the bottom of the window, above the status bar. It is resizable; drag its top edge to make it taller or shorter.
• The panels swap to the Animation set: the Layers and Color panels on the right, with the Brush picker and Brush Settings on the left. The other panels (Navigator, Timelapse, Reference, Stats) stay reachable from the Window menu.

The tool strip is the Illustration paint strip, unchanged. Animation mode reuses the raster painting tools, so everything you know from Illustration (the brush, eraser, fill, selections, filters, and the rest) draws on each frame exactly as it does there.

What does NOT change: switching workspaces never converts your layers. Mode is a different set of tools and panels over the same document.

The white paper

A blank canvas is transparent, which would make every animation frame see-through and make onion ghosts hard to read. So the first time you enter Animation mode, Limner guarantees an opaque white paper under your art: if the bottom layer is empty it fills it white, otherwise it slips a white paper layer underneath. This is a single undo step, and it happens only once.

The Timeline (dope sheet)

The Timeline is a dope sheet: a grid with one row per layer and one column per frame. It has three parts, top to bottom: a transport row, a frame-operations row, and the dope-sheet grid itself.

The dope-sheet grid

The grid is split into a frozen name gutter on the left and a scrolling frame grid on the right.

• The name gutter lists your layers in the same top-to-bottom order as the Layers panel, one row each, with an eye toggle and the layer name. Folders show as header rows with a collapse caret; layers inside a folder are indented. The active layer's row is highlighted in the accent colour. Click a layer name to make it active.
• The frame grid holds the cells. It scrolls both ways for long timelines and tall stacks. The name gutter stays put while the grid scrolls sideways, so you never lose track of which row is which.

The two panes scroll vertically together, so a layer's name always lines up with its row of cells.

Zooming the timeline. For a long animation, zoom the grid out to see more frames at once, or in to work on a few frames closely: hold Ctrl and scroll over the grid, or use the magnifier buttons on the frame-operations row (click the percentage between them to reset to 100%). Zoom changes the frame-cell width only; at a tight zoom the frame numbers thin out so they stay readable, and the current frame is always numbered.

The filmstrip. The per-layer cells show each layer's own drawing. To review the whole animation as finished frames, turn on the Filmstrip toggle on the frame-operations row: a row appears above the ruler showing a composited thumbnail of every frame, all your visible layers merged into one pose. Click a filmstrip thumbnail to jump to that frame. The thumbnails update as you draw, and the toggle is off by default (building them costs a little on a very long animation).

Reading the cells

Each cell shows the state of one layer on one frame:

A small number at a keyframe's top-right corner is its exposure: how many frames the drawing is held before the next keyframe (shown only when it is held for more than one frame). A coloured strip along a cell's top edge is its frame colour tag. The active layer's current cell carries an accent border so you can see exactly what you are about to draw on.

The ruler

The strip across the top of the frame grid is the ruler. It numbers the frames (starting at 1), marks the current frame with an accent pill, and carries the draggable in and out markers. Frames outside the in/out range are dimmed.

Click a frame number to jump the playhead there, or drag along the ruler to scrub: the playhead follows the frame under the cursor as you move, so you can flip through the animation by hand. To select a range of frames, hold Shift and click another frame (selects from the playhead to there) or Shift-drag across the ruler; the selected columns are washed in the accent colour, and Copy and Delete then act on the whole range (see Editing frames). To reorder a whole frame column (that frame, and every layer's drawing on it, moved to another position), hold Alt and drag; a highlight shows where it will land. A plain click clears the selection.

Drawing frame by frame

The core loop is: draw a pose, add a frame, draw the next pose.

• Add Frame (the button on the frame-operations row, hover "Insert a blank frame after this one and switch to it") inserts a new blank frame right after the current one and jumps to it. On the active layer the new frame is a fresh blank cel to draw the next pose on; every other layer holds its current drawing, so a static background or a layer you are not animating stays in place across the frames.
• Just start drawing. When you paint on a frame that is currently holding an earlier drawing, Limner automatically gives the active layer its own keyframe there first, so each frame you draw on becomes its own distinct cel. You never have to "create a keyframe" by hand.
• Delete (hover "Delete this frame") removes the current frame and shifts the later frames left, so no gap is left behind. It is greyed out when only one frame remains.

Because each layer carries its own track of cels along one shared timeline, you can animate the character on one layer while the background layer holds a single drawing, and add a new layer at any time (it starts blank and holds across the whole timeline until you draw on it).

Onion skin

Onion skin ghosts the frames around the one you are drawing, so you can see where your last pose was and where the next one is, the way you would flip paper on a lightbox.

• The Onion toggle on the transport row turns ghosting on and off in one tap (hover "Onion skin: ghost the nearby frames"). It is off by default. There is also a keyboard shortcut, Alt+O by default, which you can rebind in Keyboard Shortcuts.
• The gear button next to it opens the Onion skin popover, where you tune the ghosts. Every setting stays editable even while onion is off, so you can set it up before turning it on.

Earlier frames are tinted with the Past colour and later frames with the Future colour, the usual warm-past / cool-future convention, so you can tell at a glance which way time runs.

Each ghost composites all of your visible layers together, so a character built from separate line, fill, and shadow layers ghosts as one whole pose, not just the layer you happen to be drawing on. Only the layers that actually change between frames are ghosted: a layer that holds the same drawing (a static background, or the white paper) shows no ghost, so neighbouring frames never wash the canvas in tint, and a held pose never doubles up. The ghosts sit just under the layer you are drawing on, so your live line always stays on top.

