Selecting and transforming

A selection marks the pixels you want to work on. Painting stays inside it, and the Edit and Filter commands act on it. With nothing selected, they act on the whole cel.

Making a selection

Hold a key as you start to combine with the current selection:

• no key replaces it, and a click without a drag clears it;
• Shift adds to it;
• Alt+Shift takes away from it (as in Aseprite; Alt alone does too);
• Ctrl+Shift keeps only the overlap.

Grid cells. Double-click with any selection tool to select the grid cell under the pointer. Keep the button down after the second click and drag to select every whole cell between where you started and the pointer. This works on rectangular, isometric and hexagonal grids, and selects each cell's exact shape. The keys above combine the cells with the selection you had before the double-click. It uses the sprite's grid when one is set up in View > Grid > Grid Settings... or the grid is shown; otherwise a double-click is just two clicks. With the Polygonal Lasso Selection, once you've placed a corner a double-click closes the shape as usual.

The selection shows as a moving dashed outline ("marching ants") that follows its exact shape.

The Select menu:

• Select > Select All (Ctrl+A) selects the whole canvas.
• Select > Deselect (Ctrl+D) clears the selection, as does Esc.
• Select > Reselect (Ctrl+Shift+D) brings back the last selection you cleared.
• Select > Inverse Selection (Ctrl+Shift+I) swaps what's selected and what isn't.
• Select > Quick Mask lets you paint the selection instead (Quick Mask).
• Select Opaque selects every painted pixel of the active layer; Select Transparent selects every pixel with no paint. For a group, that means the pixels of every layer inside it.
• Modify > Expand..., Contract... and Border... change the selection's shape by a number of pixels (up to 256). Expand grows it outward. Contract shrinks it inward, and anything thinner than the amount disappears. Border keeps only a band of that width along the inside of the edge, which you can then fill to outline a shape. Corners picks Round (the circle brush of the same reach, as in Aseprite; at 1 pixel only the pixels straight above, below and to the sides count) or Square (diagonals count too). The edge of the selection counts as an edge, so contracting Select All leaves a margin and its border is a frame around the canvas. A selection that hangs off the canvas keeps its off-canvas part: contracting it doesn't pull it in from the canvas edge. The dialog remembers your last amount and corners.

From a layer. Hold Alt and click a layer in the timeline to select its painted pixels at the current frame, without making it the active layer. Add Shift to add them to the selection, Ctrl to take them away, or both to keep only the overlap.

Selections can be undone like any other change. Each sprite has its own.

Quick Mask

Select > Quick Mask lets you paint the selection instead of drawing its outline. It has no shortcut of its own; you can give it one in Settings > Keyboard Shortcuts....

Turning it on makes the selection paint: the canvas is tinted red where nothing is selected and stays clear where something is. With nothing selected, the whole canvas is tinted. While it's on:

• the paint tools paint the selection. The pencil, brushes, shapes, the Paint Bucket and the gradient add to it, and the eraser takes away. Brush shapes, symmetry, pressure and dynamics work as usual. The color doesn't matter, only how opaque the paint is;
• your layers can't be changed: the other tools, and the commands that would edit the sprite, do nothing until you turn it off;
• Undo and Redo step through your strokes; undoing past the first one turns Quick Mask off.

Choose Select > Quick Mask again to turn it off: every pixel painted at half opacity or more becomes the selection. Turning it on and turning it off are one undo step each.

Each sprite has its own Quick Mask, and it stays on while you change frames, layers or tabs. It is never saved: it isn't in the file, an export or Sync, and closing the sprite while it's on loses what you painted. Running a script turns it off first, so the script gets what you painted as the selection.

What uses the selection

• Painting. Every drawing tool stays inside the selection.
• Edit commands. Edit > Fill fills the selection with the foreground color; Edit > Stroke Selection... paints a line of a chosen width and color along its edge (inside, centered or outside); Edit > Delete clears it (a Background layer clears to the background color) and shrinks the cel to what's left, removing it when nothing is. Delete and Edit > Cut then drop the selection, as in Aseprite (one undo brings both back, and Select > Reselect the selection); Edit > Flip Horizontal and Edit > Flip Vertical flip it in place: every selected pixel moves to its mirror position within the selection's bounds, the spots it leaves clear (to the background color on a Background layer), and the selection outline flips with it. With nothing selected, Fill and Flip act on the whole cel, and Delete removes the cel (on a linked cel, only this frame's).
• Adjustments and effects (the Filter menu) work inside the selection. Their Apply to option chooses which cels: the active one, the cels selected in the timeline, all frames of the layer, all layers in the frame, or everything.

