Tools and strokes

Tools

Down the left: Brush (B), Eraser (E), Fill, Picker, Gradient, Crop (C), Arrow (A), Points (N), Pen (P), Width (W), Text (T), Shape (U), Select (S). Press Select again to cycle its variants, or hold it for the list: Freehand, Polygon, Box, Circle, Magic wand.

The rail arranges itself, and takes only the width it is using. One centred column when the window is tall enough to hold every tool in one, two when it is not — and the rail is exactly as wide as the columns it chose, rather than a fixed width with space around it.

Drag its edge to overrule that. A width you set is yours and stays put when the window changes shape, and it is also the way to the two layouts the rail will not choose for itself: three columns, worth the canvas it costs only when you have asked for it, and past ~150 px a single labelled list.

Hold Ctrl to borrow the eyedropper. The tool actually changes while you hold it — the rail highlights, the cursor changes — and letting go puts your brush back exactly where it was. The colour you want is nearly always already on the canvas, and going to fetch it is what breaks the stroke you were about to make.

It works from the Brush, Eraser, Fill, Shape and Gradient. It does not work from the Pen or either arrow, and that is deliberate: those have work in flight — a path you are still placing, a line you are inside — and borrowing a tool must never be the thing that finishes it. Move keeps Ctrl for its own "drag the whole layer".

The tool keys work the same way when held. Tap E and you have chosen the eraser, as ever; hold E, scrub, and let go, and you never left the brush. B, F, V and I do the same — brush, fill, move and the eyedropper — so you can reach for one, use it and land back where you were without thinking about it. The split is how long the key is down: a quick press is a choice, anything longer is a borrow, which is Photoshop's spring-loaded rule, so the reflex transfers.

A held E erases at the brush's size. A hold is a correction to the mark you just made, so the borrowed eraser takes that mark's size rather than whatever the eraser was last set to — and letting go puts the eraser's own size back along with your brush. Tap E instead and the eraser is yours as you last configured it, size included. Resize the eraser during a hold and that is a decision: the new size sticks as the eraser's own.

The other tool keys only latch. S is taken — pressing it again cycles the selection variants, so it cannot also mean "hold me". The pen, both arrows, the Width tool and Crop are left out for the reason Ctrl is: they have work in flight, and letting go of a key is not a good way to finish a path you were in the middle of placing, or a frame you were in the middle of judging.

Cropping by eye

Crop (C) puts a frame round the page and dims everything outside it, so you are looking at the crop rather than imagining it. Drag anywhere to pull a fresh frame out; drag its handles to adjust; drag inside it to slide the whole frame around once it is smaller than the page. Shift on a corner holds the ratio it has, the way Shift constrains every other tool here. Faint thirds are drawn inside the frame to judge against.

Enter crops the paper to the frame; Escape puts the frame back round the whole page. Escape does not put the tool away — leaving the tool is picking another one, and one key meaning both "undo my drag" and "I am finished" would be a key you cannot use confidently. The bar above the canvas shows what the paper would become and carries the same two as buttons.

After a crop the frame reopens on the new page, because you still have the tool: taking a little more off is another drag, not another trip to the toolbar.

Nothing drawn moves, and nothing is deleted — this is the same crop the Image menu performs, so ink outside the new edge stays in the file and comes back if you grow the canvas again. See Cropping under Documents and projects for the two menu commands, which answer the question the other way round: crop to my selection, and trim to the ink.

Arrow and Select are not the same tool

They sound alike and they do different things, so it is worth one paragraph.

Select (S)	Picks an area. Draw a shape round part of the drawing and what you paint afterwards is confined to it. What you have selected is a region, not any particular mark.
Arrow (A)	Picks a thing. Click a line and you have got that line — the entire stroke you drew in one go, however far it runs. It also picks guides, placed symbols and rig anchors.

Click to take something; Shift-click to add another, and Shift-click one you already have to put it back. Click empty canvas to let go of everything — though a Shift-click that misses leaves your selection alone, because you are part-way through building one. What you have picked is traced in cyan — a line down its middle, narrow enough that the drawn line still shows either side of it — so it is always clear which line you got.

Hovering shows you the line before you take it, traced in the same cyan a little thicker — what the click is about to give you. Where lines overlap that is the difference between picking the one you meant and finding out afterwards. The Width tool previews the same way, for the same reason.

Drag from empty canvas to sweep up everything the box touches — touched, not enclosed, so a box across a limb takes its lines without your having to draw one round the whole character. Hold Shift as you start the drag to add to what you already have. The box is a solid cyan line round a faint cyan wash rather than the marching ants of an area selection, because it is doing a different job.

