Colors, arranging, and export

Picking colors

The eyedropper in the tool bar picks colors from your photos. The options bar above the board then shows the color as HEX, RGB, HSL, and HSB — click any of the four values to copy it. Its values stay there until you select something else; the Picked chip in the tool bar brings them back any time.

1. Press I (or click the eyedropper in the tool bar, or choose File → Pick Color)
2. Move over the board — a small chip next to the cursor previews the color underneath and, over a photo, which pixel of the original file that is (counted from its top-left corner)
3. Click to pick it

The picked value comes from the original photo file, not the preview shown on screen, so a pure red really reads #FF0000. Where something see-through overlaps, on a black-and-white photo, or on the empty board, you get the color exactly as it appears on screen instead.

In Chrome and Edge, From screen picks a color from anywhere on your screen — another app, another browser window, anything.

Building a palette

Every picked color can become a swatch: a color chip on the board with its values written on it.

• Shift + click while picking picks the color, adds a swatch, and keeps the picker active for the next one
• Add to board in the options bar adds the current color as a swatch

Each new swatch lines up to the right of the previous one, so picking a few colors in a row builds a palette strip. Swatches are ordinary board items — move, resize, group, or delete them like photos. Select a swatch to load its color back into the options bar; Show color values on swatch in the Selection section hides or shows the text on it.

Opacity

Select one or more items and drag the Opacity slider in the Selection section, or press a number key: 1–9 set 10–90%, 0 sets 100%. A group's opacity applies on top of its members' own.

Grayscale and other view adjustments

View → Grayscale (G) shows the whole board in black and white, which makes light and dark values much easier to judge.

More ways to look at your references with fresh eyes:

• View → Mirror View (M) flips the whole view left to right — the classic artist's trick for spotting proportion mistakes. It resets when you leave the board.
• View → Invert Colors (Shift + I) shows the board as a negative.
• Brightness and Contrast sliders sit behind the half-circle button at the bottom of the tool bar, together with switches for all of the above and a Reset view button. The button shows a dot while any adjustment is on.

All of these only change what you see — photos, exports, and picked colors keep their real colors. Like the side panel itself, they're remembered in this browser, not saved with the board.

Black-and-white and pixel-art photos

To turn just some photos black and white, select them and choose Object → Black and White (Alt + G), or tick Black and white in the side panel's Selection section. Unlike the grayscale view, this belongs to the board: it's saved, shows up on every device, and is exported that way. The original file is never changed, so turning it off brings the colors back.

Object → Sharp Pixels (or Sharp pixels (pixel art) in the Selection section) draws each pixel of the selected photos as a crisp square as soon as they're shown larger than their own size — for pixel art and textures — whatever the Sharp pixels when zoomed in display setting says.

Photo details

With a single photo selected, the bottom of the Selection section lists its original size in pixels, the size it's cropped to (if it is), its scale on the board (100% means one board pixel per pixel of the file), and — for a photo from a web page — the site it came from, as a link.

Arrange and normalize

Select at least two items, then:

• Object → Arrange → Pack Tightly packs them into rows without any overlap, tallest first, shaped to fit your view
• Object → Arrange → Grid lines them up in an even grid
• Object → Arrange → Single Row / Single Column lines them up side by side, or stacks them top to bottom
• Object → Normalize → Same Height / Same Width / Same Size resizes them to the average height, width, or area of the selection — handy before packing a mix of tiny and huge photos

Grid, row, and column follow the order you choose at the bottom of the Arrange menu:

• As Placed — the order they already have on the board, left to right and top to bottom
• By Name — by the names shown in the layers panel, the way a file browser sorts them ("photo 2" before "photo 10")
• By Date Added — oldest first
• Random — a fresh shuffle each time

The choice is remembered. Pack Tightly always sorts by height, whatever you choose.

A selected group always moves and scales as one block, so its own layout stays intact. Each of these is a single undo step.

Exporting images

File → Export… saves the selection — or the whole board when nothing is selected — as pictures. Choose:

• As one image — everything together as it looks on the board, with the board's background and any group backdrops. It's rendered at the full detail of the sharpest photo in it, up to 8192 pixels on the longest side.
• Each photo separately — every photo as a file of its own, cropped, flipped, rotated, and black-and-white just as it is on the board, at its own full resolution (up to the same limit). Notes, drawings, and swatches aren't included. Several photos come as one ZIP file, in the order of the layers panel (frontmost first).

Pick PNG (lossless; a rotated photo exported on its own keeps transparent corners) or JPG (smaller files, with a Quality slider). For separate photos, File names sets how each file is named: {name} is the photo's name, {n} its number, {nn} its number with leading zeros (01, 02, …), and {board} the board's name — the dialog shows an example. Two photos that would get the same name are numbered. The dialog remembers your choices in this browser; from the floating window, Export… goes straight ahead with them.

Downloading the original photos

File → Download Originals saves the photo files themselves, exactly as they were added, rather than a picture of the board: those in the selection, or every photo on the board when nothing is selected. A single photo downloads as itself; several come as one ZIP file. Each file is named after the photo's name in the layers panel, and a photo placed several times is included once. Photos that were converted when you added them (BMP, TIFF, or over 20 MB — see Canvas and import) come out as the converted file, since that's what the board keeps.

Floating window (experimental)

In Chrome, Edge, Opera and other Chromium-based browsers on a computer, View → Float in a Separate Window (F) moves the board into its own window that stays on top of every other app — so your references sit right next to your drawing, sculpting, or modeling program. Resize it to any size you like; the next time it opens at that size again. Other browsers — Safari, Firefox, and anything on a phone or tablet — can't float a page yet, so there the menu item is greyed out; hover it to see why.

It's the same board, not a copy: everything you do there is saved as usual, and the keyboard shortcuts and right-click menu work inside it.

• It has its own view. It opens framed on whatever you had selected — select one reference and press F to float just that one — or else on the whole board, or where you last left it. Your view in the page is untouched and comes back when you return.
• The same tool bar and options bar as in the page come along: the tool bar runs down the window's left edge, and the options bar sits in a bar along the top together with grayscale, fit to window, undo and redo, lock, add photos, and back to the page. Both fade in when you move the mouse over the window and out again when you don't, so they never cover your reference for long. To copy a picked color, click the back color square in the tool bar and then the value you need.
• The lock button locks the board, the same as View → Lock Board in the page (see Canvas and import): dragging pans, and nothing can be selected, moved, or changed by accident — handy when you click back and forth between the window and your other app. The board stays locked when it comes back into the page, until you unlock it.
• Panning: hold Space and drag, drag with the middle mouse button, or — on a locked board — just drag.

Close the window, press F, or use the toolbar's last button to bring the board back into the page. Your changes are saved whenever you switch to another app, too.

What browsers can't do: make the window see-through, or let clicks pass through it to the app underneath — those two tricks need a desktop app.