LodePaint User Manual

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About LodePaint

About

LodePaint is a painting program that tries to fill in the gap between simple painting programs such as Paint or KolourPaint, and professional ones such as Photoshop. LodePaint has an interface that is more similar to the simple painting programs, but adds a lot more tools and advanced filters.

The user interface of LodePaint uses a game engine, rather than a classical GUI, in an attempt to have a simple but flexible GUI that works on multiple platforms. A side effect of this is that LodePaint requires 3D (even for its 2D graphics) hardware accelerated graphics to run, but that should not be a problem on most of todays computers.

The focus of this painting program is on drawing pixel-based paintings, textures, sprites or icons for games, programs or websites. Pixel-precision is considered more important than anti-aliased effects, for example.

The focus of the program is not on publishing, printing, illustrations, posters or professional graphics.

And finally, this painting program has some special features that are different than most painting programs. For example, the alpha channel is treated as an equal channel than R, G and B: opacity is always a different setting. Zooming and panning on the image can be done even while in the middle of using any tool. HDR images can be edited as well, and this using 128 bits per pixel.

This is what an earlier version of the program looks like:

Design Principles (Philosophy of this program)

These points describe what design choices are made for this program and what the purpose mainly is.

Features that aren't the focus of this program.

The following features are not part of the design goals of this program, or are not important enough to counter their difficulty of implementation. Some of those missing features have a convenient alternative that is noted in the points below.

Legal Stuff

This software is provided 'as-is', without any express or implied warranty. In no event will the authors be held liable for any damages arising from the use of this software.

Copyright (c) 2009-2010 by Lode Vandevenne.

Note: No images? Get the full manual at http://sourceforge.net/projects/lodepaint/files/LodePaint_Manual_Full.zip/download/. The full manual with images is released separately because the images filesize is larger than that of the program!