Personas

Delacroix organises its work into personas. A persona is a workspace for one kind of work: it chooses the tools in the tool strip, the panes on the right and how they are arranged, and the tool you start with. The document stays the same when you switch; only the workspace around it changes.

Switch personas with the persona control at the top left of the window, from View ▸ Persona, or with these shortcuts:

A document remembers the persona it was saved in and reopens in it. Each persona also remembers how you arranged its panes in that window. To go back to the original arrangement, choose Window ▸ Reset to Default Layout.

1. Raster Persona (⌃1)

The Raster persona is the default workspace, for painting, illustration and photo work. It has every tool except the Vector persona's drawing tools, the Liquify brushes and the Slice tool.

Panes: Tool Options at the top; Navigation, Colour and Swatches below it; then Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo History, Selection Editor and Layer Effects.

What you do here

• Paint with the Brush (P), which uses whatever brush you pick in the Brushes library. The library is sorted by medium: Digital, Pencils, Pens & ink, Markers, Charcoal & pastel, Watercolour, Acrylic, Oil, Painting, Airbrush & spray, Blend & smudge, Erasers, and Texture & effects, with your own brushes under My Brushes. Delacroix chooses the engine (GIMP's brush tips or MyPaint) for the brush you pick.
• Retouch with Clone, Heal, Inpainting Brush, Blemish Removal, Patch, Red Eye Removal, Dodge / Burn, Sponge, Blur / Sharpen, Median Brush and Smudge, and paint an earlier state back with the History Brush.
• Select with the marquees, the Lasso (with a Magnetic mode), the Wand (with an All Matching mode), Foreground Select and the Selection Brush, and edit a selection as a mask with Quick Mask (⇧Q).
• Adjust and filter from the Colors and Filters menus. Most filters can be kept editable as layer effects, and Layer ▸ New Adjustment Layer adds adjustments as layers of their own. The Develop pane holds a photo develop stack.
• Dither with the Dither Brush: ⌘-click to place colour points, then paint, and each pixel takes the colour of one of the points, more likely the nearer one. See Tools.
• Move with the Move tool (V). In this persona it has a second mode, GIMP Move, which drags the layer, a guide or the selected pixels as GIMP's Move tool does.
• Use GIMP paths. The Paths pane, Stroke Path, Fill Path and conversion between selections and paths are in this persona only.

The Pen, Shape, Text and Gradient tools are here too, so you can add vector shapes and text to a painting without changing persona.

2. Vector Persona (⌃2)

The Vector persona is for design and illustration with shapes that stay sharp at any size. It works like Affinity Designer: vector layers are containers of shapes, there is one Move tool, the Pen draws curve objects, and booleans can stay live. The canvas is dimmed outside artboards.

Panes: Tool Options at the top; Layers and Pathfinder; then Colour, Swatches, Fonts, Symbols, Transform and Symbol Masters.

Tools: Move (V), Node (A) and Corner, the Pen (B), Vector Pencil, Vector Brush and Knife (⇧K), the Shape tool (⇧M), Contour (J) and Shape Builder (⇧J), Transparency (⇧Y), Place Image (⇧I), Table, Artboard, Text (T), Gradient (G), Bucket Fill (⇧B), Crop and Vector Crop, Unified Transform and Point Transform, Color Picker, Measure, Zoom and Hand.

The Vector Pencil, Vector Brush, Knife, Contour, Shape Builder and Corner tools appear only in this persona. GIMP's paths and the Paths pane do not: here every curve is a shape.

Vector and SF Symbols describes the vector tools in detail.

3. Liquify Persona (⌃3)

The Liquify persona is for reshaping pixels: portraits, product shots, fabric and smoke. Warping and deformation tools live only in this persona.

Panes: Tool Options; Navigation and Undo History.

Warp brushes

• Warp (Push Forward) (W): pushes pixels the way you stroke.
• Push Left: pushes pixels sideways to the stroke.
• Twirl: swirls pixels clockwise; hold ⌥ for counter-clockwise.
• Pinch: pulls pixels towards the centre of the brush.
• Punch (Bloat): pushes pixels out from the centre.
• Turbulence: displaces pixels in liquid swirls.
• Clone: copies a deformation onto another area.
• Reconstruct: brings pixels back towards where they started.
• Smooth: evens out harsh or uneven distortion.
• Freeze Brush and Thaw Brush: paint a ruby mask over what must not move, and take it away again.

Options

Tool Options has the brush's Size, Hardness and Strength, Stroke periodically (keep warping while the pointer is still), Show Freeze Mask with Clear Mask, Invert and Freeze All, and Show Mesh to see the deformation as a grid. Animate makes a sequence of frames from the original to the warp.

The canvas shows the warp live. Apply (Return) writes it to the layer in one undo step; Cancel (Escape) discards it.

