Lacoura Raster
Tools & painting
All 26 tools are built; none is a placeholder. Tools that share a shortcut share a slot in the rail — hold the slot to reach the others.
Selection and navigation
| Key | Tool | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| V | Move | Moves the active layer; applied at composite time, not by rewriting pixels. |
| M | Rectangular / Elliptical Marquee | Drag a selection. Both live in one slot. |
| L | Lasso | Freehand selection. |
| W | Magic Wand | Selects by colour similarity. |
| C | Crop | Recomposes the canvas as a transform, not a pixel rewrite. |
| I | Eyedropper | Samples a colour into the foreground swatch. |
| H | Hand | Pans. |
| Z | Zoom | Zooms. |
Painting
| Key | Tool | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| B | Brush / Pencil | The brush is anti-aliased and pressure-driven; the pencil is hard-edged. |
| E | Eraser | Erases through the same pipeline the brushes use. |
| G | Gradient / Paint Bucket | Fills, both clipped to the current selection. |
Retouching
These are all samplers over the shared paint pipeline, so brush size, hardness, flow and dynamics apply to every one of them.
| Key | Tool | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| J | Spot Healing / Healing Brush | Blends sampled texture into the surrounding tone. |
| S | Clone Stamp | Copies from a sampled origin. |
| R | Blur / Sharpen / Smudge | Local focus and push. |
| O | Dodge / Burn / Sponge | Local lightening, darkening and saturation. |
Vector and type
| Key | Tool | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| P | Pen | Bézier paths with fill, stroke, and path-to-selection. |
| T | Horizontal Type | Editable type layers — the text and its styling are stored, never the pixels. |
| U | Shape | Draws shapes. These rasterise on creation rather than staying editable vectors. |
The brush engine
Brush Settings exposes 26 dynamics in collapsible sections — size, angle, roundness, scatter, texture, dual brush, colour dynamics and transfer among them, each drivable by pressure, tilt, velocity or a random source.
- Stabilisation uses a pulled-string model, so a slow deliberate line comes out smooth without lagging behind the cursor.
- Coverage accumulates by maximum within a stroke, so going back over your own wet stroke at low opacity does not darken it into a blotch.
- Procedural texture is generated rather than sampled from an image, so it never tiles visibly.
Selections
Selections are coverage masks, not outlines, so they hold partial values. They combine with the usual boolean modes and take feather, expand and contract. Everything clips to them — painting, fills and filters alike. The marching ants around them are drawn from the mask itself.
Filters
26 filters, each run on a worker so the interface stays responsive, with a live preview before you commit and the selection respected. They apply destructively for now: the engine supports non-destructive filter masks, but the document model does not carry them yet.