It picks what you can see. Where two lines cross you get the one on top. Clicking inside a filled shape picks the fill; clicking in a hole in that shape does not, because the hole is not part of it. A gradient is picked by the line you dragged to make it, not by everywhere it reaches.

What you erased is not there to pick. An eraser leaves a record of itself so that reloading a drawing rebuilds it exactly, but as far as every tool is concerned the rub and what it rubbed out have both gone: you cannot click an eraser stroke, a box dragged over one does not sweep it up, and clicking the gap an eraser left picks nothing rather than the line that used to run through it. A line erased along its whole length is out of reach entirely. Undo is what brings an erasure back — it is the only thing that does, so an eraser stroke you did not mean to make is undone rather than selected and deleted.

Erasing lightly is a different act and is treated as one. An eraser below full opacity fades a line rather than removing it, and a faded line is still a line you can pick, move and recolour. The same goes for a line rubbed through the middle: the surviving ends are still yours, and only the gap is out of reach.

Guides and symbols win over lines where they overlap. The drawing is the thing that is everywhere, so if it won, a guide crossing a line would be unclickable wherever you had drawn.

Moving to another layer lets go of what you had picked, because it is not there any more. Stepping along a hold does not — the same drawing is still on screen.

Picking up another tool lets go too. Selected lines are the Arrow's — no other tool moves, recolours or deletes them — so the highlight goes when the Arrow does, rather than sitting on the canvas pointing at something you can no longer do. Clicking empty canvas, or picking a guide or a symbol instead, lets go for the same reason.

If the layer is locked it says so rather than doing nothing — but only when you actually click a line on it, not every time you click past one.

A line drawn entirely outside the canvas can still be picked, moved and deleted — where a line is does not depend on where the paper ends.

What you can do with what you picked

Move it by dragging one of the selected lines. The outline follows your pointer while the button is down and the drawing itself arrives when you let go — so you can see exactly where it is going without the canvas redrawing the whole frame on every twitch. A press that does not move is just a click.

Nudge it with the arrow keys: one pixel, or ten with Shift. This is the way to place a line exactly, because a drag cannot reliably land on a single pixel. The cost is worth knowing: while the Arrow is in your hand and something is selected, ← and → nudge instead of stepping frames. Let go of the selection, or pick up another tool, and they step frames again.

Delete it with Delete, or the button in the tool options. Undo puts the lines back in the order they were in, so nothing quietly ends up in front of something it was behind.

Recolour it with the button in the tool options — the selected lines take the current foreground colour. If a line was taking its colour from a palette swatch, recolouring it this way stops it following that swatch: you asked for this colour rather than that swatch's colour. Undo restores the link.

Everything is one undo step per action, however many lines are selected.

A moved line's texture changes, and that is deliberate. The grain of a brush comes from where the mark is on the canvas — that is what stops it boiling when you animate. Move a line and it is somewhere else, so it grains differently. If you need a mark preserved exactly, move the layer rather than the line.

Scale and rotate what you picked with Ctrl+T, the same transform the rest of the application uses — the handles appear around the lines rather than around the whole drawing, and only they move. Enter applies, Esc cancels.

While lines are picked the scope is this drawing and says so: a line lives on one drawing, so "all layers" or "the whole animation" would name cels it is not on.

A marquee selection wins if you have one up. If you have both an area selected and lines picked, Ctrl+T transforms the area — so if a transform takes something you did not expect, the usual reason is a marquee still up somewhere off screen, and Ctrl+D is the answer. The transform says what it is moving when it starts, so you can see which one it took before you drag anything.

Dragging picked lines now moves them as you drag rather than on release, and the whole drag is still one undo step.

Reshaping a line

Double-click a line to go inside it. The line gets a row of points along it and everything else on the canvas stops responding — click another line while you are in here and nothing happens, deliberately. Esc when you are done — or just pick another tool: anything that cannot work the points (anything but the white arrow and the Width tool) leaves the mode on its way past.

Why a mode rather than a held key: reaching into a drawing and moving its geometry is not something that should ever happen by accident, and a modifier is something you have to remember not to be holding.

The points come from the line you drew. You do not have to have planned for this — any line, drawn at any time, gets its points worked out when you first double-click it. A long stroke usually comes back as a handful of points rather than the hundreds you actually drew, because a point every wobble is not something a hand can work with.

