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 for pixel editing, and professional image editors. LodePaint has an interface that is more similar to the simple painting programs, but adds a lot more tools and advanced filters.

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.

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 OpenGL 3D (even for its 2D graphics) hardware accelerated graphics to run, but that should not be a problem on most of todays computers.

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 to 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 the program looks like as of 2010/07/31:

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 for this design to counter their difficulty of implementation. Some of those missing features have a convenient alternative that is noted in the points below.

Acknowledgements

Portions of LodePaint use open source code or other resources with a liberal license. Here are the acknowledgements and copyright messages for these resources.

Radix FFT

The code in sing.cpp and sing.h is created by:

Javier Soley, Ph. D, FJSOLEY AT UCRVM2 DOT BITNET
Escuela de Fisica y Centro de Investigaciones Geof sicas
Universidad de Costa Rica

JPEG and TGA support

This uses stb_image, public domain library to load different image formats, original source: http://nothings.org/stb_image.c

PNG Support

This uses the LodePNG library, http://www.lodev.org/lodepng

GIF Loader

Code to decode GIF files.

The code in winimage.cpp and winimage.h is a modified version of a library called WINIMAGE, Copyright (c) 2000, Juan Soulie (jsoulie at cplusplus dot com)

LED Icon Set

Many icons for the toolbar and paint tools are based on the LED Icon Set: http://led24.de/iconset/

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!