LACOURA

Lacoura Raster

Getting started with Lacoura Raster

Lacoura Raster is a painting and retouching studio that runs in a browser tab. Layers, masks, adjustment layers, selections and a full brush engine, composited on the GPU, with nothing to install.

Early access. The painting, compositing, selection and filter core is real and covered by 446 tests. It does not open PSD, KRA or OpenRaster files yet, and colour is 8-bit sRGB only — both are called out below rather than hidden.

Open the studio

Go to lacoura.com/raster and sign in. The editor opens at lacoura.com/raster/app.

Use a desktop browser. Compositing runs on WebGPU where the browser supports it and falls back to the CPU where it does not — the badge in the status bar says which one you are on, and the editor recovers on its own if the GPU device is lost mid-session.

Paint something in five steps

  1. Pick the Brush. B, or the brush in the tool rail.
  2. Choose a preset. The Brushes panel has 56 across ten categories, each with a live stroke preview drawn by the real rasteriser — searchable by name.
  3. Set a colour. The Color panel has a saturation/value field, a hue rail, hex entry and 40 swatches.
  4. Paint. Pressure, tilt and velocity all drive the brush if your tablet reports them.
  5. Add a layer. ⇧⌘N, or the button at the foot of the Layers panel.

The window

  • Tool rail (left) — 26 tools. Groups carry a corner wedge; hold one to reach the rest. The guillemet at the top switches the rail to two columns, and the choice is remembered.
  • Options bar — the settings for whichever tool is active.
  • Canvas — with a task bar for undo, redo and the active layer.
  • Dock (right) — Brushes, Brush Settings and Color above; Layers, Properties and History below. Each group scrolls on its own and collapses to an icon rail, and the layout persists.
  • Status bar — zoom, document size, tile count and memory, the GPU/CPU badge, and the composite time per frame.

Layers, masks and adjustments

  • All 26 blend modes, plus groups that either pass through or isolate.
  • Layer masks — the highlighted thumbnail shows whether a stroke will land on the layer or on its mask, which is the thing that is otherwise impossible to tell.
  • Adjustment layers are non-destructive and take masks of their own; the pixels underneath are never rewritten.
  • Clipping confines a layer to the one below it.

Your work is saved as you go

The editor autosaves to browser storage a few seconds after you stop working, keeping three generations. Close the tab by accident and it offers the work back when you return. ⌘S saves a .psdoc file — layers, masks, adjustments, selections and text, all preserved — and ⇧⌘E exports a flattened PNG.

Recovery currently covers one document, because the editor is single-document.

What is not built yet

Said plainly, because finding out mid-project is worse:

  • No PSD, KRA, OpenRaster or TIFF import. They appear in the format list and report themselves as unimplemented rather than failing quietly.
  • 8-bit sRGB only — no ICC profiles, no soft proofing, no 16- or 32-bit.
  • No dragging to reorder layers, no layer effects, no fill layers, no channels panel.
  • No magnetic lasso, object selection, colour range or Quick Mask.
  • No Liquify, Blur Gallery, or non-destructive filter masks.
  • No desktop build — the browser is the product for now.
  • View, Window and Help in the menu bar are disabled, honestly, because they do nothing yet.