Drag the line itself, between two points	Pulls the curve to where you put it. The points either side do not move — this bends the line rather than shifting it, and it is usually the one you want.
Drag a point	Moves it, and the line follows as you drag — the shape you see mid-drag is the shape you get on release.
Alt-drag a point	Pulls a curve out of it: the point stays put and its two arms reach for the pointer, mirrored — the same gesture the pen uses to place a curved point. The quickest way to turn a corner into a curve.
Click a point	Selects it — it fills in — and shows its handles: two arms, each ending in a small solid dot, that decide how the line curves through it. Drag a dot to bend the curve. A handle is always smaller than a point, so the two are not mistaken for each other.
Square points are corners, round ones are smooth	On a smooth point the two arms stay in line, so the curve runs through without a kink. On a corner they are independent.
Alt-drag an arm	Breaks the pair, turning a smooth point into a corner.
Shift-click	Adds a point to what you have got; dragging then moves them together.
Click empty canvas	Lets the points go, without leaving the mode.

Each drag is one undo step, however far you pushed the point around.

While you are inside a line you see the line itself, with its points on it. The thin cyan trace appears only while you are dragging — it shows where the line is going, and goes again once the ink has caught up. Points, handles and the trace are drawn in one cyan with a dark edge, so they stay visible on white paper, on black, and on artwork that happens to be cyan.

Fewer points

Simplify — on the quick bar while you are inside a line, beside the count of points it currently has — refits the line through fewer points and tells you how many are left: "Simplified: 31 points to 12." Press it again and it goes further. Each press is its own undo step, so one too many costs a single Ctrl+Z rather than the whole line.

It appears with the line you are inside rather than with a tool, because that is what it acts on — go in with the white arrow or the Width tool and it is there.

It refits the line as it is now, not the line you originally drew, so reshaping first and simplifying afterwards keeps the reshape. It also keeps the weight: fewer points describing the same line still carry the same taper.

A shape that genuinely needs the points it has says so rather than doing nothing.

Making a line heavier or lighter

The Width tool (W) changes how thick a line is along its length. Hover a line and it lights up; drag away from it to fatten it there, or back towards it to thin it. The change is local: it spreads a short way either side of where you are pointing and leaves the rest of the line as you drew it.

You do not have to open the line first — the drag takes hold of whatever is under the pointer, one press, the same as the white arrow. If you are already inside a line reshaping its points, reaching for this works on that line without leaving.

It is the same number your pen pressure writes, so a line you drew with a taper and a line you widened by hand are the same kind of thing afterwards. A line drawn with the pen, which had no pressure at all, starts out even and can be given a taper this way.

The whole drag is one undo step, and undoing it puts every original pressure back exactly.

What else a stroke can record from the pen

Pressure is always recorded. Tilt and speed are recorded when the brush you are drawing with uses them, and left out when it does not. You do not have to switch anything on: give a brush a tilt curve and its strokes start storing tilt; a plain round brush stores neither and its drawings stay exactly the size they were before any of this existed.

It works per axis, so nothing is stored for the sake of it — a brush that only reads speed records speed and no tilt.

The readout beside the pen settings shows what your tablet is actually delivering — tilt 34/-12 · speed 0.42 — whatever brush you have in hand. It is the quickest way to find out whether your pen reports tilt at all. Plenty do not, and a driver that does not will say no tilt reported rather than quietly recording zeros.

Keeping the numbers for later

There is one thing worth knowing before you need it. If you draw with a brush that ignores tilt and later decide those strokes should respond to it, adding the curve will do nothing — the pen's tilt was never stored, and it cannot be recovered. The drawing is not broken; there is simply nothing there to drive the mark.

If you would rather keep your options open, switch on Always record tilt and speed, even when the brush ignores them in Edit → Configure → Drawing. It is remembered between sessions, off to begin with, and it roughly doubles the size of a drawing — which is why it is not the default on an application built for two hundred frames at a time.

Turning it off later leaves finished drawings alone. Strokes that recorded tilt keep it and keep drawing with it; the setting only decides what the next stroke stores. That is the same promise every setting here makes — changing a preference never repaints work you have already done.

Reshaping a line into a path is the one thing that drops these: once you are moving points by hand the pen is no longer the author, so the tilt it reported no longer describes the line. Pressure survives, because you can still edit it directly with the Width tool.

Planned. Recording these is what ships first. Brushes that use tilt and speed — a nib that widens as you lean it, a line that thins as the hand accelerates — come next, and every brush that ignores them keeps drawing exactly as it does today.

Pulling the line is worth trying before anything else. Most of the time what you want is this bit of the line should be over there, and reaching for that directly is quicker than working out which point governs it and which way its arms need to go. It works on a straight run too — drag the middle of a straight line and it bends, which is how you turn a corner-to-corner segment into a curve without adding anything.