Playback and transport

The transport row across the top of the Timeline drives playback. Left to right:

The play mode is a three-segment control:

• Loop (the default) plays the range over and over.
• Ping Pong plays forward to the end, then back to the start, and repeats.
• Once plays through one time and stops.

A readout at the right end of the transport shows "Frame X / N" (the current frame, counting from 1, over the total) followed by a timecode: the current time and the total duration in minutes:seconds.tenths at the current frame rate.

Playback stays locked to the frame rate you set. On a heavy scene that is too slow to draw every frame in time, Limner drops (skips) the frames it cannot keep up with instead of playing in slow motion, so the timing you see matches the timing you will export.

Keyboard frame navigation and playback

In Animation mode, a few keys drive the playhead and transport without reaching for the buttons. They work only in Animation mode and are fixed (they are not in the rebindable Keyboard Shortcuts list). Space stays the hold-to-pan key, so Enter is what plays and pauses.

In and out range

Two markers on the ruler set the part of the timeline that plays and exports. Drag the in marker to set the start and the out marker to set the end; their grab tabs sit at the top of the ruler. You can also type the range directly: the In and Out boxes on the frame-operations row set the start and end frames numerically (drag them or click to type). Frames outside the range are dimmed.

• The range bounds both playback and export. Playback loops, bounces, or plays once within the in/out points, and export writes only the frames inside the range.
• By default the range covers the whole timeline, and it follows the frame count as you add or remove frames. The Export menu names the current range and frame count, for example "Frames 1 to 12 (12 total)".

Editing frames

Right-click any cell to open its frame menu (available once you have more than one frame):

The frame menu also has Copy frame and Paste frame after: the copied frame carries every layer's drawing and can be pasted anywhere in the timeline. The frame operations all have keyboard shortcuts too: Alt+C copy, Alt+V paste after, Alt+D duplicate, Alt+L clone, Alt+Delete delete.

Working with several frames at once. Select a range on the ruler (Shift-click or Shift-drag, see The ruler), and Copy and Delete act on the whole range: the menu reads "Copy 3 frames" or "Delete 3 frames", and Alt+C and Alt+Delete do the same. Paste drops all of the copied frames in order after the target frame ("Paste 3 frames after").

Re-timing a cel

Drag a keyframe sideways along its row to re-time it, moving the drawing to a different frame. A highlight shows the target column as you drag. Dropping it onto a frame that already has a drawing replaces that one.

Changing how long a drawing is held (exposure)

The exposure of a drawing is how many frames it stays on screen before the next one. To change it on one layer, hover the right edge of a held drawing until the resize cursor appears, then drag: right holds it longer, left holds it shorter, and a guide line shows where the boundary will land. This moves the next drawing on that row; it never runs past the drawing after it (that one always keeps at least one frame), and it does not change the total frame count. The last drawing on a row has no edge to drag, since its hold runs to the end of the timeline; use Add Frame or Delete to change the timeline length. The exposure badge in the corner of a keyframe updates as you drag.

Colour tags

Frames can carry a colour label to mark beats, holds, or sections. Right-click a cell, open the Color tag submenu, and pick one of six colours (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, or purple), or None to clear it. The tag shows as a coloured strip along the top edge of that frame's cells, and the tags travel with the document when you save.

2D camera

The 2D camera adds a keyframed move over the whole animation: a pan, zoom, and rotate applied to the finished frame, so you can push in, drift across, or spin the shot without redrawing anything. It is a Limner Plus feature, and it is non-destructive: it never changes your drawings, only how the finished frame is framed.

Open the camera controls from the Camera button and its gear popover on the frame-operations row. To set up a move:

1. Scrub to the frame where the move should start and click Add key (in the popover, or the Camera track's + button). The first key turns on Camera view so you can see the framing.
2. Set the framing for that key: Center X / Center Y (where the camera looks, as a percentage of the canvas, 50% being the middle), Zoom (100% frames the whole canvas, larger zooms in), and Rotation.
3. Scrub to a later frame, add another key, and give it a different framing. Limner interpolates the camera between the keys, so the shot moves smoothly from one to the next.

Camera view (the Camera button, and always during playback) shows the canvas through the camera, so scrubbing and playing back preview the move. Turn it off to edit the frames on the plain canvas again.

The keyframe track. Once you have a key, a Camera row appears under the ruler, with a diamond at each keyed frame. Click a column to jump there; drag a diamond to re-time its key. A filled diamond is a moving key; a hollow diamond is a Hold key. Use the track's + and trash buttons, or the popover, to add or delete the key at the current frame.

Easing. Each key controls how the camera moves from it to the next key:

The camera bakes into the export (GIF, MP4, and PNG sequence all render the move) and saves with the document.

Layer keyframes

Where the camera moves the whole shot, layer keyframes move one layer inside it: keyframe a layer's position, scale, rotation, and opacity over the timeline and Limner interpolates between the keys, so a cloud can drift, a title can fade in, or a cel can slide across the shot without redrawing it anywhere. A Limner Plus feature, and non-destructive: the layer's pixels are never changed, only how they are composited at each frame.

Open a layer's keyframe controls from the diamond button on its Timeline row (it lights up when the layer has keys):

1. Move the playhead to the frame where the motion starts and click Add key. The key starts as "no change", so adding it never alters the look.
2. Set the values for that key: Position X / Y (an offset in canvas pixels), Scale (100% = unchanged), Rotation, and Opacity (100% = the layer's own opacity). Anchor X / Y sets the point scale and rotation pivot about; it belongs to the layer, not to any one key.
3. Scrub to a later frame, add another key with different values, and play: the layer moves, turns, grows, or fades smoothly between them.

