BIGGER UPDATES
YOUR OWN LOOK: A Theme From Any Palette
Pick any palette and the app dresses itself in it: panels, text and accents drawn from your colors, every pairing checked so text stays readable, saved under a name and switched live. Dark or light, your call; the art and the palette swatches keep their true colors. One accent color of your own can sit over any theme or look, its shades worked out and checked the same way.
READY-MADE LOOKS: Six to Start, Yours to Share
Six looks come with the app, each built from one of its palettes, and any look you make can be saved as a file and opened on another machine. The theme list preserves the built-in themes, the ready-made looks and your own apart.
CANVAS COLORS: The Checker, the Grid, the Space Around
Preferences has a Canvas section: the transparency checker's colors and square size, the space around the picture, the pixel grid's color and strength, and the onion-skin tints. Every change shows at once and stays, and Reset brings the originals back.
YOUR OWN BRUSHES: Scale, Turn and Scatter
A captured brush scales up in whole pixels, turns and flips on the spot, and two- or four-way radial symmetry turns each repeat instead of stamping it flat. Spacing turns a drag into dashes and Jitter into a spray; the bracket keys step the scale.
INKS THROUGH A BRUSH: Replace and Shade
A captured brush painting in your color answers to the Ink drop-down like the plain brush: Replace recolors the pixels under the shape and Shade steps them along the ramp.
ANIMATED BRUSHES: Capture Every Frame
Tick All frames beside Capture and the selection is read off every frame as one animated brush, each dab painting the next. Import brush brings in a PNG or GIF from anywhere, and every brush shows a thumbnail of its own art.
LAYER TIMING: A Layer Preserves Its Own Speed
Turn on Layer timing in the Feature Manager and any layer can keep its own time: it loops through its own frames at its own speed while the rest of the timeline keeps going. Pick its speed from a list or type an exact one, choose whether it loops, holds or plays once, and the dot beside its name plays that layer alone. Every export, from GIF and video to the animation sheet, Godot and Aseprite, now plays that layer at its own speed, exactly as Live Preview shows it, and a rigged picture exports its poses. A GameMaker strip holds a longer frame for extra columns and tells you the speed to set on the sprite, and the atlas's normal map sheet keeps step with the picture sheet. A picture with a rig and a timed layer shows that layer at its own speed too, in Live Preview and in every export, a single-frame picture whose layer plays once and disappears now plays that layer's own time when you press Play, and a frame added or a timing changed while playback runs is picked up at once.
BRUSH DYNAMICS: What the Brush Follows
Preferences has a Pen and dynamics section with three rows: what the brush's size, its fade and its new dither density follow. Choose a pen's pressure, how fast your hand moves, or how far the stroke has traveled; faster and further thin the brush, and a pen presses harder for more. Everything starts at nothing, so the brush paints as it always has until you choose. The bar at the bottom shows the pen's pressure, and the speed or length while you paint.
THE TAPER AND THE FOLLOW: A Stroke With Ends
Taper, in Tool Options for Paint and Erase, thins both ends of a stroke over the cells you set, so a line starts thin, swells, and ends thin again, and the preview shows it as you draw. Follows the stroke, a box under the captured brush rows in Tool Options, turns the captured art to face the way your hand moves, in quarter turns.
FAST STROKES: An Unbroken Line
A quick flick now paints the same unbroken line a slow stroke does, with the brush, the eraser, every ink and a captured brush. A pixel-perfect stroke that leaves the canvas and comes back no longer draws a line across your art.
CANVAS SIZE: Always in View, Dragged by Its Edges
The picture's size now sits beside the zoom at the bottom right. Drag any of the small handles just outside the canvas to add or remove room on that side; the art maintains its size and its place.
PIXEL SIZE: Chunkier Pixels on a New Picture Too
On a picture you started blank, Pixel size now works the way it does on an opened photo: a photo imported as a layer re-pixelates crisply, and moved or animated layers keep their place. The photo is saved with your project too, so it stays crisp after you reopen it.
SAVE FIRST: New and Open Ask Before They Replace Your Work
File ▸ New, Open and the other doors that replace your picture now offer to save unsaved changes first, the same way closing does.
