This is the basic tool used to draw things with. The end result depends on the current Media, Paint Mode, and colour. See those chapters for more details.
Drawing with the left mouse button builds up paint in the paint layer, drawing with the right mouse button removes it.
Clicking on the tool when it is already selected changes the way the tool works. It toggles between drawing with the current media, and drawing free hand filled shapes.
To draw a straight line, click on the image where you want the line to begin, then release the mouse over where you want it to end. If you draw a line with the left mouse button, clicking the right mouse button aborts, and vice versa.
Holding down shift whilst drawing restricts lines to being either horizontal or vertical.
The Curve Tool draws a curve through three points that you specify. To set the beginning and end points, draw a line, and release the mouse button. Move the mouse to where you want the curve to curve through, and press the mouse button again. To abort while still specifying points on the curve, press the opposite mouse button to the one you started with. In other words, if you draw a line with the left mouse button, clicking the right mouse button aborts, and vice versa.
To draw an unfilled rectangle using the current media, click on the rectangle tool once, then click on the image where you want the rectangle to begin, and release the mouse button over where you want it to end. To draw a filled rectangle, click on the rectangle tool again to go into filled rectangle mode. As with the other tools, drawing with the right mouse button erases what you have done.
Hold down shift whilst drawing to draw squares.
To draw an unfilled ellipse, select the ellipse tool, click on the image where you want the center of the ellipse to be, and drag the mouse to the desired size. To draw a filled ellipse, click on the tool again.
To draw a circle, hold down shift whilst drawing an ellipse.
To draw a polygon, click whereabouts on the image where you want the first point, and release. Click again to define the next point in the polygon. Double click to close the polygon, or click the other mouse button to abort.
Clicking on the tool once lets you draw unfilled polygons, i.e. the outline is drawn using the current media. Clicking on the tool when it is already selected toggles the tool to let you draw filled polygons.
To use the Text Tool, select the "A" icon in the toolbar, drag a text box over the place you want the text to be in, and type straight onto the layer. To change the text attribute, bring the Tool Options Container to the front by clicking on its tab in the options menu, or it should automatically become the selected page when you click on the Text Tool.
To change the font, either type its name straight into the Font Name field, or click on the arrow next to it to bring up the standard system font requestor.
You can change the size in the same way, or type it directly into the Size field below.
The B, I and U icons represent Bold, Italic and Underline style. If the button is pressed down, that style is in effect. Click it again to toggle it.
To move the position of the text, simply drag it with the mouse. To change the size of the text box, grab one of the corners of the text box and size it as needed.
If you are having difficulties getting any text to show up, or are finding it too slow, bear in mind that Text interacts with what is currently in the paint layer. Pressing Fix will clear the paint layer and let the Text Tool work faster. Also make sure that you aren't typing black text on a black background, or using a subtle paint mode like Blur.
This is a cross between DPaint's fill tools, and PhotoShop's magic wand. Click on an area on the image for it to be filled in the current colour and mode. Click with the right mouse button to subtract.
Use the tool's options to set the tolerance and smoothness.
Clicking on the hand icon lets you drag the layer around the image. The options for this tool will automatically come to the front of the Options Window when selected. You can choose exactly what is being positioned via a popup menu. By default it is set to position the entire layer. So if for example you have used RubThrough to composite the secondary image on top of the current image, dragging the mouse around will move what you have done around the image. If you select to move just the Secondary, then you can move the secondary image around, whitest keeping the layer in place. This has the effect of scrolling the secondary image around whilst keeping the paint layer still. You can also position the alpha channel independently of the layer, which has the effect of moving what parts of the layer show through. In lots of cases it is useful to be able to move the alpha channel with the secondary image, i.e. if you have rendered an image in a 3D package, and it saved an alpha channel mask as a separate image.
You can type exact pixel coordinates into the X and Y text entry gadgets for precise placement.
Press the Reset button in this tool's options to put the layer back to its starting place, or select the Layer->Arrange->Top Left menu item.