Keys show as small diamonds along the bottom of the layer's row: drag one to re-time it, right-click it to pick its ease (Hold / Linear / Smooth, the same three as the camera) or to delete it. Keys ripple with frame inserts, deletes, and reorders, exactly like drawings and tags.

A few things to know:

• Painting is blocked on a moved frame. On a frame where a layer is shown displaced, scaled, or rotated by its keys, a stroke would land away from the pen (the pixels live at their undrawn position), so Limner blocks it and says why. Paint on a frame where the transform is "no change" (for example the first key, before the move starts), or clear the layer's keys. Opacity-only keys never block painting.
• Onion skin ghosts do not follow the keys. Ghost frames show the raw drawings; preview keyframed motion by scrubbing or playing instead.
• Layer keyframes bake into the export and save with the document, like the camera. The 2D camera composes on top, so a camera move over keyframed layers exports exactly as previewed.

Importing frames

You can start an animation from images you already have. Both importers are Limner Plus, and each opens a fresh Animation-mode document:

• File ▸ Import GIF as Animation Frames... splits an animated GIF, one frame per GIF frame, and sets the frame rate from the GIF's timing.
• File ▸ Import Image Sequence as Animation Frames... turns a folder of numbered images into frames, one frame per file, in numeric order (so frame2 comes before frame10, padded or not). PNG, JPEG, WebP, BMP, TGA, TIFF, and GIF files are read, transparency is kept, and any off-size image is scaled to match the first one. A plain image sequence carries no timing, so it starts at 12 fps; change it in the transport. Both importers keep the first 300 frames of a very long source.

Export

The Export button on the Timeline's frame-operations row writes your animation out. It is enabled once you have more than one frame, and it offers three formats (since 0.8.3 the same three exporters also appear under File ▸ Export while the Animation workspace is active):

A few things to know:

• The export honours the in/out range. Only the frames inside the range are written; the Export menu names the range it will use. To export the whole animation, leave the markers at the ends.
• The size is the canvas size. There is no separate export resolution; frames are written at the document's pixel dimensions. GIF and MP4 use the project frame rate.
• Onion skin is turned off during export, so ghosts never bleed into the output, then restored afterwards.
• The 2D camera move and layer keyframes are baked in. Each exported frame is rendered through the camera framing and the layer transforms at that frame, so the export matches what playback shows on screen.
• All three formats are encoded inside the app. GIF and MP4 use the same built-in encoder as the Timelapse feature, so no extra tools or downloads are ever needed.
• One export runs at a time. A status line beside the Export button shows progress ("Exporting animation...") and then the result.

How animation is saved

Animations save inside the normal Limner document (.limner). The format stores the frame count, frame rate, play mode, onion settings, the in/out range, the colour tags, the 2D-camera keyframes, the per-layer keyframes, and every cel's pixels, so reopening a file drops you straight back onto the timeline. A document that uses animation reopens in Animation mode automatically. Older files, and files with a single frame, open as before in Illustration or Vector mode. See File Formats for details.

Related pages

• The Interface: the workspace switcher, panels, and the rest of the window.
• Layers: the layer stack that becomes one cel track per layer here.
• Brush and the Tools index: the painting tools you draw each frame with.
• File Formats and Export: what a .limner document stores, including animation.
• Timelapse: the other video export, which records your drawing process.

New in 0.8.2

This release adds motion on top of your cels, and a faster timeline to cut on:

• 2D camera. Keyframe a pan, zoom, and rotate over the whole shot, with Hold / Linear / Smooth easing and a live camera view; the move bakes into every export. See 2D camera. Limner Plus.
• Layer keyframes. Animate a layer's position, scale, rotation, and opacity between key diamonds on its timeline row; non-destructive, and baked into exports. See Layer keyframes. Limner Plus.
• Import an image sequence. File ▸ Import Image Sequence as Animation Frames... turns a folder of numbered images into ready-to-play frames, transparency kept. See Importing frames.
• Scrub, zoom, and the filmstrip. Drag the ruler to scrub the playhead (reordering a frame column is now Alt+drag), zoom the frame width with Ctrl+scroll or the magnifier buttons, and flip on the Filmstrip row to see every frame's finished picture.
• Range selection and exposure. Shift-select a run of frames on the ruler to copy, paste, or delete them together, drag a cel's right edge to lengthen or shorten a hold, and type the in/out range directly.
• Whole-pose onion skin. Ghosts now composite every visible layer that changes, so a multi-layer character ghosts as one pose, and Alt+O toggles onion skin from the keyboard.
• Steadier playback. Playback keeps real time by skipping frames it cannot render in time, a timecode readout joins the frame counter, Enter toggles play and pause, and Add Frame inserts right after the frame you are on.

