Flame Painter 4: New Features That Will Enhance Your Digital Art Creation
The upcoming release of Flame Painter 4, a standalone paint and particle effects package, promises exciting new additions. Expect amazing new brushes, particle systems, and an advanced Brush Creator panel. Let’s dive into the major improvements designed to elevate your experience with Flame Painter, including features like vector path import, a symmetry tool, canvas size and transform tools, a Navigator panel, and a Filters menu.
Importing Vector Paths
A groundbreaking feature in the next Flame Painter release is the ability to import SVG files. You can import them to a single layer as a bitmap or to multiple layers as vectors, allowing for detailed editing. Switch between brushes, edit the brush in the Brush Creator, or select different colors or gradients to customize your design. The imported vector paths will automatically receive brush strokes, speeding up your design process and making it more enjoyable.
Symmetry Tool
Flame Painter 4 introduces a new tool for creating symmetrical designs. This tool makes it simple to create beautiful, symmetrical artwork using any brush, with just a few strokes from your mouse or tablet pen. Follow your artistic intuition, choose different colors, or gradients to create stunning scenes. For even more enjoyment, create shapes on a vector layer to see your design update while switching between various brush presets, particle systems, colors, or gradients.
Advanced Palette Panel
The advanced Palette panel in Flame Painter 4 offers new options for color management. You can select any color from the Palette, displayed in RGB, HSL, HSV, or HSLuv formats. You can choose from a default list or create custom gradients for your brush preset, applying them to strokes, lines, or dots based on the engine your brush preset used. Set how many times the gradient repeats on your stroke and in which direction, either horizontally or vertically.
( A ) – Single Color, ( B ) – Gradient on Length, ( C ) – Gradient on Width, ( D ) – Gradient on Dots
You can also apply the palette from an Image, which allows you to import your images. The image will be mapped onto strokes, lines, or dots and repetition options are available for both length and width.
Canvas Size Tool
Previous Flame Painter versions lacked tools that often required artists to switch over to Photoshop. The Canvas Size tool is introduced in Flame Painter 4 enabling cropping, scaling, and resizing. Resize the canvas using control points or by entering the desired size in the edit boxes. You will also be able to resize the image and change its DPI as needed. The size of your canvas in Flame Painter is limited only by your computer’s memory.
Pick Color Tool
Flame Painter has implemented a Pick Color tool. You can select colors from your photographs to match a specific palette, or the current or all layers. You can also adjust the sample size.
Selection Tool
The Selection feature in Flame Painter 4 makes it more convenient to select areas within your canvas and perform operations on this selected area. There will be various selection tool types available: rectangular, elliptical, polygonal, and freehand.
The Magic Wand is also added to create selections based on the tone and color of pixels, allowing you to specify tolerance, antialiasing, continuous selection, or use the alpha channel. Tolerance determines the color range of selected pixels; antialiasing creates smoother-edged selections; Contiguous selects only adjacent areas of matching colors; and Use Alpha considers the alpha channel.
Filter Menu
In addition to Tile, Glow, and Blur, the development team has implemented standard color adjustment settings under the filter menu. The new filters include:
- Brightness / Contrast
- Hue / Saturation / Lightness
- Color Balance, Color Filter, Colorize
- Desaturate, Invert
- Black to Alpha, White to Alpha
The ‘Black to alpha’ and ‘White to alpha’ filters will be helpful if you want to remove a background from an image.
Improved Fill Tool
The enhanced Fill tool in Flame Painter 4 will fill not only the entire layer with the selected color or gradient but also already painted strokes. Internally, the stroke will be selected with a magic wand tool, based on its color, and then the chosen palette will be applied to this stroke with one click.
Improved Transform Tool
The Transform tool in Flame Painter 3 has been upgraded in the new version, making it easy to move, scale, and resize the selected layer or layers. Also, layers or selections can be rotated and flipped horizontally or vertically with a single click or shortcut.
Photoshop Plugin
Flame Painter 4 will have an updated Photoshop plugin (Flame Painter Connect) for exchanging layers. Export layers back-and-forth between Flame Painter and Photoshop quickly and easily.
Other New Features
Here are some notable features being released in Flame Painter 4:
- Navigator panel to quickly adjust your artwork’s view using a thumbnail display.
- Drag & drop functionality to drag and drop brushes, gradients, images, and files from a web browser or file manager.
- A “New Artwork” window that includes multiple default preset sizes, along with custom presets in centimeters, inches, or pixels including custom DPI.
- The Layers panel will offer a Lock function to prevent any unwanted changes.
- A Preferences panel will allow setting General, Tools, Tablet, and custom Keyboard shortcut preferences.
