Basic features

Romain F. T. rrroschan@gmail.com Creating, opening and saving files. Basic features

Drawing is a simple raster image editor for the GNOME desktop. It'll help you to create and edit pictures.

Many features described here are located in the header of the window, but the exact layout of the app depends on your desktop environment. Screenshots are provided for a standard GNOME environment.

The "Open" button

Open a picture file from your documents.

If the window size is too small to display the Open button, it's available in the primary menu.

Supported file types include PNG, JPEG and BMP. The app could open any file format known by your version of the GdkPixbuf library (TIFF, XPM, etc. and maybe WebP if your distribution provide the related package), however Drawing has not been developed with them in mind so it might not be able to always save an image correctly with these formats.

The "New Image" menu

The goal of this menu is to create a new image. Several options are available:

Create a new blank image, in a new tab. This new image will use the default size and background color.

Create a new blank image, with a custom size and background color.

Create a new image from the current selection.

Create a new image from the current clipboard content.

Open a new window with a new blank image.

If the window size is too small to display its button, the New Image menu is merged in the primary menu.

The primary menu

Reload the picture from the disk. This will not be possible for a new and never saved image. If the image changes on the disk and needs to be reloaded, a warning message should tell you anyways.

See the pictures properties, such as its size and colorspace.

Enable the fullscreen mode.

Export the image or save it as a new file. Both options don't overwrite the original file. With Export as…, you keep editing the original file, but Save as… closes the original file and makes you edit the new one.

Print the picture.

Copy the picture to the clipboard, for example to share it with an other app.

Show tools names. Edit preferences.

Editing

You can edit the picture with the tools in the side bar. There are several types of tools:

The classic tools, such as pencils, shapes, or text insertion.

The various types of selection, to define a part of the picture you want to move or edit further with the following tools:

Finally, some tools can transform either the selection or the entire canvas. This includes cropping, rotating or flipping, scaling, or applying a filter.

With the related buttons in the header of the window, you can Undo (and then Redo) any edit you just did.

In the bottom bar, each tool provides various options and actions.

You can press Ctrl while hovering the canvas to display the pointer coordinates, and various other data depending to the tool you're using.

See also this page about adjusting the zoom level of the image.