New in 0.8.0

The timeline grows the frame operations beta artists asked for, and export no longer blocks the app:

• Reorder frames by dragging a column in the timeline ruler, and copy and paste whole frames anywhere in the timeline.
• Frame hotkeys. One Alt family drives the playhead frame: Alt+N new, Alt+D duplicate, Alt+L linked clone, Alt+C copy, Alt+V paste after, Alt+Delete delete. All rebindable in Keyboard Shortcuts.
• Duplicating a frame copies every layer of that frame, and a new frame starts blank on every layer, so each drawing is fully independent.
• Export without the freeze. GIF, MP4, and PNG-sequence export render one frame per screen refresh and stream to the encoder in the background; switching documents cancels cleanly.
• Full undo for the timeline. Frame add, duplicate, delete, reorder, retime, and paste each undo as a single step, restoring the whole timeline.
• Sharper helpers. Ctrl+Alt+click a mark on the canvas to jump to the layer that owns it; Ctrl+V pastes a copied image onto the Reference board; transparent canvas shows a dark field with a View ▸ Transparency checkerboard toggle (Animation mode always shows the checkerboard so onion skins stay readable).

Book: Comics and Manga

A Book is Limner's multi-page comic, manga, or book project: an ordered list of pages held together in a single file, with a Page Manager board to add, reorder, and page through them. A Book is a NEW axis layered over the workspaces, not a fourth one. Each page is its own normal document that you draw with the usual Illustration, Vector, or Animation tools, and a page can be in a different workspace from its neighbours. On top of that, a Book adds comic-specific helpers: per-page bleed / trim / safe guides and a Panel tool for laying out frames.

For the painting tools you draw each page with, see Brush and the Tools index. For how the layer stack works on a page, see Layers. For the vector tools you can use on a page, see Vector Mode.

What a Book is

A Book sits ABOVE the per-page drawing workspaces. It is deliberately not a fourth workspace: switching Illustration / Vector / Animation changes the tools and panels for one document, while a Book is a project that owns many documents (its pages) and a board to manage them. Each page remembers its own workspace, so you can ink one page in Illustration, letter another in Vector, and animate a third, all inside the same Book.

While a Book is open you move between two surfaces:

Creating and opening a Book

Books are created and opened from the File menu:

• File ▸ New Book opens the New Book setup dialog (described below).
• File ▸ Open Book opens an existing .limnerbook file.
• File ▸ Open Recent Book lists the books you opened recently; pick one to reopen it.

You can also reach these from the Book home screen: open the Page Manager with no book loaded and it shows New Book, Open Book, and a prominent "Continue" button for the most recent book, with the rest of your recent books listed below.

The New Book setup dialog

The dialog builds a new, empty book from a page template plus a few options. Pick a Template from the list to fill in the size and binding, then adjust anything by hand.

The remaining controls:

Manga and Tankobon templates default to right binding and right-to-left order; the webtoon strip turns the print guides off. Click Create to start the book, or Cancel to back out.

The page list (Page Manager)

The Page Manager is the book's home board. Each page is a card with its thumbnail, its number and title, and a row of per-page actions. The active page is outlined in the accent colour.

The book toolbar across the top of the board carries the book-wide commands:

The toolbar heading shows the book name (with a * when there are unsaved changes) and a summary line: the page count, the binding (left or right bound), and whether right-to-left order or spreads are on. Page-structure undo and redo are session-only; a reopened book starts with an empty page history.

Drawing on a page

A page is an ordinary document. Open it from the Page Manager and you draw with the same tools, layers, brushes, selections, and filters you use everywhere else. The page opens in its own remembered workspace, so each page keeps whatever Illustration / Vector / Animation lens you last left it in.

When the print guides are on (or a page sets its own bleed and safe area), Limner draws two non-destructive guide rectangles over the canvas:

• The trim line (blue) marks the final cut edge of the printed page.
• The safe rectangle (orange) marks the area to keep important art and text inside.

The guides are a display overlay only. They are never composited into your artwork and never affect undo, the eyedropper, or export. A webtoon or screen page has no bleed, so it shows no trim guide.

The Panel tool

While a Book is open, a comic Panel tool is appended to the tool strip in every workspace, so you can lay panels on any page without switching modes. Panels are frames: each panel CLIPS the page's raster paint to its interior, so nothing you paint spills into the gutters between frames. The clip is a non-destructive display effect, so your true pixels stay intact for undo, the eyedropper, and export.

• Drag an empty area of the canvas to draw a new rectangular panel.
• Click an existing panel to select it; then drag it to move or resize it.

The Panel tool options bar edits the selected panel live, or the defaults for the next panel you draw:

Panels are stored with the page document, so they travel with the file and reopen exactly as you left them.

Saving and exporting

A whole Book saves into one .limnerbook file. The file holds the book metadata (page size, resolution, binding, reading order, spreads, default bleed / safe) and the full ordered page list, with each page embedding its own complete document blob. Use Save to write it, or Save As to write a copy under a new name.

The pages themselves use Limner's normal document format (version 19), which is where each page's layers, vectors, panels, and animation live. The format is additive: documents saved by older versions of Limner still open, and a v18-or-earlier file simply loads with no panels.

Export on the book toolbar writes every page to numbered PNG files. It prompts for a base name, then writes the pages as name_001.png, name_002.png, and so on, padded so they sort in order. A tall webtoon book (no print bleed, strip-shaped pages) is also sliced vertically into platform-sized pieces, named name_001_01.png, name_001_02.png, and so on. When the export finishes, Limner reports how many files it wrote and where.

Related pages

• Layers: the layer stack on each page.
• Vector Mode: the vector tools you can use on a page.
• File Formats and Export: what a .limnerbook and a .limner document store.

Construction Aids: Rulers, Symmetry, Perspective

Construction aids are drawing guides that snap your strokes to clean geometry: straight lines, parallel lines, circles, mirror copies, and perspective lines that converge on vanishing points. They do not paint. They constrain whatever you paint next with the Brush, the Line and Shape tools (see Shapes), and most other stroke tools.

