PaintTool SAI or is a lightweight

raster graphics editor A raster graphics editor (also called bitmap graphics editor) is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics file formats (also known as bitmap ...

and

painting Painting is a Visual arts, visual art, which is characterized by the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called "matrix" or "Support (art), support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with ...

software for

Microsoft Windows Windows is a Product lining, product line of Proprietary software, proprietary graphical user interface, graphical operating systems developed and marketed by Microsoft. It is grouped into families and subfamilies that cater to particular sec ...

developed by and published by Systemax. The prototype of the software was for

X68000 The is a home computer created by Sharp Corporation. It was first released in 1987 and sold only in Japan. The initial model has a 10 Megahertz, MHz Motorola 68000 Central processing unit, CPU, 1 Megabytes, MB of Random Access Memory, ...

, produced in October 1996; Development of the software began on August 2, 2004, with an alpha version released on October 13, 2006, a beta version on December 21, 2007, and a commercial version (1.0.0) on February 25, 2008. It has been available on

from XP to 11. A version 2 is currently in development.

Features

SAI is a lightweight painting application. The

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine fro ...

allows multiple documents to be opened at the same time. The drawing canvas can be both zoomed and rotated using the sliders on the navigator or the hotkeys configured on the keyboard. The toolbar on the top part of the screen also includes a button to mirror the drawing view without mirroring the actual drawing. It is also possible to open multiple viewports to the same document. An application-wide scratchpad (which can be used as a color mixing panel) is provided, which is saved between sessions. Colors can be stored in the swatches panel. Various raster drawing tools are implemented, such as the Airbrush, Watercolor, Pen, and Marker, which can all be customized, and stored in slots in the user interface of the application. There is also a set of vector drawing tools intended for inking, which, like the raster tools, can be configured to be pen pressure-sensitive. Work can be done on separate

layers Layer or layered may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media * ''Layers'' (Kungs album) * ''Layers'' (Les McCann album) * ''Layers'' (Royce da 5′9″ album) *“Layers”, the title track of Royce da 5′9″’s sixth studio album * Layer, a ...

, which can be grouped and have opacity masks. In addition to this, layers can be masked by clipping them to a lower layer. This allows one to add shading and highlights to an area without creating new masks for the additional layers. There is also a pen movement and pressure smoothing feature which can be manually configured as to how much effect it has. Selection tools include the simple square selection, the

lasso A lasso or lazo ( or ), also called reata or la reata in Mexico, and in the United States riata or lariat (from Mexican Spanish lasso for roping cattle), is a loop of rope designed as a restraint to be thrown around a target and tightened when ...

, and magic wand, which can be configured for

anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used b ...

. There is also a selection brush tool, which can be customized like the drawing brush. SAI comes with a full set of transformation tools that can work on selections, including move, resize, rotate, and a free (perspective) transform. Any series of transforms can be set up and then applied at once to a specific selection minimizing the softening of the image. Unlike other tools, SAI is not multipurpose, and has few functions to assist editing, such as graphic drawing tools, text input tools, and special effect filters (these will be implemented in version 2). SAI displays white and transparency in the same way, which may cause significant display differences when exporting to another program, such as Adobe Photoshop. There is also no printing functionality, but documents can be exported in a range of popular formats, such as .PSD or .BMP files, in addition to the native .SAI format. Because the program does not focus on image editing, the only adjustments present are

Brightness Brightness is an attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to be radiating/reflecting light. In other words, brightness is the perception dictated by the luminance of a visual target. The perception is not linear to luminance, and ...

/ Contrast and Hue/ Saturation, and therefore offer no support of level editing, channel extraction, etc. Users may use another program for more complex editing, but when the image is brought back to SAI, its properties may be changed. SAI also includes linework layers, which can be used instead of manually drawing linework. The linework layer includes different tools designed specifically for creating line art, such as the Line, Curve, Edit, Pressure, and Weight tool.

Customization

Various settings and features can be accessed and edited by the user either from the built-in Options dialog, or using the provided misc.ini file in the installation folder which allows additional options and customization. Existing brush presets can be edited, and the user has the choice of adding custom ones by placing

bitmap In computing, a bitmap (also called raster) graphic is an image formed from rows of different colored pixels. A GIF is an example of a graphics image file that uses a bitmap. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a partic ...

files into the "elemap" folder. New canvas presets, as well as custom brush textures may be added by the user, in the form of

grayscale In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a greyscale (more common in Commonwealth English) or grayscale (more common in American English) image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample (signal), s ...

bitmaps.

Version 2

In parallel with the updates to SAI, development began on version 2, in which the software is being rebuilt from the ground up. It is commonly known as SAI2. A preview version was released on December 10, 2013, and an English preview version was released on January 2, 2015. Later, when the cost of adding features to version 1 reached its limit, the policy was changed to cancel all planned additions to version 1 and implement them in version 2. Although a paid upgrade was originally planned, this change made the upgrade from version 1 to version 2 free of charge. Users who purchased version 1 can also use version 2 at no additional cost. Version 1 updates stopped after 2016, and as of 2024, version 2 updates continue.

References

External links

* * {{Raster graphics editors Raster graphics editors

Features

Customization

Version 2

See also

References

External links