Parametric Warp… in Tool Options offers the warps that work by numbers rather than by brush: Ripple, Waves, Whirl and Pinch, Spherize, Polar Coordinates and Apply Lens.

Deformation tools

N-Point Deformation, Cage Transform (⇧G), Mesh Warp and Handle Transform (⇧L) share one slot in this persona. See Tools.

4. Export Persona (⌃4)

The Export persona prepares a document for handing over: app assets, web images, icons and print files.

Panes: Slices at the top, then Layers and Tool Options. Slices are drawn on the canvas.

Tools: Slice (⇧X), Move, Color Picker, Measure, Zoom and Hand.

Slices

Draw a slice with the Slice tool, or use the + menu in the Slices pane: New Custom Slice…, New Slice from Active Layer, New Slices from Selected Layers, New Slice from Selection, and New Slice from Canvas. Export Slices as Guides (GIMP Fallback) puts guides on the slice edges, which GIMP can read.

Each slice has a name and a list of outputs. An output is a format (PNG, JPEG, WebP, TIFF or HEIF), a scale (0.5×, 1×, 2× or 3×) and a suffix such as @2x. Presets… fills the outputs in one go:

Export All… writes every slice. With Continuous Export on, a slice is written again to its folder whenever it changes. Slices are saved in the document.

File ▸ Export Icon Set…, available in every persona, writes an icon set from the document: sizes from 16 to 512 px at @1x and @2x, as PNG files, an Apple .icns and a Windows .ico, scaled crisply with nearest-neighbour when you ask.

5. Pixel Persona (⌃5)

The Pixel persona is set up for pixel art and small icons. Every tool draws whole pixels with no antialiasing.

Key Capabilities

• A flat tool palette with no fly-outs: Pixel, Pixel Eraser, Pixel Line, Pixel Rectangle, Pixel Ellipse, Bucket Fill, Wand, Rectangle Select, Lasso, Move, Colour Picker, Hand and Zoom. Vector, MyPaint and retouching tools are left out.
• Single-letter shortcuts, Aseprite's where they don't clash:

X swaps the colours and [ ] change the size, as in every persona. These letters apply only in the Pixel persona; elsewhere the usual shortcuts apply. Move here is GIMP's Move, which moves the layer or the selected pixels. - Pixel defaults: zoom snaps to whole steps (100 %, 200 %, 300 % …) and the pixel grid is shown. Selections and fills are aliased, unfeathered and match colours exactly, and New Layer makes a transparent pixel layer. The status bar shows whole-pixel coordinates, the selection size in pixels, and the colour and palette index under the pointer. When you leave the persona, zoom and the pixel grid go back to how they were. - Palette-first colour: the Working Palette pane shows the document's working palette in big swatches, with the foreground and background as palette entries and their index; the Colour Picker lands on the entry under it. - Click an entry for the foreground, ⌥-click for the background, double-click (or Edit… in its menu) to change it. Recolour the pixels using it changes every pixel of that colour in the same undo step. - + adds the foreground colour, − deletes its entry, and dragging a swatch reorders the palette. - Ramp… makes a shade ramp between the foreground and background: choose the number of steps, a hue shift (shadows lean cool, lights warm) and how much the middle steps gain saturation, then add it to the palette. - New Colour opens the system colour picker (wheel and sliders) for a colour to add. - Keep colours to the palette is on by default in this persona: an off-palette colour snaps to the nearest entry. Turning it off here is a setting of the persona and doesn't change the document. - Pixel-art commands (Edit ▸ Pixel Art), all whole pixels and one undo step each: - Outline… draws an outline in the foreground colour round the layer's opaque pixels, or the selected ones: 1–16 px wide, outside the shape or on its inside edge, with or without the corners. - Remove Orphan Pixels… finds pixels that share their colour with no more than the chosen number of neighbours. Each takes its neighbours' commonest colour; one alone on transparency is erased. - Pixel-Perfect Lines removes the corner pixel of every L in 1-px lines (in the selection, if any), turning stair-steps into clean diagonals and leaving straight runs alone. - Replace Foreground Colour with Background recolours every pixel of the foreground colour. - Flip and Rotate 90°/180° turn the selected pixels, which stay floating like a move (Return anchors them), or the whole layer when nothing is selected. Nothing is resampled. - With the Move tool, the arrow keys move the selected pixels by one, and ⇧-arrow by 8 or the pixel grid's block. - Its own workspace: Working Palette, Swatches and Palettes at the top; the real-size Preview and the Navigator; then Layers and Tool Options. - Starting a pixel-art document: the Pixel Art presets in the New Image sheet (under Assets) make a transparent document and switch to this persona. File ▸ Place as Reference… adds a locked reference layer at 50 % opacity that is left out of every export.