The white arrow (N) is the same thing as a tool rather than a gesture. Hover a line with it and you see its points before you commit to anything — which is how you tell a line with three points from one with thirty without going inside it first. One click goes in and takes hold of whatever was under the pointer, so you can start dragging a point immediately.

One click here, two with the Arrow, and the difference is deliberate: a click with the Arrow ordinarily means pick this whole thing, so reaching into geometry has to be asked for twice. Reaching into geometry is the only thing the white arrow does, so there is nothing to ask twice about.

The two tools still do different jobs — the Arrow picks whole lines, the white arrow picks the points inside one — and blurring them is how a click starts meaning two things.

Reshaping keeps the weight you drew with. A line that tapers at the ends still tapers after you have moved its points about — the pressure spreads along the new shape rather than being flattened out. What it does not keep is the grain, for the same reason moving a line does not: the texture comes from where the mark is on the canvas.

Drawing a line with the pen

The pen (P) draws a line by placing its points instead of by hand. Click to put a corner down; click and drag to put a curved point down, pulling its handles out as you go. The line follows the pointer as you move, so you can see the curve the next click is going to make before you commit to it.

Click	A corner point.
Click and drag	A smooth point — the drag pulls its handles out.
Alt while dragging	Only the outgoing handle, leaving the point a corner: a curve that arrives straight and leaves bent.
Shift	Constrains to 45°, so horizontals, verticals and diagonals are exact.
Click the first point	Closes the line, and finishes it. A ring appears around the first point when you are near enough, and the preview snaps shut — closing is announced before it happens, never a surprise.
Backspace	Takes the last point back off.
Enter or Esc	Finishes the line.

Neither Enter nor Esc throws the line away. Both mean done — a path you have spent a minute placing is artwork, not a gesture in progress. If you did not want it, Ctrl+Z: the whole line is one undo step however many points went into it.

Reaching for another tool does not finish the line either. The path in progress stays on screen, parked, and the pen picks it up exactly where you left it — so grabbing the eyedropper for a colour mid-path costs nothing. Enter, Esc or closing the loop are how a path becomes a line.

What the pen makes is an ordinary line. Not a shape and not a separate kind of object — the same thing the brush makes, with the same brush settings, which means it erases, fills against, exports and inbetweens exactly like a drawn one. The white arrow opens the points you placed rather than working them out afterwards.

A pen line has no pressure variation, because nothing was pressing. That is what it is for — a clean, even line. If you want weight in it, reshape it afterwards or draw it by hand.

Symmetry

With the brush or the eraser in hand, the options bar has a Symmetry toggle (Shift+M). Turn it on and a cyan axis appears down the middle of the page: every mark you make now lands once on each side of it, reflected. Turn it off and the axis goes away; the marks you made stay exactly as they were.

The axis is placed and turned on the canvas rather than in a dialog. Drag the square at its centre to move it, and drag the circle a little way along it to turn it — hold Shift while turning to land on 15° steps, so 45 and 90 are exact. A drag is one undo step, however long you fiddle. Everywhere else on the canvas still paints, so an axis in the way of a stroke is not in the way.

Two fields appear beside the toggle once it is on:

• Copies — how many turned copies around the centre, the mark you draw included. 1 is the plain mirror. 6 turns a mark into six, spaced evenly round the centre, and the dashed spokes on the canvas show where each one goes.
• Mirror — whether each copy is also reflected. With one copy this is the left/right mirror; with six it is a kaleidoscope, and the solid lines on the canvas are the ones each mark is reflected across. Off with one copy, the axis does nothing and is drawn dashed to say so.

The ×N beside the fields is how many marks the next stroke will make, which is also how much more it costs to draw: six copies is six times the stamping. One copy with a mirror is unnoticeable; twelve with a mirror is twenty-four marks per stroke and you will feel it on a large brush.

A few things worth knowing about how it behaves:

• A reflected mark is a true mirror. The copy has the same grain, the same scatter and the same jitter as the one you drew, landed the other way round — not a second, slightly different mark in a mirrored place. Paper texture is the one thing that is not mirrored, because the paper is under the whole drawing and real paper does not flip when you do.
• The copies trail the pen by a touch while you draw, and catch up exactly when you lift it. That is deliberate: it keeps drawing itself as fast as it is without symmetry.
• Each stroke keeps the axis it was drawn under. Moving or turning the axis afterwards changes the next stroke and never the ones already down, so you can draw a face mirrored, drop the axis somewhere else for a hand, and nothing on the face moves. Turning Symmetry off does the same: it stops reflecting, it does not un-reflect.
• The axis is saved with the document, where you left it, and comes back switched off. Opening a drawing does not start reflecting marks you have not asked it to.
• Brush and eraser only, for now. Fill, smudge and blur ignore the axis rather than half-honouring it — a reflected fill has to reflect its outline, and smudge and blur read the pixels under them, both of which need their own work. Resizing the image moves the axis with the paper.