Moving and transforming

The arrow keys move the selected pixels one pixel at a time, and Shift with an arrow one grid cell, as in Aseprite; each press is one undo step. With nothing selected, ← and → step through the frames and ↑ and ↓ through the layers.

With the Move (V), the selection, or the whole cel if nothing is selected, gets a frame with handles. Then:

Press Enter, click outside, or switch tools to apply the change as one undo step; Esc cancels it. The tool options choose how rotation and scaling redraw the pixels:

• Fast Rotation keeps every pixel as it is (the usual choice for pixel art);
• RotSprite rotates through an 8× upscale for smoother, cleaner edges;
• Bilinear blends in-between colors.

You can distort and then still scale, rotate or move the result. The shape has to stay convex: a corner can't be dragged across the shape to fold it over.

Art moved or transformed past the canvas edge isn't lost:

• With nothing selected, the whole cel moves and keeps everything, so dragging it half off the canvas and back brings it all back. Scaling or rotating it keeps what lands within the canvas and the cel's old area, wherever you move it.
• Selected or pasted pixels are kept within the canvas and the area the cel already covers; what goes beyond that is cut when you apply.
• On the Background layer, anything past the canvas edge is cut.

The Move tool's options also have number fields: X and Y (the left and top of the transformed shape), W and H (its size in pixels, scaled about the pivot) and the angle in degrees. Type a value and press Enter to start or edit the pending transform. With nothing selected and several cels selected in the timeline, applying the transform moves, scales or rotates every selected cel the same way, as one undo step.

A layer with Lock movement on can't be moved, though it can still be scaled, rotated and distorted in place. With Snap to grid on, moving snaps the corner to the grid and scaling snaps the edge you drag; a distorted corner snaps to grid points.

Edit > Transform also has:

• Edit > Transform > Rotate 90° Clockwise, Edit > Transform > Rotate 90° Counterclockwise and Edit > Transform > Rotate 180°, pixel-exact;
• Align (left, center, right, top, middle, bottom) puts the selection, or the cel's pixels, against the canvas edge or center, and Distribute Horizontally / Vertically spaces the content of three or more selected cels evenly between the outermost two;
• the rotate, flip and iso commands, like Align, cover every cel selected in the timeline when nothing is selected on the canvas (with a selection they act on the active cel);
• Edit > Transform > Iso Left, Edit > Transform > Iso Right and Edit > Transform > Iso Floor, which project flat art onto the sides or top of an isometric cube, following the sprite's isometric ratio.

To turn or flip the whole sprite or a whole layer, use the Sprite and Layer menus instead (Sprite > Rotate 90° CW, Sprite > Flip Canvas Horizontal, Layer > Flip Layer Horizontal and their neighbors).

Copy and paste

A paste lands where the selection is (so copy and paste puts it back in the same spot), or in the middle of the view. Transparent pixels in it don't erase what's underneath. Press Enter or click away to place it, or Esc to throw it away.

Copies also go to your computer's clipboard as a PNG, and images copied in other apps paste in.

When the timeline has the keyboard focus, these shortcuts copy and paste whole cels instead (Animation and the timeline).

Symmetry

Turn on symmetry with the Symmetry button at the right of the tool options bar, and every drawing tool mirrors what you draw. Its menu picks the axes, which can be combined:

• Horizontal mirrors top to bottom; Vertical mirrors left to right;
• the two Diagonals mirror across the corners;
• Horizontal and Vertical together give four-way symmetry.

Drag the dashed guides on the canvas to move an axis (they snap to half pixels, so odd and even sizes both mirror cleanly), and Reset puts them back in the middle. Each sprite remembers its own symmetry. The Move tool and the selection tools aren't mirrored.

The mirrored strokes work on their own side's pixels: a translucent, shading, blur or dodge/burn stroke blends with what is under each mirror, and the Paint Bucket fills again from the mirrored click point.

