Introduction

SmoothDraw is a natural painting and image editing software that can produce the same quality as Painter. Support many kinds of brushes (pen, pencil, dry media, airbrush, bristle brush, image hose, etc.), retouch tools, layers, image adjustment, and many effects... Works great with tablets and Tablet PC.

SmoothDraw 's main features:

• Many customizable brushes, like Painter (pen, pencil, airbrush, bristle, dry media, image hose, spray, watercolor and so on)
• Retouch Tools
• Image transform and adjustments
• Effects
• Draw and paint in super quality
• Special subpixel level smoothing for thin lines--better than Painter some time :)
• Layers and Layer blend modes
• Tablet pressure support
• PNG, JPEG, BMP and TGA support
• Palette panel to save your colors
• Plugins can be used to add new functions

You can visit our site http://www.smoothdraw.com/product for updates and goodies.

What's New

2.6.0

• New Cartoon Fill Brush - let you take full control over the cartoon filling. This brush draws within black borders. With this brush, you don't need a close figure any more. Tip: to get better silhouette, make a duplicate layer of the figure on top and set blend mode to Multiply, so that the silhouette will stay safe on top.
• Reworked layer blend modes work better in Photoshop's way.
• New Dessolve layer blend mode from Photoshop replaced Difference mode.
• Added color tools on the Color Panel.
• Bottom most background settings on Visual Aid Panel. See translucent pictures with different mat color, and set to transparent bg layer before saving.
• 20% Speed improvement.

2.5.1

• User color palette now is remembered.
• Undo/Redo button now can be gray.

2.5.0

• New "Just Add Water" brush.
• Layer lock and alpha lock function.
• Erase tool and alpha erase tool merged to smart erase tool.
• New eyedropper tool.
• Canvas view now can be zoomed.
• Visual aid.
• Better user interface.

Install

System Requirement:

• Windows 98/Me/2000/XP
• recommend Tablet PC or a tablet.
• For Win95/NT, some update packages may be needed. Just for the 'msimg32.dll'.

Upgrade:

• To update from old version, just overwrite the old version. RegKeys for 2.0 is still valid for the updates.

Installed Files:

Work Space

• The default canvas is 800x600 pixels and filled with white. You can use File>New to create canvas of other sizes, which is transparent by default.
• Use Edit>Clear to BG Color to fill the current layer with background color.
• Use Edit>Clear to Transparent to clear the current layer to transparent.
• You can either click the triangle of the tool panel or the caption bar to hide or show the properties.
• When picture size is bigger than the window size, use the hand tool to move the canvas.
• Use the move tool to move the current layer.
• Both Mouse and Tablet can be used to draw, mouse only has maximum pressure. Brush Size changes when the pressure varies.

Brushes

SmoothDraw offers kinds of brushes to help you with painting, following are descriptions of each brush in more detail:

• Pen: Just a pen.
• Leaky Pen: A pen that is leaky.
• Digital Pencil: A pencil without grain.
• 2B Pencil: A pencil drawing on rough paper.
• Dry Media: To simulate chalk, charcoal,  crayons and so on.
• Felt Pen: Soft tip brush.
• Digital Airbrush: Like Photoshop's airbrush.
• Fine Spray Airbrush: Dotty airbrush.
• Graffiti: Just as the name.
• Coarse Spray: Just as the name.
• Bristle Brush: You can use it to draw hair.
• Kind of Water Color: Just looks like water color.
• Cartoon Fill: Draw only within black borders for cartoon style pictures.
• Custom Shape: Draw with any dab pattern.
• Image Hose: Draw with Images.
• Eraser: Soft eraser. It erase to background color if the opacity of the current layer is locked, otherwise to transparent.
• Hard Eraser: The same as Eraser except it erase clear at once.
• Just Add Water: Pure water to blur the image.
• Blur: Make the image blurred as you drop water on the image.
• Sharpen: Make edges look clearer.
• Burn: Darken the image.
• Dodge: Brighten the image.

The Panels

	The Color Panel Random: Get a random color. Foreground & Background Color: Click to open the color dialog to choose or mix colors. Color Panes: Like a palette to hold some colors you are using. Left click a pane to choose its color. Right click a pane to fill the pane to current color.
	Color Set An express way to pick up a color.
	Brush Size Size: The diameter of the brush tip. Min Size: The minimum size when you draw with minimum pressure in percentage.
	Ink Flow Flow: The amount of the ink flow of the brush. Min Flow: The minimum ink flow when you draw with minimum pressure in percentage.
	Grain For dry media brushes. To set the paper texture and the amount of grain.
	Jitter Spacing: The spacing between two dabs in percentage. And rest are the jitter amount of hue, saturation, luminance, size, position, angle.
	Dab Image Choose the dab image for the custom shape brush or the image hose.
	Layer Name: You can rename the layer name or use default name. Layer Blend Mode: Normal: Cover underlying layers. Multiply: Paint color superpose, the result is always a darker color. Screen:  Prime light color superpose, the result is always a lighter color. Overlay: Multiply or Screen depends on the color. Color: Only blend current layer's color and underlying layers' lightness. Luminance: Only blend current layer's lightness and underlying layers' color. Brighter: If current layer's color is brighter than underlying layer's color, then draw. Darker: If current layer's color is darker than underlying layers' color, then draw. Negative: Inverse the underlying layers' color. Dissolve: Opacity values for pixels dither to either 0 or 1. Opacity: Change the value will change the layer's opacity. Up: Move current layer upstairs. Down: Move current layer downstairs. Commands: Layer operations like add, delete, merge, etc.

Dialogs

You can select color from right or mix color on the left. And preview the color in the big rectangle at the top. Because a color looks different for slices of different sizes.

When you save a file in JPEG format, this dialog will appear. You can set the quality of the JPEG compression, and to select whether to generate progessive-display JPEG. And the numbers are the compressed/original size.

When you want to resize Canvas/Image size, note that resize canvas size will not change image size, but if you resize image size, canvas size will change too. And note that when resize canvas size, you can enter negative value, but resize image size you can not use negative number.

Many effects have a parameter, e.g. the amount of the effect. Click on the gauge to set the parameter and you will see the result immediately. Click accept button to accept the change, or canel to roll back.

File Formats

• SDD: SmoothDraw's Document format to hold all info. Can not be used by other applications.
• PNG: Portable Network Graphics is a lossless compressed format for Web. Can contain transparency infomation.
• JPEG: Lossy but has a high compression rate. Can only save as opaque images.
• BMP: Uncompressed native Windows format.
• TGA: Just for those who still use it.