This page covers the four ruler kinds, guides, grid snap, symmetry, perspective, and the Smart Shape gesture.

Where the aids live

All of the aid tools share one flyout group in the left tool strip, in this order:

• Linear Ruler
• Parallel Ruler
• Radial Ruler
• Concentric Ruler
• Symmetry
• Perspective

There is no menu path and no default keyboard shortcut for any aid tool. You can assign shortcuts in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

Two things to know about how the aids behave:

• Selecting an aid tool puts you in its edit mode. A drag on the canvas places or moves that aid's geometry. It never paints.
• Any handle can be grabbed at any time. While any aid tool is active, pressing near a ruler point, a guide, a symmetry handle, or a vanishing point grabs the nearest one and switches to its tool automatically, so you can nudge any aid without first picking its tool. The grab range is about 12 pixels on screen.
• Aid edits have their own undo. Rulers, symmetry, and perspective share a lightweight undo and redo stack (up to 64 steps). While an aid tool is active, Ctrl+Z steps back through aid edits rather than the document history. These shortcuts are rebindable in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

The ruler, symmetry, and perspective geometry is session state, not saved per document.

The Snap checkbox

When a ruler is placed or any guide exists, a Snap checkbox appears at the left of the tool-options bar, no matter which tool is active. It is on by default. Turn it off to draw freely without removing your rulers and guides, then turn it back on to resume snapping.

Rulers

A ruler resolves a single constraint at the moment your stroke begins, then projects every later point of that stroke onto the same line or circle, so the whole stroke rides one clean path. There are four kinds. Each is its own tool.

A freshly selected ruler is unplaced: nothing shows and nothing snaps until your first drag on the canvas draws it. That first draw is a single undo step, so one Ctrl+Z removes the ruler again.

Linear

A single fixed straight line. Every stroke projects onto that one line, wherever you start drawing. Drag on the canvas to set the two endpoints. Use it for one repeated edge, a horizon, or a single straight rail.

Parallel

A fixed direction. Each stroke snaps to a line through its own start point, parallel to that direction. Drag once to set the direction, then draw anywhere to lay down parallel strokes. Use it for hatching, wood grain, or any field of parallel lines.

Radial (focus)

A focus point. Each stroke snaps to the ray through the focus and the stroke's start point, so lines radiate from (or converge on) the focus. Drag to place the focus point. A stroke that begins exactly on the focus has no direction, so it does not snap. Use it for sunbursts, spokes, and one-point radial layouts.

Concentric

A center point. Each stroke is locked to the circle centered there whose radius is fixed at your stroke's start point. The radius comes from where you begin; the stroke then sweeps around that circle. Drag to place the center. A stroke that begins on the center has no radius, so it does not snap. Use it for rings, ripples, and concentric arcs.

Ruler options

These controls appear on the tool-options bar for any of the four rulers.

Hint shown on the bar: "Drag on the canvas to place or move the ruler, focus, or a guide."

The kind of ruler is decided by which ruler tool is active, not by a control on this bar. The Snap checkbox itself lives in the shared header (above), not in this list.

Placing and moving a ruler

• For Linear and Parallel, the first drag sets the start point, then drags the end point. Later drags grab whichever endpoint is nearer.
• For Radial and Concentric, only the single point (the focus or center) is placed and dragged.
• Reset recenters the ruler: a horizontal line across the middle for Linear and Parallel, or the canvas center for the single-point kinds.

Guides

Guides are infinite horizontal or vertical lines. A stroke that begins near one snaps onto it, with the snapped line passing through your stroke's start point (only the guide's axis coordinate is forced). Guides are added from the ruler options bar with the + H and + V buttons and are owned by the ruler tools.

A new guide is added at the canvas mid-line. A stroke snaps to the nearest guide within about 6 pixels on screen of where it starts, and only while Snap is on. You can drag a guide on the canvas to move it (the drag changes only its constrained coordinate). The Clear button removes every guide at once.

Grid snap

Grid snap is separate from rulers and guides. With Grid snap on, once a stroke has moved far enough for its direction to be clear (about 6 pixels on screen), it rails to the nearest View grid line of the dominant axis, so you can draw straight along grid lines.

Grid snap uses the View grid spacing. It works off the spacing whether or not the grid overlay is actually shown.

Symmetry

The Symmetry tool mirrors and rotates each dab of your stroke around a movable center, so a single stroke is duplicated into a symmetric pattern. It applies to brush dabs, smudge and blur, and vector strokes. Entering the Symmetry tool while symmetry is Off starts it on Vertical so there is something to see and edit.

Modes

Symmetry options

Hint shown on the bar: "Drag on the canvas to move the centre or rotate the axis."

Moving and rotating the axis

The symmetry axis has two on-canvas handles: a center dot and a rotation handle that sits out along the axis. Drag the center dot to move the origin of the mirror or rotation. Drag the rotation handle to turn the axis to any angle. The whole move or rotate is one undo step.

The center starts at the canvas mid-point and the angle starts at 0. Recentre returns both to those defaults.

Perspective

The Perspective tool sets up vanishing points, an eye-level line, and an optional perspective grid. Strokes then snap onto the line that runs from where you start toward the best-matching vanishing point. Entering the tool while perspective is Off starts it on 2-point and arms placing the first vanishing point. Leaving the tool disarms placement so an armed click cannot hijack another tool's first stroke.

Modes

Perspective options

When the mode is Off, only the mode buttons are shown. The rest appear once you pick a mode.