Seamless tiles

For a tile that repeats — a floor, a wall, a pattern — turn on Tile beside the Symmetry toggle (Shift+T) with the brush or the eraser in hand. A mark that runs off the right edge of the page comes in on the left; one that runs off the bottom comes in at the top. Turn it off and the marks stay exactly as they are, the same way symmetry works: the tiling belongs to each stroke, not to the document.

While it is on, the canvas shows the page's eight neighbours around it, dimmed, so you can see the seam where it will actually be seen. You can paint in them: a stroke begun in a neighbour is recorded on the page, and a stroke that crosses an edge stays one stroke — the copy on the far side is drawn for you.

A few things worth knowing:

• The seam is invisible by construction. The part of a mark that comes in on the far side is the same mark, moved a whole page — same grain, same scatter, same jitter — not a second mark blended in. There is nothing to clean up.
• A mark in the middle of the page costs nothing extra. Only the copies that actually reach the page are drawn.
• Tile and Symmetry work together. A mirror with Tile on gives you a repeating mirrored pattern; six copies with Tile on gives a kaleidoscope that repeats. Keep the copies to 1, 2 or 4 for a pattern that lines up on a rectangular page — three and six only repeat on a hexagonal grid, which the page is not.
• Resizing the image moves the tile with the paper. Resizing the canvas does not: marks already made keep the tile they were drawn for, and new marks take the new page.
• Exporting a tile: the sprite sheet never trims a tiled document, whatever the preset says, and its gutter is filled from the tile's own far edges rather than left transparent — see exporting.
• Brush and eraser only, for now, as with symmetry. A fill does not wrap yet; paint the edge with a brush if the tile needs colour right up to it.

What a stroke is

A frame is a list of strokes; the pixels are derived. Nothing paints except through the stroke record, so a reload renders exactly the same image, undo is exact, and the inbetweener has real geometry to work with rather than pixels to guess at.

The same is true of fills (a fill is a stroke with contours) and selections (a selection is an entry in the document, referenced by the strokes clipped to it).

Settings that reach pixels — anti-aliasing, pressure curves — are recorded on each stroke, so changing a preference never alters art you have already made.

Why a hard-edged line comes out smooth

A brush lays its mark down as a row of overlapping stamps, one every fraction of a pixel. For a hard-edged brush — Ink, hard round, the eraser, anything with hardness at 1 — the whole row is drawn as a single shape rather than stamp by stamp, and the smooth edge is worked out once for that shape.

The difference is worth knowing because it shows up most where it matters least to explain and most to look at: thin diagonals, which is what hair, eyelashes and hatching are made of. Drawn stamp by stamp, each stamp's soft edge lands on top of the last one's and the two add up to something harder than either — so a shallow diagonal holds one column of pixels for a few rows, jumps to the next, and reads as a staircase instead of a line. Drawn as one shape there is nothing to add up, and the line keeps the same weight wherever it happens to fall between pixels.

Soft brushes still work stamp by stamp, because each stamp's fade belongs to the stamp rather than to the mark. So do brushes with scatter, size jitter, a squashed tip, or an imported bitmap tip, whose stamps genuinely differ from one another. If you are inking and want the crispest possible line, a plain round tip at full hardness is the one to reach for.

Why a soft brush's edge is as soft as you set it

Hardness sets how far a brush fades out. Because a stroke lays its stamps down much closer together than they are wide, that fade used to build on itself: the mark came out with roughly half the soft edge the brush described, and the softer you set it the more you lost. Hardness 35% asked for an eight-pixel fade and gave you four.

A mark is now held down to what the brush's own shape allows, so a stroke's edge is exactly as soft as one stamp of that brush — which is the thing you were setting all along. If your old paintings look a little softer than you remember, that is this.

Building up still works. Flow is how much paint each stamp puts down, and going over your own stroke still darkens it. What the ceiling stops is a mark becoming denser than the brush's shape allows, so an airbrush worked back and forth now settles into a soft-edged mark instead of hardening into a blob. Low flow behaves exactly as it did.

