LazPaint: Square Pen or custom Brush without smoothing?

[delbruck]

Hi, new here, I'm currently testing LazPaint for pixel art and I'm liking it a lot.

I can use the not-antialiased Pen at size 1 to draw pixels and size 2 for squares that double that size. But size 3 or more go from cross to circle. Is there a way to increase the size and get squares instead of circles? I don't see a way to customize the pen "tip".

I also tried creating a custom brush out of a 3x3 px document filled with black. It works, but the brush smooths the lines I draw, so I can't get perfect squares nor clean edges. Is there a way to deactivate this smoothing on brushes?

Maybe there's a way to entirely deactivate blurring/antialias on all the document?

I know I could use the rectangle tool, or just add more single pixels, but that would mess with the way I think and paint.

In any case, thank you to all of you, I'm glad I've found this software.

[circular]

Hello delbruck,

I am happy you like the software. I understand you're doing pixel art and that you would like a square tip for the pen. You're correct that using a brush can be a way of achieving this.

Currently there is not alias option for the brush, however you may keep CTRL key down to align with pixels. The setup here is to use a 3x3 image, with a brush size of 30, and a pattern spacing of 3, pressing CTRL and holding while you draw, you can draw an horizontal line made up of 3x3 squares.

This is not perfect, for example if you move diagonally, you will get blurred intermediates. To provide what you would like to have ideally, the simplest is probably an aliased option for the brush: that would always align the pattern with pixels. We can also consider allowing to rotate the autogenerated brush, as for now, setting to 4 sides will give a square with 45 degrees rotation. Would that suit your need?

Regards

[delbruck]

Thank you so much! And sorry it took me so long to reply, I thought I'd get an email notification and didn't check the forum until just now.

I'm trying the CTRL+spacing method and it works beautifully. In pixel art, diagonals and curves are mostly used for sketching and have to be redrawn with straight lines anyway, so I can already work with this.
It's true that having aliased lines from the start would make the process faster (less pixels to clean), and the two solutions you propose would do the trick (I would go for aliased brush, it could have more unexpected use cases than the rotated 4-side brush), but since I might be the only person using LazPaint for pixel art, I don't think coding those features would be worth your time

The ability to zoom further in could be useful for more people, it would sure be great for pixel art.

BTW, thank you for using the .ora format, if more painting programs included it, my life would be easier.

[circular]

Thank you for the detailed reply. I am glad you have a way of doing wide horizontal and vertical lines. I do love pixel art. <3

While your request stems from your personal needs, few people actually make requests, so it is likely that other people would benefit from improvements for you. However it is true that my bandwidth is limited so while I will definitely add the idea in the issue list, I don't know if or when it will be implemented.

I will look as well into allowing further zooming.

Providing the ORA format was natural to me. I've looked online for common formats for layered images and this one popped up. 

[delbruck]

That's great, thank you so much! But no pressure!

I'm actually surprised that this program isn't more popular and doesn't get many feature requests. It's fast, intuitive and to the point, just my kind of tool. I'll recommend it around.

And since you're open to them, I'll add another suggestion I think is important (but again, no pressure at all): When we click or drag through the color wheel, looking for the right color, we get a square showing the color we're getting. Most painting programs include another square right next to it (the closer the better), showing the color before we started changing it. This feature is so popular for a reason: it's a huge help for matching/comparing subjective values when changing hues. I bet it comes from traditional painting, where we hold the brush with the newly mixed color right above to the previous one, on the palette (or above any color we want to compare it to), so we can examine the before and after visually without any mental effort. I can't stress enough how much that helps.

In any case, great job with LazPaint and it's a pleasure talking with you.

[circular]

Actually there are a lot of feature requests:
https://github.com/bgrabitmap/lazpaint/issues

[delbruck]

Ah, I think I misunderstood you. I'm glad to see that much activity on GitHub, and thank you for posting my idea there!