Hint shown on the bar: "Drag a vanishing point or the eye-level line to move it."

Placing vanishing points

Click a VP button to arm placement, then press on the canvas to drop that point. Placement flows on to the next unset point for the mode, so you can place them one after another. Each placement is a single undo step, and the placement gesture never paints. The eye-level line starts at the canvas mid-line (height divided by two).

Moving points and the eye level

When no placement is armed, drag a placed vanishing point to move it, or grab the eye-level line to slide it up or down. Each drag is one undo step.

How perspective snapping works

Perspective snapping is active only when Snap is on and at least one vanishing point is placed. On pointer-down it records the start point; the line direction locks once you have moved about 6 pixels on screen. The vanishing point chosen is the one whose line best aligns with your initial movement (toward or away from the point both count). Every later sample then projects onto that line.

Perspective snapping is the fallback below ruler, guide, and grid snapping: if a ruler or guide is snapping the stroke, that takes precedence.

Smart Shapes (draw and hold to snap)

Smart Shape is a gesture, not a separate tool. It works on the Brush tool only, and never for a transparent-paint (Erase) stroke. Draw a freehand shape and then hold the pointer still at the end of the stroke. If the path you drew reads as a clean primitive, the freehand is replaced by the snapped shape, rendered with your active brush, and dropped into on-canvas re-edit. If it matches nothing, your freehand stroke is kept, so you never lose an intentional squiggle.

A Smart Shape checkbox on the Brush tool-options bar turns the gesture on or off (on by default, persisted across sessions). Untick it if you prefer every stroke to stay freehand.

Because the snap is checked both as you move and once per frame, a held-still mouse (which sends no move events) snaps just like a tablet pen.

What it recognizes

Smart Shape is deliberately conservative so a back-and-forth shading or fill scribble is never force-straightened. A path is rejected (left freehand) when it has fewer than 8 points, is shorter than 12 pixels, has a bounding-box diagonal under 10 canvas pixels (on top of the 48 screen-pixel size floor above), or reverses direction along its own axis more than 3 times (the scribble gate).

When a path does pass, it can snap to:

• Line (a clean single-pass straight stroke)
• Arc (an open bowed stroke)
• Ellipse and Rectangle (axis-aligned closed shapes)
• Polygon (a rotated rectangle or a convex shape of 3 to 7 corners)
• Rotated ellipse

For a closed stroke, the tightest-fitting candidate wins.

Constraining and re-editing

• Hold Shift as the shape snaps to constrain it: a perfect circle or square, or a line snapped to the nearest 15-degree increment.
• The snapped shape floats with draggable handles, an oriented selection box, and a rotation handle. While dragging a handle, Shift constrains to a square or a 15-degree line; on the rotation handle, Shift snaps rotation to 15-degree steps.
• Commit by tapping off the handles or pressing Enter. Cancel with Esc.
• On a vector layer, the snapped shape commits as an editable vector stroke rather than a flat raster shape. See Vector Editing.

The same shape re-edit handles are used by the Line tool. See Shapes.

See also

• Shapes
• Brush
• Menus (View ▸ Grid and grid spacing)
• Preferences and Shortcuts

File Formats and Export

Limner reads and writes its own native project format and exchanges work with other apps through PSD, ABR, SVG, PNG, and JPEG. This page lists every format the app handles, what each one stores, and how to use the matching commands.

Quick reference

All keyboard shortcuts mentioned here are the defaults and can be changed in Edit ▸ Preferences ▸ Keyboard Shortcuts.

The native Limner format (.limner)

Limner's own project format is a single binary file that holds your entire working document. New files save as .limner by default; older .artpaint files still open and re-save in place, because both extensions share the same on-disk format (they are byte-for-byte identical). The default save name is untitled.limner.

What a .limner file stores

A document file is the complete project, not just flattened pixels. The current format (version 19) saves:

• Every raster layer (name, blend mode, opacity, visibility, and its painted pixels).
• Layer folders (single level).
• Layer masks.
• Layer locks.
• Reference layers.
• Re-editable text layers, so you can keep editing text after reopening.
• Vector-layer strokes and the brush snapshots they were drawn with.
• Vector-mode graphic objects (the Bezier object scene), including live-corner radii and clip groups.
• Comic panels (frame folders) on a page, added in version 19. A document with no panels stays byte-identical to a version 18 file. See the Book format below.
• Animation, when the document uses it: every frame's cels, the frame rate, play mode, the in/out range, onion-skin settings, and the frame colour tags. A single-frame document stores none of this, so it stays the same size as before. See Animation Mode.
• The embedded timelapse recording, so it travels with the art and can resume on reopen. See Timelapse.
• Per-document session stats (active drawing time and committed stroke count). See Stats panel.
• The canvas size and DPI.
• A capped slice of undo/redo history (the most recent 16 undo and 16 redo entries each, paint strokes and layer add/remove only).

Older documents keep loading. A file written by an earlier version of Limner opens normally, and any file without animation (including everything saved before version 17) opens as a single frame. A document that uses animation reopens straight onto the timeline in Animation mode; a vector scene reopens in Vector mode; everything else opens in Illustration.

Pixels are stored compressed (run-length packed) on disk, so typical mostly-empty artwork saves small. Files are written atomically: Limner stages the new file beside the target and renames it into place, so the previous version is never left half-written, even when saving over the file you have open.