Click plus or minus to zoom in or out, or type a percentage value into the text gadget. You can access common presets such as 100, 200, or 400 percent by clicking on the down arrow next to it.
Use this tool to grab colours from images. To use it, click on its icon (the pipette), and click in the image you are interested in with the left mouse button to set the current colour to the one under the mouse pointer. Clicking and dragging updates the colour in real time. A good use for this is for matching a colour to an image. For example, paint blue on someone's forehead, then click and drag the colour picker over the unpainted area to match the foreheads colour.
With this selected, everything you've drawn becomes mirrored. Note that this doesn't yet work with the undo system.
Select this tool and the paint mode will automatically be set to Clone. Drag a line from where you want to clone, to where you want it to end up. Draw with the draw tool to see the effect. Click on the clone tool again to position where you are cloning from.
After selecting this tool, drag a rectangle around the area you want to crop, then press crop in its tool options.
This layer sets the layer to its maximum values. It's a quick way of applying a paint mode to the entire image.
This does the reverse, it clears the layer and is a quick way of undoing a lot of changes you aren't happy with.
This stamps your changes onto the Image.
The lightbulb icon in the toolbar toggles the status of Experiment mode, also known as AutoFix/AutoRedo.
When painting, most people find they have two modes of working. One when they know exactly what they are doing, and one when they aren't quite happy and need to experiment with what they have just drawn.
With experiment mode turned off, selecting a new colour for example and drawing with it will result in what you have previously drawn being fixed into the image. You can still undo it, but you can't play around with its colour. To do this, you need to turn experiment mode on. Changing the colour in this mode results in your image being updated immediately to display what you have painted in the new colour. The same holds true for Paint Modes. In experiment mode, you can draw something in one Paint Mode (such as Paint), and then see what it would like in a different mode (such as Emboss). Being able to play with the setting in this way opens up a lot of possibilities. To give you an idea of what you can do, load in an image, draw on some splodges with the Airbrush, turn on Experiment mode, and click on the left/right arrows next to the PaintMode Selector to cycle through every Paint Mode in Photogenics.
Click here to change the layer's paint mode. You can have the modes arranged categorically, or alphabetically. Click on the arrows to cycle through all the available modes.
Photogenics offers two ways of undoing actions. The recommended way is the one that makes Photogenics unique, the ability to rub out mistakes with the right mouse button. This allows you to undo just the bits you aren't happy with, and keep the bits you like.
The other, more conventional way of Undoing is to press the Undo button. This undoes the last action you performed, be it a stroke of the Airbrush, the Cropping of an Image, or whatever.
The amount of memory required to store a brush stroke is minimal (mere kilobytes), however the memory needed to undo a large change such as a Collapse is considerable. Only the area that was painted on is stored, but if you painted on the entire image, that's a full undo it needs to allocate.
For this reason, Photogenics allows you to specify the amount of memory you want to put aside for undos, measured in Full Undos. A value of three for example would let you undo up to three full undos, or six undos where only half the image was affected and so on. This setting can be changed using the Undo page of Preferences.
What happens if you want to undo an undo though? Well, that would be a redo. To illustrate this, create a new image, and draw the letters A,B,C and D on it. Press Undo three times, and you will see D, C and B disappear. Press Redo three times, and B, C and D will come back exactly as your drew them. Now, pressing Undo and Redo three times to undo three actions can be a pain, so clicking on the down arrows to the left of the Undo and Redo buttons drops down a menu that lets you select which actions you want to undo. So, instead of clicking Undo three times, a quicker way would be to select the final action you want to undo, and Photogenics will undo all the actions up to and including the one you selected. The same concept applies to the redo dropdown.
You may also have noted the options to Clear and Flush the Undo/Redo History. Flushing the History forces all of the undo actions to free as much memory as they can. This currently means that they will still be in the undo list, but you won't be able to undo them. In future it will mean you will be able to undo them, it will just take a lot longer as more calculations are involved.
Clearing the history removes all the actions from the list, and frees all memory associated with them.
If you are really low on memory, this can be a useful thing to do.