Sweeping back and forth is flat. The ceiling is worked out from the whole mark — how far each pixel sits inside everything the stroke reached — rather than from the nearest stamp, so a large soft brush scrubbed side to side settles into one even tone. It used to print faint lines along the sweep and a hard rim where the middle met the fade, because between two passes no stamp was near and the ceiling dipped; that is gone, and a single stroke or a single dab renders exactly as before.

Simulated media are left alone — with watercolour, gouache, oil or ink the edge you see is made by the paint pooling and flowing, not by the brush's fade, and holding the stamps back would starve the flow.

This is not a setting and there is nothing to switch on. It also applies to art you drew before — reopen an old drawing and its hard-edged lines are cleaner than they were.

An erase that rubbed nothing out is not recorded. Sweep the eraser across blank canvas, or press Delete with an empty selection, and nothing is written: no stroke on the drawing, and no step in the history. It did nothing to nothing, so there is nothing to keep. Erasing down the gap between two lines counts as nothing too — what matters is whether any pixel changed, not whether ink was nearby.

The one consequence worth knowing: Ctrl+Z straight after an erase that hit nothing takes back whatever you did before it, because as far as the drawing is concerned that erase never happened. An erase that did rub something out is recorded and undone exactly as it always was.

This also keeps the timeline honest. Erasing on a hold normally starts a new drawing on that frame — but if the erase turns out to have hit nothing, the hold stays a hold. A gesture that changed no pixels never changes your timing.

What you see while drawing is what you get

The mark under the pen is the mark you will have when you let go. Not close to it — the same pixels. That covers everything: how dense the dabs are, how far the paint load has run down, where a scattered brush threw each stamp, how the tip texture sits.

It is worth stating because it has not always been true, and because the way it used to fail was hard to name. The preview built the stroke a piece at a time and each piece started the brush over, so an airbrush came out darker while you drew than after, an oil brush looked fully loaded until you released and then faded to nothing, and a textured tip rearranged itself on pen lift. If you see anything like that again, it is a bug and worth reporting — it is not the medium being unpredictable.

A soft brush is the other exception, and it is new. Its ceiling is worked out from the whole mark rather than from the stamps just laid down, so it runs with the wet-media passes below rather than under the pen. While you draw you see the mark as it looked before this change — very slightly harder at the edge — and it settles to the softer, correct one a moment behind the tip. Nothing looks worse than it used to while drawing; it is the finished mark that is now the one that differs, and only until the pass lands.

A very low flow escapes even that. If a brush's flow is at or below its spacing, no amount of overlap can push the mark up to the brush's own shape, so there is no ceiling to work out and nothing settles — the mark is exact under the pen. Smudge and Blender are both below that line as they ship, which is why what the next paragraph says about them still holds. Scatter is the exception to the exception: a brush that throws its stamps around can pile more of them onto one spot than its spacing suggests, so it keeps the ceiling however low you set the flow.

That now includes smudge, blender and blur. They were the last to hold out: because they rework pixels already on the layer rather than adding new ones, each piece of the preview restarted not only the brush but the colour it was dragging, so a smear reached further after you let go than it had while you drew. Smudge, blender and blur are exact now — the same pixels, live and committed — and nothing is redrawn when you lift the pen. Blur used to differ by a shade at the rim of the mark; it no longer does, and costs no more to draw.

The one thing you may notice: on a fast flick the very tip of the mark settles a fraction behind the cursor. That is the last stroke of the brush waiting until it knows which way you turned, and it is deliberate — the alternative is stamps that visibly jump into place.

The bucket shows its region before you click

Hover with the Fill tool and the region a click would flood is tinted in the colour you are holding, its outline drawn solid. It is traced by the same code the click runs — same tolerance, same gap setting, same smart-fill sampling — so the click gives you exactly the tinted region, never a surprise. Moving inside a region costs nothing (the answer cannot change until you cross its edge); the trace runs in the background, so a fast hand never waits on it. Change tolerance, gap, overfill or smart fill and the outline re-traces where you are standing, rather than waiting for you to cross into somewhere else — the point of the preview is that the control beside it and the shape under your pointer agree.

What the trace costs follows the region, not the page. Hovering a small enclosed area is quick whatever size the canvas is; a fill that covers half the drawing takes longer, because there is more of it. Filling under your lines costs about what filling over them does — the drawing is patched where the colour landed rather than rebuilt from the first stroke. The magic wand previews the same way, as a faint, still dashed outline — dashes mean selection, and it stays faint and still so it cannot be mistaken for one you have already made.

