This topic covers bottom bar or status bar. Status bar is divided in three sections: left, middle and right section.
Left section
The left section of the bar contains following items:
- Currently selected (activated) action. Initially, when program is started, Draw action is activate.
- Mouse cursor position (X, Y). When you perform drawing or creating selection (when left mouse button is hold) this area displays position where you clicked left mouse (Xd, Yd) and current mouse position ( X, Y).
- The third item (wide rectangle) displays current pixel color under mouse cursor.
- Next to it are RGB values of pixel under the cursor.
Middle section
The middle section of the bar contains brush bucket consisting of 9 brushes, accessible by mouse click or by entering number from 1 to 9 on your keyboard. When specific brush is selected, brush tip and its respective parameters are automatically shown in brush tool form (right bar). Under each brush tip in status bar, respective primary color is displayed (black, red, green, blue, etc…). When brush is selected, it’s primary color rectangle is up.
Note: Brush can be changed on the fly while drawing, simply by pressing any number from 1 to 9 on your keyboard. Brush change does not interrupt stoke, i.e. undo buffer is not affected (like in previous versions).
Right section
The right section of the bar contains “short palette options” button following currently selected short palette colors (palette entries). Selected color from color palette is one where small rectangle is up. Short palette can be loaded from external file in userdef_xml folder (file extension .spa). Maximum entries (colors) for short palette is 16. There are sample palettes with 5, 10 and 16 colors available. To select some color (palette entry) just click on desired rectangle. Any color from short palette can be used as brush primary/secondary color and color of some palette entry can be changed as well:
- Ctrl+LMB (left mouse button): sets selected color as current brush primary color.
- Ctrl+RMB (right mouse button): sets selected color as current brush secondary color.
- Shift+LMB: starts color dragging: you can drag color to any color picker field (for instance brush primary/secondary color).
- RMB: invokes color dialog; you can change color of selected palette entry.
Another way to select short palette color (only when image is created/loaded) is to press X or Y key on your keyboard while mouse is somewhere over the image (X-next entry, Y-previous entry). Also, when drawing some stroke with selected brush, pressing X or Y will temporary change brush primary color to active palette entry and next entry will be selected (or previous one if Y is pressed). When mouse button is released brush primary color is reset to initial color.
When “short palette options” button is pressed, a pop-up menu appears:
- Load palette sub-menu: a list of sample palettes will appear. Besides the palette name there is a number of color entries.
- Default palette (internal): this is default (internal) palette.
- Reverse palette order: palette entries are mirrored (flipped).
Short palette can be stretched to full 256 palette by interpolating values. This will be covered in Brush tool section.