Saving and opening

Save writes to the document's tracked path; if nothing has changed since the last save, Limner skips the write. Save As prompts for a name and location and offers both the .limner and .artpaint extensions. If a file with the chosen name already exists, Limner shows its own overwrite confirmation in the app.

Opening a file that is already open in another tab just switches to that tab rather than opening a second copy. You can also open a document by double-clicking it in Windows (the .limner / .artpaint association launches Limner.exe with the file).

Limits and safety

Documents are loaded defensively: a corrupt or hostile file produces a clear error (for example "not a Limner document", "unsupported file version", "file has no layers", or "file has a corrupt layer"), shown in a dialog rather than crashing the app. A file written by a build with a different internal tile size cannot be loaded.

For the on-disk layout, the version history table, and the developer-level details, see the developer file-formats page.

The Book format (.limnerbook)

A Book is a multi-page comic, manga, or book project. It is not a separate drawing mode: each page is an ordinary Limner document (it can be Illustration, Vector, or Animation), and the Book wraps an ordered list of those pages with its own page metadata. The whole project saves as a single .limnerbook file, with one full per-page document embedded inside it.

Creating, opening, and saving

When a Book is open you save it with the normal Save and Save As commands, which write the .limnerbook file (Save prompts for a name and location the first time). The default save name is untitled.limnerbook. Once a Book is open, a comic Panel tool appears in the tool strip; panels you draw on a page clip that page's artwork to the panel frame, so nothing spills into the gutters. See Menus for the File-menu commands.

What a .limnerbook file stores

• The ordered list of pages, each one a complete embedded Limner document (the same per-page bytes a stand-alone .limner file holds, version 19).
• The Book's page order and per-page identity, so pages keep their place when you reorder or page through them.
• Book-level metadata (such as the binding direction for left-to-right or manga right-to-left reading).

Because each page is a full document, every page keeps its own layers, masks, vectors, text, and comic panels. Older Books still open in newer builds, and an older per-page document inside a Book loads the same way a stand-alone older .limner file does.

PSD (Photoshop)

Limner imports and exports layered Photoshop documents, so you can move work to and from Photoshop, Clip Studio Paint, Krita, and other apps.

Export PSD

File ▸ PSD (in the File menu's Export section) writes a layered, uncompressed Photoshop file:

• One PSD layer per Limner layer, with the layer's name, blend mode, opacity, and visibility preserved.
• Full-canvas RGBA channels per layer, plus the flattened merged image.
• The document DPI.

Notes and limits:

• Channels are written uncompressed, so PSD files are large but exact.
• PSD always exports the full canvas. The crop presets below apply only to PNG and JPEG.
• Layer names are stored up to 255 bytes.
• Export is refused if the document is too large for the PSD section limits ("document too large for PSD export; reduce canvas size or layer count") or has more than 32767 layers ("too many layers for PSD export; the format allows at most 32767").

Import PSD

File ▸ Import PSD opens a Photoshop file as a new Limner document. Each PSD layer becomes a Limner layer, keeping its name, blend mode, opacity, and visibility.

Supported and unsupported:

• Supported: 8-bit RGB documents, both raw and RLE (PackBits) channel compression. Documents with no layers fall back to the merged image (named "Background").
• Not supported: PSB (large-document) files, non-8-bit and non-RGB documents, and ZIP-compressed channels. Each of these produces a clear error message.
• Imported documents are capped at 8192 by 8192 pixels.
• If the file has no DPI, Limner uses 96.

PSD layer groups flatten to a single-level stack on import, and the imported document starts with fresh history (it is not tied to a .limner path until you save).

ABR (Photoshop brushes)

Limner imports and exports .abr brush sets. Importing brings sampled (bitmap) brush tips in as new brushes; exporting writes a widely compatible ABR version 2 file. These commands live in the Brush picker, not the File menu. See Brushes for the full workflow, the import folder naming, and the dynamics that do and do not travel in the ABR format.

SVG (vector export)

File ▸ SVG (vector), in the File menu's Export section, writes a standalone SVG 1.1 document from your Vector-mode graphic layers, so vector artwork leaves Limner as true resolution-independent geometry rather than a rasterized image.

What it covers:

• Paths, fills, and strokes (width, cap, join, miter, and dash).
• Object opacity and fill rule.
• Linear and radial gradients.

What it does not cover (these are not in the vector model yet): raster (Illustration) layers, text objects, clipping, and live effects.

If no vector layer has any objects on it, Limner shows a "Nothing to export" notice instead of writing an empty file. The default save name is artwork.svg. For more on building vector artwork, see Vector editing.

PNG and JPEG (still image export)

Both export the flattened canvas. Pick the command from the File menu's Export section.

JPEG has no alpha channel, so transparent areas are composited over opaque white before encoding. PNG keeps the alpha channel. PNG also embeds the document DPI (a pHYs chunk), so print software reads the intended physical size. JPEG export does not write resolution metadata.

Crop and aspect presets

The File ▸ Crop to: submenu (in the File menu's Export section) sets a centre-crop applied to PNG and JPEG exports (PSD always exports the full canvas). The chosen aspect persists between exports.

Limner takes the largest rectangle of the chosen ratio that fits the canvas, centred, with even dimensions and offsets. A canvas under 2 pixels on an edge exports uncropped.

Watermark

You can stamp an optional signature or logo onto PNG and JPEG exports. The toggle and settings live in the File menu's Export section.

• File ▸ Add watermark turns the stamp on or off. The toggle is stored separately from the settings, so turning it off never discards your configured image or placement.
• File ▸ Watermark settings opens the configuration window.