Drawing fast

A pen reports its position at a fixed rate, so the faster you draw, the further apart the points it records. Lightbox lays the brush along the curve through those points rather than along the straight lines between them, which is why a quick arc drawn with a fat brush comes out as an arc instead of a row of flat facets with the tops of the stamps showing on the outside of the bend.

Corners you meant are kept: turn sharply enough and the stroke stays sharp there, so a drawn rectangle has square corners and a flick still has a point.

The pointer tells you what the tool will do

The pointer changes with the tool, so you can tell what is armed without looking away from the drawing. The brush and the eraser show their real size and shape as a ring; the eyedropper and the fill show a crosshair with their own icon beside it — the crosshair is where the tool acts, the icon says which one you are holding; the pen, the shapes and the selections show a plain crosshair; the move tool shows arrows; the two selection arrows show a pointer.

If the pointer shows a "no" symbol, the tool will not do anything where you are — that is the point of it, and the reason why appears in the strip at the bottom of the window. It means one of:

• the layer is hidden. Turn its eye back on in the Layers panel.
• the layer is locked. Unlock it with the padlock.
• you are outside the selection. Strokes only land inside it.
• the layer is alpha locked and this drawing has no paint on it at all. Alpha lock means "only draw where I have already drawn", so on an empty drawing there is nowhere a mark could land. On a drawing that has paint the pointer never refuses, wherever it is: the brush only colours the paint it crosses, and a stroke that starts on bare paper still paints once it reaches some.

The selection one changes as you move, because it is about where you are rather than about the layer. Before, all four did nothing and said nothing, which is hard to tell apart from the application being broken.

Hold Ctrl and the brush becomes an eyedropper for as long as you hold it — the colour you want is usually already on the canvas, and fetching a tool to get it breaks the stroke you were about to make. The pointer changes to say so. It also stops refusing while you hold it, because picking a colour off a locked layer was always allowed.

With a selection up, Ctrl inside it moves what is in it instead. Hold Ctrl, and anywhere inside the marching ants the pointer becomes the four-way arrow: drag, and the artwork the selection holds comes with it. Shift while you drag holds it to one axis, the guides catch it like any other move, and the whole drag is one undo step. Let go outside the ants and Ctrl is the eyedropper again — same key, different place, and the pointer always says which one you have got before you press, including while you are still holding it with the mouse quite still.

Two things worth knowing. It moves the lines the selection holds rather than cutting the pixels out, so a stroke that crosses the edge travels whole. And a Ctrl-click that goes nowhere leaves nothing behind — no move in the history for a press that was only a press.

Ctrl+Shift+click finds the layer. Click on a mark with both held and the layer it is on becomes the active one, whichever tool you have in hand: the quick way from "that line there" to its row in the Layers docker. See Finding a layer from the canvas under Layers. With both keys down the pointer becomes the plain arrow — this click draws nothing and fetches no colour.

The eyedropper's ring

With the eyedropper in hand — chosen, or borrowed with Ctrl — a ring follows the pointer, split in two:

• the top half is the colour you would take if you clicked now;
• the bottom half is the colour you already have;
• the middle is a hole, so the pixel you are aiming at is never covered.

It is there so picking a colour is a comparison rather than a guess: whether a shadow off the drawing is actually different from the one loaded is the question you are asking, and the answer used to be in a panel on the other side of the window. Click and both halves become the same colour, which is the ring saying the pick landed.

The ring goes away when there is nothing to pick — off the paper, mainly. Over bare canvas it shows the paper colour, because that is what a click there takes.

The pointer also tells you what you are about to grab

Nothing floats over your drawing in Lightbox — there is no row of buttons on the canvas and no handles except the ones a gizmo puts there — so the pointer is what says a thing under it can be taken hold of, and which way it will go.

• A double-headed arrow means this drags a size. It lies along the direction the handle actually travels: across a corner of the transform box, straight up or straight across from an edge, up and down on the top rung of a height chart. Turn the canvas and the arrows turn with it, because they describe the movement your hand makes rather than the one the document would see.
• A four-way arrow means this moves. Inside the transform box, on a guide, on the transform box's pivot, on a reference sheet's box, and on a corner of a perspective warp — a warped corner goes wherever you put it, so there is no direction to point along.
• A curved arrow means this turns. Outside the transform box, on the camera frame's rotate handle, and on a bone's tip — the aiming handle, in both bone modes. A bone's shaft and joint show the four-way arrow, because those grabs carry the bone whether you are building the skeleton or posing it.
• A hand means you are holding the canvas itself — a middle-button drag, or the pan tool.

Two things this promises. It keeps the shape for the whole drag, so a scale that started at a corner does not turn into a move cursor when your hand crosses the middle of the box; and it changes the moment you hold a key, without waiting for you to move, so a modifier that borrows another tool says so straight away.

