SAI or is a lightweight raster graphics editor and

painting Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...

software for Microsoft Windows developed and published by Systemax Software. Development of the software began on August 2, 2004, and the first alpha version was released on October 13, 2006. SAI's official release (1.0.0) was on February 25, 2008, and an update preview was released shortly after. It has been available on Microsoft Windows from 98 to 10. The painting application is available in both

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

, and an official

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ide ...

as well as an official

German German(s) may refer to: * Germany (of or related to) ** Germania (historical use) * Germans, citizens of Germany, people of German ancestry, or native speakers of the German language ** For citizens of Germany, see also German nationality law **Ge ...

translation.

Features

SAI is a lightweight painting application. The

user interface In the industrial design field of human–computer interaction, a user interface (UI) is the space where interactions between humans and machines occur. The goal of this interaction is to allow effective operation and control of the machine f ...

allows multiple documents to be opened at the same time. The drawing canvas can be both zoomed and rotated using the sliders on the navigator or the

hotkeys computing, a keyboard shortcut also known as hotkey is a series of one or several keys to quickly invoke a software program or perform a preprogrammed action. This action may be part of the standard functionality of the operating system or ...

configured on the keyboard. The toolbar on the top part of the screen also includes a button to mirror the drawing view without mirroring the actual drawing. It is also possible to open multiple viewports to the same document. An application-wide scratchpad (which can be used as a color mixing panel) is provided, which is saved between sessions. Colors can be stored in the swatches panel. Various raster drawing tools are implemented, such as the Airbrush, Watercolor, Pen, and Marker, which can all be easily customized, and stored in slots in the user interface of the application. There is also a set of vector drawing tools intended for inking, which, like the raster tools, can be configured to be pen pressure-sensitive. Work can be done on separate layers, which can be grouped and have opacity masks. In addition to this, layers can be masked by clipping them to a lower layer. This allows one to add shading and highlights to an area without creating new masks for the additional layers. There is also a pen movement and pressure smoothing feature which can be manually configured as to how much effect it has. Selection tools include the simple square selection, the

lasso A lasso ( or ), also called lariat, riata, or reata (all from Castilian, la reata 're-tied rope'), is a loop of rope designed as a restraint to be thrown around a target and tightened when pulled. It is a well-known tool of the Spanish an ...

, and magic wand, which can be configured for

anti-aliasing Anti-aliasing may refer to any of a number of techniques to combat the problems of aliasing in a sampled signal such as a digital image or digital audio recording. Specific topics in anti-aliasing include: * Anti-aliasing filter, a filter used be ...

. There is also a selection brush tool, which can be customized like the drawing brush. SAI comes with a full set of transformation tools that can work on selections, including move, resize, rotate, and a free (perspective) transform. Any series of transforms can be set up and then applied at once to a specific selection minimizing the softening of the image. Some common features that exist in similar software, such as text layers, gradients, and shape tools, are not implemented, as SAI focuses on drawing and painting, while the final composition is often done using another application. SAI displays white and transparency in the same way, which may cause significant display differences when exporting to another program, such as Adobe Photoshop. There is also no printing functionality, but documents can be exported in a range of popular formats, such as

.PSD Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in ...

.BMP The BMP file format, also known as bitmap image file, device independent bitmap (DIB) file format and bitmap, is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device (such as a graphics adap ...

files, in addition to the native .SAI format. Because the program does not focus on image editing, the only adjustments present are

Brightness Brightness is an attribute of visual perception in which a source appears to be radiating or reflecting light. In other words, brightness is the perception elicited by the luminance of a visual target. The perception is not linear to luminan ...

/ Contrast and

Hue In color theory, hue is one of the main properties (called color appearance parameters) of a color, defined technically in the CIECAM02 model as "the degree to which a stimulus can be described as similar to or different from stimuli that ...

Saturation Saturation, saturated, unsaturation or unsaturated may refer to: Chemistry * Saturation, a property of organic compounds referring to carbon-carbon bonds **Saturated and unsaturated compounds ** Degree of unsaturation **Saturated fat or fatty aci ...

, and therefore no support of level editing, channel extraction, etc. Users may use another program for more complex editing, but when the image is brought back to SAI, its properties may be changed. SAI also includes linework layers, which can be used instead of manually drawing linework. The linework layer include different tools designed specifically for creating lineart, such as the Line, Curve, Edit, Pressure, and Weight tool.

Customization

Various settings and features can be accessed and edited by the user either from the built-in Options dialog, or using the provided misc.ini file in the installation folder which allows additional options and customization. Existing brush presets can be edited, and the user has the choice of adding custom ones by placing

bitmap In computing, a bitmap is a mapping from some domain (for example, a range of integers) to bits. It is also called a bit array or bitmap index. As a noun, the term "bitmap" is very often used to refer to a particular bitmapping application: t ...

files into the "elemap" folder. New canvas presets, as well as custom brush textures may be added by the user, in the form of

grayscale In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a grayscale image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an ''amount'' of light; that is, it carries only intensity information. Graysc ...

bitmaps.

References

External links

* * {{Raster graphics editors Raster graphics editors