The grid

View > Grid has:

• View > Grid > Show Grid (Ctrl+') and View > Grid > Show Pixel Grid (Ctrl+Shift+');
• View > Grid > Snap to Grid (Shift+S), which snaps shapes, lines, rectangular and elliptical selections, slices and gradients to the grid's corners;
• View > Grid > Isometric Grid, which switches to diamond cells;
• View > Grid > Hexagonal Grid, which switches to hexagonal cells;
• View > Grid > Grid Settings..., with the grid's type (rectangular, isometric at 2:1, 1:1, 3:2 or 4:3, or hexagonal), offset, cell size, color and opacity. Selection as Grid uses the selection's bounds as one cell.

Hexagonal grids can be pointy-top (a corner at the top, straight sides left and right) or flat-top (a corner at the left). Width and Height are one hexagon's bounding box and Edge length is the length of its straight edges. The pixels have to work out evenly: the width (pointy) or height (flat) must be even, and the box must be longer than the edge by an even number of pixels, so each pointed end is a whole number of pixels tall. Choosing the type, or flipping the orientation, fits a regular-looking hexagon; the dialog tells you what's wrong if you type a combination that doesn't fit. Every other row sits half a cell over, and the lines are drawn pixel-exact. Snap to grid snaps to the hexagons' corners, and Stop at grid fills a single hexagon.

The grid's type, offset and size are saved with the sprite (and can be undone); its color and opacity, and whether it shows or snaps, apply to every sprite. .aseprite files keep only the bounding box, as they do for isometric grids.

Rulers and guides

View > Guides > Show Rulers (Ctrl+R) puts a ruler along the top and the left of every editor, marked in sprite pixels. The sprite's own extent is shaded on each, and the pixel under the pointer is highlighted.

Guides are lines you place across the sprite to line things up. They never show in the art or in exports.

• Add one by dragging out of a ruler onto the canvas: out of the top ruler for a horizontal guide, out of the left ruler for a vertical one. The position shows while you drag, and guides always sit on a pixel edge. For an exact spot, use View > Guides > New Guide....
• Move one with the Move tool: drag the guide.
• Remove one by dragging it off the canvas (back onto a ruler), or all of them with View > Guides > Clear Guides.
• Esc cancels a guide drag.

Also in View > Guides:

• View > Guides > Show Guides (Ctrl+;) hides or shows them;
• View > Guides > Snap to Guides (Ctrl+Shift+;) pulls shapes, lines, rectangular and elliptical selections, slices and gradients onto a guide within a few screen pixels, and moving or scaling with the Move tool too (a moved selection lands whichever edge is nearer the guide). A guide in reach wins over the grid;
• View > Guides > Lock Guides (Ctrl+Alt+;) stops guides being moved or removed by dragging.

Guides are saved with the sprite, also in .aseprite files (Aseprite keeps them but doesn't show them), and adding, moving or removing one can be undone. They move with the art when you change the canvas size, crop, trim, resize, rotate or flip the sprite. Whether they show, snap or are locked, and whether the rulers show, apply to every sprite.

Perspective grid

View > Perspective Grid turns on a drawing aid for perspective: rays fan out of one, two or three vanishing points, with a horizon line through the first two. Like guides it never shows in the art. With the Move tool, drag a point to move it (a point can sit well outside the canvas). View > Perspective Grid > Perspective Grid Settings... sets 1-, 2- or 3-point, the points' positions and how many rays fan out of each. It's saved with the sprite, moves with the art when you resize, rotate or flip the canvas, and can be undone; it's dropped from .aseprite files. Nothing snaps to it.

Choose Fisheye as the type for a 5-point curvilinear grid: a circle with a center point, and curved horizontal and vertical lines that all meet at the circle's left, right, top and bottom points, with straight lines through the center. Set the center, radius and how many lines run each way in the dialog, or drag the center and the handle on the circle with the Move tool.

In a rotated view each ruler measures the sprite's axis that runs closer to it, so at 90° the top ruler shows y (counting the other way at some angles). At angles between quarter turns the rulers read along the line through the middle of the view, and the highlight follows the pointer. Guides can be added and dragged at any angle.