Painting

Every picture in Mosaicus can be painted by hand: touch up a conversion pixel by pixel, or paint a picture from blank. Whatever you paint keeps to the rules of the picture's C64 format.

• Paint colorsThe primary and secondary colors, swapping them, and picking colors.
• Cell limits and clashesWhat a clash is, the Cell limits choice, and recoloring clashing cells.
• PencilDraw, shade and spray; sizes, soft and pixel-perfect brushes, paints, and brushes picked up from the picture.
• EraserTakes hand edits away, so the conversion shows again.
• FillAn area, a color or the selection, in colors, patterns, dither mixes or 26 generated fills.
• GradientLinear, radial, diamond and conical gradients, placed live and adjusted before they go in.
• Replace colorOne color swapped for another everywhere.
• ShapesLines, curves, rectangles, ellipses and polygons.
• TextText in a built-in C64-style font or any installed font.
• Image stampAnother picture placed onto yours.
• Eyedropper, Hand and ZoomPicking colors and moving around the picture.
• SymmetryMirrored painting, and painting turned 4 or 8 ways around a center.

#Painting over a conversion

A converted picture has two parts: the conversion, which Mosaicus makes from your source picture and its settings, and your hand edits, the pixels you painted. The hand edits lie on top of the conversion.

• Hand edits stay on top. Change the format's settings, the adjustments, the dithering or the palette, and the conversion is made again under your edits; what you painted stays as you painted it. A change of format carries the edits over to the new format, and a change of size that scales or cuts off edits says how many in a note.
• Seeing them: the status bar counts the pixels you edited. View ▸ Checks ▸ Mark hand edits marks them on the picture, and holding O shows the conversion without them for as long as you hold it.
• Taking them away: the Eraser takes edits away where you paint with it, so the conversion shows there again. Edit ▸ Clear all hand edits takes every edit away in one step (a C64 file you opened goes back to the picture as it was opened). Undo brings them back.
• Freezing the conversion: Edit ▸ Freeze conversion into edits turns every pixel of the conversion into a hand edit, so later changes to the settings leave the picture exactly as it is. In the same step it fixes the choices the converter made for this picture in the settings (the background color, the sprites' shared colors, where the sprites are, a sprite sheet's colors) and says which. Freeze when the conversion is as good as it gets and you only want to paint from now on.

NoteWith Quality set to Auto, the conversion is refined to Best when you pause. Once you paint over a conversion, Mosaicus waits for your next settings change before refining it again, because refining would recolor the cells under your edits.

After a settings change, an edit can find itself in a cell whose other colors changed. Where that puts the cell over its format's limit, the cell is outlined as a clash: see Cell limits and clashes.

A picture without a source (File ▸ New, or a C64 file you opened) is all hand edits over a blank picture: see Painting from blank.

#The tools

The tools run down the left edge of the window, in groups, with the paint colors below them. On a short window they go into two or three columns.

The keys are plain letters, with no Ctrl. Two tools belong to their formats: the Sprites tool shows only in Multicolor + sprites and Hires + sprites, and Snap only in a charset logo and a picture in characters. Switching to a format without the tool in hand takes up the Pencil.

Painting happens in the Result view (Alt+1). In the CRT view the tools are dimmed, and choosing one says that Alt+1 goes back to the picture.

Some things work the same in every painting tool:

• The left button paints with the primary color, the right button with the secondary.
• Alt+click picks the color under the pointer, with the Pencil, Fill, Replace color, Shapes, Text and Image stamp.
• With a selection, painting stays inside it.
• Each stroke, fill, shape or stamp is one undo step, named after its tool (Eraser, Fill, Text, Image stamp, the shape's name). Ctrl+Z during a stroke cuts the stroke short.
• Hold Space to pan the view with any tool.
• The Mirror option of the Pencil, the Eraser and Shapes paints mirrored or turned copies of what you draw.
• The Pencil, the Eraser, Shapes and Text can draw on the sketch layer instead of the picture (S).

#The options bar

The bar above the picture holds the options of the tool in hand.

• At its left: the tool's name, then, for the tools that can draw on the sketch layer, the Sketch switch.
• Then the tool's own options. A tool without options shows a hint of how to use it instead.
• At its right: the view switch (Result, Source, Compare, CRT) and the zoom.

When the window is too narrow for all of a tool's options, the ones that don't fit move into a More ▾ pop-up just before the view switch, the least important first (Cells and Mirror go first; the tool's mode, the brush size and the fill style stay on the bar longest). Nothing is ever cut off: what isn't on the bar is in More. A hint that doesn't fit is shortened, and its full text is in its tooltip.

Each tool keeps its own options, and Mosaicus remembers them between sessions (the Pencil always starts in Draw). Some options are shared: the Pencil and the Eraser have one brush size, the Pencil, the Eraser and Shapes one Mirror option, and every tool that paints the picture one Cells option (see Cell limits).

The Fill, Gradient, Shapes, Text and Image stamp tools and the Pencil each have their own fill style, the thing they paint with: a color, a pattern, a dither mix, a gradient or a generated fill. The Fill page describes them all.

#Related

• Undo and history
• Overlays: the format guides and hand edits marked
• Keyboard shortcuts