The pointer is also honest about what it cannot offer: a guide only shows a grab when a guide can be grabbed — with a brush in hand, or with the rig locked or hidden, it is scenery and the pointer stays the brush's.

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Shapes

The Shape tool draws a line, rectangle, ellipse or polygon: pick the shape in the tool options and drag. Shift squares it — a circle, a square, a regular polygon — and Alt grows it from the point you started rather than towards it.

A shape is an ordinary stroke, drawn with whatever brush you have loaded. A watercolour rectangle is watercolour; it erases, re-renders and inbetweens like every other mark, and it snaps to guides like every other mark. The trade is that it is not re-editable as a shape afterwards — that is the right bargain for a tool where the unit of work is two hundred drawings, not one.

Text

The Text tool (T) puts a caret on the canvas and lets you type. Click where the words should sit, type, and press Esc to set them — or just reach for another tool, which sets them too. Ctrl+Enter also sets; Enter breaks the line.

The point you click is the baseline at the alignment you have chosen, not the top-left corner of a box. The baseline is the line the letters stand on, so it is what lines up with a horizon, a shoulder, or the row of type above it, and it stays put when you change the size. It snaps to guides and grids like any other point.

What you see while typing is exactly what you get. The letters on screen are the real outlines, drawn through the same engine that will record them — not a preview of them. Change the size, the tracking or the font while the caret is still up and the words reshape under your hands.

Set type is a drawing

Setting type turns it into ordinary strokes — one filled outline per letter. So it erases, transforms, exports, composites and re-renders exactly like anything you drew, and a document renders identically on a machine with none of your fonts installed. The words are in the picture, not a note about the picture.

What stays behind is enough to type them again.

Click anywhere in a block of type and you are in it, with the caret where you clicked. Anywhere means anywhere inside the block's box — the gaps between letters and the space inside an "o" included — so you do not have to hit the ink of a letter to correct a word. The size and alignment come back with it, and setting it again replaces the letters rather than stacking new ones over the old. To remove type, pick it up, clear it, and set it.

Double-click type with the Arrow and you are in it too, and the Text tool comes with you. It is the same reach-into-it gesture the Arrow already uses to open a line for node editing, and it saves going back to the tool rail to fix a typo while you are arranging a page.

Selecting works the way it does anywhere else. Drag across the letters to select a run, double-click to take a word, Shift with the arrows or Home and End to extend, Ctrl+A to take the whole block. Typing replaces what is selected, and so do Backspace and Delete. A dashed box shows the block you are in while you are in it.

Esc sets rather than discards, which is the opposite of Photoshop. Setting is one undo step, so if you meant to throw the words away, Ctrl+Z does it — whereas an Esc that discarded would lose a typed title with nothing to get it back from.

Choosing a font

The font button opens the list, with a search box. It is on the options bar along the top with the text tool in hand, and in the Tool options docker, which has room for every setting at once — the bar carries the face, the size and the alignment, which are what you change mid-word, and the docker carries those plus tracking and leading. There are two kinds of font in the list:

• Installed — every font on this machine. Always there, no waiting, works offline.
• Google Fonts — a few thousand more, fetched once and then kept on disk. Marked carries in the list, which is explained below.

Alongside the font: Size in pixels, Tracking in thousandths of an em (the unit type specimens quote, so a number copied off one means the same here), Leading as baseline-to-baseline in pixels — leave it at zero and the typeface's own spacing is used, which is what it was designed for — and the alignment, which decides what part of the line sits on the point you clicked. Tracking and leading are in the docker rather than on the bar: they are set once for a block, and the bar has only so much room.

If a font is listed but sets nothing, Lightbox says so when you pick it. Some installed families are formats with no outlines it can read, and the honest moment to find that out is when you choose one, not after you have typed a title.

Which fonts travel with the file

Because the letters are outlines, a document always renders correctly anywhere. Carrying the font is about something else: whether somebody else can retype the words.

• A Google font is under an open licence that allows it to be passed around, so Lightbox carries a copy inside the document. Open the file anywhere and the text is editable.
• An installed font is under terms Lightbox cannot read, so it is named in the document and never copied. Open the file on a machine without that font and the words are still there, still perfect, and picking them up to retype them will say the font is missing.

Both switches are in Configure ▸ Drawing ▸ Fonts: whether Google Fonts are offered at all — off means Lightbox never contacts them, which is what an air-gapped studio wants — and whether open-licensed fonts are carried. Neither changes how anything looks, then or later.

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