The mtPaint Handbook
1. Legal
2. Introduction
2.1 Life Before mtPaint
2.2 Project Genesis
2.3 General Philosophy
2.4 Development Timeline
2.4.1 Version 0.23 - 0.37
2.4.2 Version 0.40 - 0.97
2.4.3 Version 2.00 - 2.30
2.4.4 Version 3.00
2.4.5 Version 3.10 - 3.40
2.4.6 Version 3.50
3. Pixel Art
3.1 Creating a New Canvas
3.2 Painting Tools
3.2.1 Paint
3.2.2 Shuffle
3.2.3 Flood Fill
3.2.4 Straight Line
3.2.4.1 Drawing Arrows
3.2.5 Smudge
3.2.6 Clone
3.2.7 Text
3.2.7.1 Text (FreeType)
3.3 The Palette
3.3.1 Editing the Palette
3.3.2 Loading and Saving the Palette
3.3.3 Sorting and Adjusting the Palette
3.3.4 Colour Protection
3.3.5 The Transparent Colour
3.3.6 Picking a Colour from the Canvas
3.3.7 Copy to Palette
3.3.8 Paste Palette
3.3.9 Pick Gradient
3.3.10 Colour Chooser
3.4 Patterns
3.5 Painting Modes and the Settings Toolbar
3.5.1 Continuous
3.5.2 Opacity
3.5.3 Tint
3.5.4 Colour Selection
3.5.5 Mask
3.5.6 Gradient
3.5.6.1 Placed Gradients
3.5.6.2 Stroke Gradients
3.5.6.3 Custom Gradients
3.5.6.4 Utility Channel Gradients
3.5.6.5 Shapeburst Gradients
3.5.7 Blend
3.6 Tricks and Tips
3.6.1 Cleaning up a Scanned Image
3.6.2 Extracting Colour Value Component
4. The Selection Tool
4.1 Rectangle Selections
4.2 Polygon Selections
4.3 The Lasso
4.3.1 Smoothing a Selection
4.4 Masking Colours
4.5 Alpha Blending
4.5.1 Single Colour Variation
4.6 Multiple Clipboards
4.7 Brush Pasting
4.8 Ramps
4.9 Paste Swap
5. Image Viewing
5.1 Zooming and Panning
5.1.1 Zooming to a Particular Area
5.2 Full View Mode
5.3 Image File List
5.4 The View Window
5.5 Image Tracing
5.6 Zoom Grid
5.7 Dock Pane
5.8 Status Bar
6. Image Manipulation
6.1 Cropping
6.2 Scaling
6.2.1 Gamma Correction
6.3 Rotating
6.4 Resizing the Canvas
6.4.1 Tile Effects
6.5 Adjusting the Image Gamma, Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Hue
6.6 Applying Effects
6.6.1 Bacteria
6.6.2 Greyscale
6.6.3 Unsharp Mask
6.6.4 Gaussian Blur
6.6.5 Kuwahara-Nagao Blur
6.6.6 Edge Detection
6.6.7 Thresholding
6.7 Isometric Transformations
6.8 Converting an RGB Image to Indexed Palette
6.8.1 The Palette
6.8.2 The Pixels
6.8.3 Examples
6.8.4 Tricks and Tips
6.8.4.1 Saturation
6.8.4.2 Manually Selecting Colours
6.8.4.3 Dithering Settings
6.9 Skewing
6.10 Segmentation
6.10.1 Object extraction
7. Channels
7.1 Alpha
7.1.1 Coupling RGBA Operations
7.1.2 Unassociate Alpha
7.2 Selection
7.3 Mask
7.4 File Handling
7.5 Tricks and Tips
7.5.1 Converting a Colour Transparency to an Alpha Transparency
7.5.2 Converting an Alpha Transparency to a Colour Transparency
7.5.3 Separating a Red, Green or Blue Channel
7.5.4 Adding a Red, Green or Blue Channel
7.5.5 Converting Red, Green or Blue into any Other Colour
7.5.6 Adding or Subtracting Masks
7.5.7 Creating a Mask from a Single Colour
7.5.8 Cutting out Text Shapes from a Photo
7.5.9 Creating Text Cut Outs for Web Pages
7.5.10 Feathered Edges
7.5.11 Outlined Edges
7.5.12 Partial Masking
7.5.13 Magic Wand Selections
7.5.14 Colour Replacement
8. Layers
8.1 Creating
8.1.1 Drag 'n' Drop
8.2 Manipulating
8.2.1 Communal undo space
8.3 Examples
8.4 Tricks and Tips
8.4.1 Creating a Scrapbook using Layers
8.4.2 Gradient Stencils
9. Animation
9.1 Loading Animated GIF Files
9.2 Creating Animated GIF Files
9.3 Animating Layers
9.3.1 Preparation of Ideas
9.3.2 Project Initializing
9.3.3 Setting up Positions and Cycle Data
9.3.4 Exporting Frames for GIF or MPEG Encoding
9.3.5 Extra Notes
9.4 Indexed Palette Animation Examples
9.5 RGB Animation Examples
9.6 Palette Shifting
10. Scripting
10.1 Script Commands
10.1.1 Groups
10.1.2 Flattening
10.2 Quoting and Comments
10.3 Lists
10.4 Toolbars
10.5 Irregularities
10.5.1 The File Menu
10.5.2 The Edit Menu
10.5.3 The View Menu
10.5.4 The Image Menu
10.5.5 The Selection Menu
10.5.6 The Palette Menu
10.5.7 The Effects Menu
10.5.8 The Channels Menu
10.5.9 The Layers Menu
10.5.10 The Tools Toolbar
10.5.10.1 The Edit Gradient Dialog
10.5.11 The Settings Toolbar
10.5.12 The Layers Window
10.6 Examples
A. Miscellaneous
A.1 Shortcuts
A.2 Supported File Types
A.2.1 PNG Files
A.2.2 JPEG 2000 Files
A.2.2.1 Lossy Image Comparison - JPEG vs JP2
A.2.2.2 Lossless Image Comparison - PNG vs JP2 vs WebP
A.2.3 TIFF Files
A.2.3.1 Creating PDF Files
A.2.4 PMM Files
A.2.4.1 PMM File Structure
A.2.4.2 Manipulating PMM Files
A.2.5 LBM Files
A.3 Grabbing Screenshots
A.4 Preferences
A.4.1 Touch Sensitive Tablets
A.4.2 Localized Translations
A.5 Limitations
A.6 Customizing mtPaint
A.6.1 Creating Patterns
A.6.2 Creating Brushes
A.6.3 Custom Icons
A.6.4 Default Settings
A.7 File Actions
A.7.1 GNU/Linux Systems
A.7.2 Windows Systems
A.8 Image Loading and Saving
A.9 Command Line Options
B. The History of this Document
C. The NEWS file from mtPaint
D. The README file from mtPaint