PIXEL DOCTOR: It Shows You Before It Fixes
Before you press Fix, Pixel Doctor now shows every pixel it will change. Its fix for lone pixels removes only a tiny stray floating on its own, like a stray dot or a single star, and blends in a speck that is almost the same color as the art around it. Every other single pixel is left alone: an eye, a glint, a highlight. Soft shadows and glows stay too. With a selection, it works only inside it, and undo works right from the Pixel Doctor window.
SMALL FIXES: Reset, Linux Fonts, Keyed Layers
Reset Tool Options now really resets every knob on the tool card, the captured brush's included; your colors stay, and so does the brush you captured. On Linux the Text tool now lists the fonts installed on the computer, the way it always has on Windows. When a layer has keys on its Across, Down or Fade row in the timeline, moving the matching control in Layer FX sets a key at the current frame instead of being ignored, and one drag is one undo step.
SELECTIONS: Shift in Place, Save by Name
With a selection on the canvas, Ctrl+Arrow moves the pixels under it while the marquee stays put. Save Selection maintain it under a name for later, and the Select tool offers a shape marquee: Circle, Star, Heart and more.
ANIMATED FILES: Every Frame Opens
A GIF, APNG or animated WebP opens as all of its frames, each timed the way the file says. Drop one onto an open picture and it offers to add its frames there, or to add it as one layer.
ZOOM BAR: Minus, Percent, Plus
A zoom bar sits at the bottom right. Press minus or plus to step the zoom, or click the percentage for a size, Fit to Window or Actual Size. Ctrl+wheel still zooms toward the pointer.
DRAW YOUR OWN FONT: A Board of Letters
The Font panel opens with a glyph board: one button per character, the letter filling it in the accent green and what you have drawn for it in the corner. Click one and the canvas zooms to that cell; on the sheet every empty cell shows its letter in the same green, and the cell you are drawing is framed in it.
ARTUS PREVIEW: A Player With a Clear Frame
The rig preview draws on the checkerboard with a border around the canvas, and a player beneath it walks every frame's pose at its own speed. Live Preview shows the posed frames too.
UNDO YOU CAN TRUST: Esc Preserves Your Redo
Press Esc to cancel a floating piece, a text or shape being placed, a pen path or a drag in the Graph panel, and Undo and Redo stay exactly as they were, so a step you undid is still there to bring back. A locked layer now stays locked under Grayscale, Posterize, Snap to Palette, Gradient Map, Add Outline, Replace Color and the other commands that change a whole layer, the way the brushes always respected it.
SMALLER UPDATES
Undo and Redo ask you to finish a drag first, a tool key in the middle of a drag preserves what you drew, Delete, Cut, Paste and Fill say why when a layer cannot take them instead of adding an empty step, capturing a tile is its own undo step, adding a guide or changing the color budget or the tile set marks the picture unsaved so closing asks first, guides lock in place from View ▸ Guides, a crosshair cursor is one tick in Preferences, a grayscale picture offers a palette of its own grays, saving while a lifted piece still floats preserves the piece, dragging the Tile Stamp with no tile picked no longer deletes undo steps, gray pictures saved in high bit depth open in their own shades, dragging beside a zoomed-out picture pans again, Pixelate Mode can pin a reference image to trace over, Preferences, Autotile, Spectaculum, Scaena and the 3D model dialog fit a short laptop screen with their buttons in reach, the Fabrica hover picks the block you point at, a live-linked model never shows a half-written save, holding the pen still no longer starts the Windows ring, the bone button always brings Artus, exporting a document with tags to Aseprite no longer fails, a one-frame picture whose layer preserves its own time now counts as animated wherever you export it, batch and sheet exports no longer change with a paused playhead, the app opens full screen every time and Preferences can switch it to maximized, a close button at the top right closes it in one click, a button in the bottom-right corner switches full screen on and off, Esc now only cancels and no longer leaves full screen, a big picture no longer pushes the canvas off the screen while Live Preview is open, changing a layer's opacity or blend after saving now asks before closing, undo waits until a stroke is finished, and numerous fixes for timing, export, loading and discovered bugs.