If "Add watermark" is on but no image has been chosen, the export stops and tells you to pick one ("no watermark image chosen"). A watermark you asked for is never silently dropped: if the chosen image fails to load, the export aborts instead of writing an unwatermarked file. The watermark is sized against the final exported dimensions (after any crop).

Import Image as Layer

File ▸ Import Image as Layer brings a PNG or JPEG into the current document as a new layer above the active one. The image is centred on the canvas at its native scale (clipped if it is larger than the canvas, the way Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint behave), and it lands in a single undo step, named after the file. This command requires a document to be open.

Drag and drop

Drop a file onto the Limner window to open or import it. Dropping several files at once handles each one in turn. Limner routes by file type:

The image set accepted by drag and drop is wider than the File ▸ Import Image as Layer dialog, which offers PNG and JPEG only. When an image is dropped with no document open, Limner creates a white-paper document sized to the image (capped at 8192 by 8192 pixels) and lays the image in at 1:1.

Crash-recovery autosave

While you work, Limner periodically writes a crash-recovery snapshot of each modified document in the same format as a normal save. These are cleared on a clean exit. If the app closed unexpectedly, the next launch offers to Restore or Discard the recovered work.

See also

• Timelapse: record and export a video of your process, embedded in the document.
• Brushes: importing and exporting .abr brush sets.
• Vector editing: building the vector artwork that SVG export writes.
• Developer file-formats reference: the on-disk layout and version history.

Timelapse

Limner can record your whole painting session and play it back as a sped-up video. One recorded frame plays back per stroke (or per timed sample), so a few hours of work becomes a short, satisfying clip you can post or keep. The recording is saved inside the document, so you can stop, close Limner, reopen the file days later, and pick up the same timelapse right where you left off.

There is no menu entry and no keyboard shortcut for the timelapse. Everything is driven from the Timelapse panel (a dock tab) and from the two short prompts described below.

How recording works

• Limner captures the canvas (the flattened composite of all layers) and encodes it to an H.264 .mp4 with an encoder built into the app. There is nothing to install and no companion files: encoding works the same on any GPU.
• Capture is non-blocking. Frames are read back from the GPU and handed to a dedicated encoder thread, so painting never stalls on encoding. If the encoder ever falls behind on a very large canvas, the occasional frame is dropped rather than freezing your brush. The on-screen frame count stays accurate because dropped frames are not counted.
• Playback is fixed at 30 frames per second. At "1x" speed the panel shows the duration as frames / 30.
• A timelapse is made of one or more segments (one self-contained .mp4 per recording session or save). Exporting joins them into a single continuous video.

Capture resolution

Recording happens at the canvas's native size by default, capped only by the resolution preset you choose. The long edge is capped to the preset's limit (aspect preserved), and the short edge to 2160 (the built-in encoder accepts up to 3840x2160 landscape or 2160x3840 portrait), so a square canvas records at up to 2160x2160. A canvas smaller than the caps records at its real size and is never upscaled. 4K is the maximum on purpose: recording above 4K balloons memory with no real benefit.

You can see the exact size and codec that will be used in the small hint line under the Resolution control, for example → 1920×1080 · H.264, or → 2160×2160 · H.264 (from 6000×6000) when a large canvas is downscaled to fit.

Frames live inside the document

The encoded segments are embedded in the saved .limner file (this also applies to legacy .artpaint files from format version 5 onward). That is why the panel footnote reads "Frames saved inside the .limner file." A save while recording rolls the active segment over seamlessly, so the recording survives the save and keeps going. When you reopen a file that already holds a timelapse, Limner offers to continue it. See file-formats.md for the document format details.

The recording prompts

Limner shows a short modal in two situations. Both embed the full setup controls (see below) so you can configure everything before recording starts.

• Record a timelapse? appears once right after you create a new canvas. The body reads: "Limner records this session as a timelapse, saved inside the .limner file so you can keep recording every time you reopen it." Buttons: Record to start, or Not now to dismiss.
• Continue this timelapse? appears when you open a file that already has a timelapse. It tells you how many frames are stored and that recording picks up where you left off and the whole thing exports as one video. Buttons: Continue to resume, or Not now.

Pressing Esc or clicking outside the modal also dismisses it.

The Timelapse panel

Open it as the Timelapse dock tab (record icon). The panel shows one of two states.

While recording

• A red Recording label.
• A line showing Frames: {n} ({n/30}s of video at 1x).
• Two buttons:

Both buttons force a final capture of the latest edit first, so your last change always lands in the video.

When not recording

• If saved frames exist, a strong label: Saved timelapse: {n} frames ({n/30}s at 1x).
• The shared setup controls (Resolution, Quality, Capture, Watermark, and the export length options once frames exist).
• A Record button, or Continue recording when saved frames already exist.
• An Export video... button (shown only when saved frames exist) that saves the whole timelapse so far as one .mp4.
• The footnote: "Frames saved inside the .limner file."

Setup controls

These appear both in the panel (when not recording) and in the prompt modals.

Resolution

The recording size preset. This is greyed out (locked) when you continue an existing timelapse, because every segment must share one size to join cleanly.

Quality

A single quality slider. The slider runs from lower quality on the left to higher quality on the right. Higher quality produces a larger file. (Internally this maps to the encoder's constant-quality value, which the panel presents inverted so the slider reads naturally.)

Capture (cadence)

When a frame is grabbed during recording.

Every (s)

Shown only when Capture is set to Timed or Per edit + timed.