January 26, 2026

PyDPainter version 2.2.1 is now out! This update adds new gradient options along with some other improvements.

Download now!

Key Features

1. Fill & Dithering

• Circular & Linear Fills: We have added support for a Circular Fill with an adjustable center, along with an enhanced Linear Fill that now supports interactive direction dragging.

• Advanced Dithering: Pixel art is nothing without texture. We have introduced built-in dither modes (including Halftone and horizontal and vertical bars) and support for different ordered dither matrices.

2. Smarter Brushes & Tools

• Shear Y: The Brush menu now includes a Shear Y transformation to match the existing Shear X, allowing for easier distortion of your brushes.
• Enhanced Color Picker: The dropper tool now displays RGB values directly. You can also hold CTRL to pick colors, and we've added the ability to paste RGB values directly from the clipboard into the palette.

3. UI Changes

• Better GUI Font Rendering: We have added many international characters to the user interface font and also fixed the rendering on some of the letters.
• Keyboard Shortcuts: Several shortcut improvements, including support for the US backtick key on international keyboards. The foundation was also laid to add custom keyboard remapping.

4. Window Resizing and Scaling fixes

• Fixed HiDPI Window Sizing: The PyDPainter window had problems scaling properly on a 5K display. Now it scales to 5K in all its pixellated glory.
• Portait Displays and Multi-Monitor Setups: In the previous release, Full-screen on some non-conventional display setups did not work properly. That bug has been squashed, and PyDPainter should be at home on any weird display combination you can dream up.

Detailed Changelog

New Features & Improvements

• Fill Tools:
  • Added Circular Fill style with crosshair gradient indicators.
  • Added arbitrary rotation for linear fill as well as handy rotation buttons (45-degree increments) for linear fills.
  • Implemented arbitrary Dither Matrix support with many presets.
• Palette & Colors:
  • Added RGB values to the dropper tool tooltip.
  • Added ability to paste clipboard RGB data into the Palette.
  • New shortcut: CTRL key to pick colors.
• Windowing/UI:
  • Improved mouse scaling behavior in Fullscreen mode.
  • Fixed window sizing issues.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed some GIF saving errors and import issues.
• Fixed IFF writer to output correct screen resolutions.
• Fixed clipboard behavior under PyGame.

Documentation

• Extensive updates to the Palette and Toolbox documentation.
• Updated Animpainting tutorial with clearer shortcuts and snapshots.

A huge thank you to our contributors for this release: Stephane Anquetil, Jim Higson, and Caleb Riale.

June 19, 2025

PyDPainter version 2.2.0 is now out! This update adds Brush Trails along with some other improvements.

Download now!

• Brush Trails (formerly "Spacing"): The "Spacing" requestor has been renamed to Brush Trails. It is a rethinking of DPaint III Move requestor which allows you rotate and scale brushes along a path along with "ease-in/out" options.
• Brush Rotation and Scaling: You now rotate brushes with the 9 and 0 keys along with the - and = (or +) keys that scale while you are painting. Also, the mouse wheel now scales built-in brushes when used on the toolbar.
• Brush Type/Size Indicator: A new on-screen indicator helps you visualize your current brush type, rotation, and size.
• Native File Dialogs: A new Prefs option allows you to use the OS file dialogs.
• Signed Windows EXE: The Windows executable is now signed so that antivirus programs don't delete it.
• Improved Mac Support: Added a native Mac ARM binary .app for download. The Command key also works like CTRL for menu shortcuts and the menus have the Command symbol in them as well.
• Clipboard Paste Support: You can now paste text directly into the text tool.
• Click Menus: In addition to the click/release menu mode, they also work in a click/click mode to make it easier to use with laptops.
• Increased Undo Levels: Increased undo levels from 20 to 256
• Comprehensive Documentation Updates: New Brush Trails documentation and tutorials. Added Screen Format details as well.

January 30, 2025

PyDPainter's 2.1.0 update introduces anim brushes (animated brushes) that work with animations and sprite sheets in addition to many other improvements.

New Features:

• Anim brushes (animated brushes):
  • Load/save IFF ANIM (ANBR) and GIF anim brushes
  • Paint with anim brushes on a single frame or in an animation
  • Grab anim brushes from animation frames
  • Grab anim brushes from sprite sheets using an adaptive flex grid with a visual editor
  • Anim brush settings for animation playback (forward/backward/ping-pong/random), duration control, and frame selection.
• Improved Grid:
  • Added number spinners
  • "From Brush" button automatically sizes the grid
  • Shift-G sets the grid offset to the cursor
  • "ExclBrush" preference for adjusting brush size when using the grid
• Window Shade Gadgets:
  • Added - and + to title bars on Stencil, Palette, and Brush Grid requestors for better window management

Improvements:

• Faster GIF loading (3X speed)
• Preserved palette when converting to fewer colors
• Improved Fill Type requestor: Corrected gradient fill direction, added a new direction gadget, and ghosted irrelevant controls
• Shift-F11 to disable mouse grabbing in fullscreen mode
• Improved brush pickup stencil behavior so that stencil is cut out of brush

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed brush transparency saving
• Fixed stencil events falling through the requestor
• Fixed stencil clipping for images larger than screen
• Fixed occasional crashes in recovery mode
• Fixed stencil clipping for images larger than the screen
• Fixed a lock-up issue with flood fill
• Fixed [ and ] key handling for AZERTY keyboards and added F12 debug functionality

Go to pydpainter.org to download version 2.1.0 .

Also explore the new animation tutorials (thanks to Stephane Anquetil):

• https://pydpainter.org/docs/tutorials/src/animpainting/animpainting.md
• https://pydpainter.org/docs/tutorials/src/animbrush/animbrush.md

September 02, 2024

PyDPainter 2.0 is out now! This release adds animation to its array of pixel-painting capabilities.

Here are some of the new features:

Animation

• Load and save GIF and IFF ANIM5
• Import and export a series of frames
• Edit and copy per-frame color palettes
• Easily edit per-frame animation rates
• Animation toolbar with VCR controls

Additional Improvements

• Import 24-bit and Amiga HAM images and convert to 256 colors
• Amiga overscan screen support
• Multicycle support for color cycling the colors in a custom brush
• Many bugs fixed
• Added a recovery mode (in case a bug isn't fixed yet)

Go to pydpainter.org to download version 2.0.0 .

Also explore the new animation tutorial (thanks to Stephane Anquetil):

https://pydpainter.org/docs/tutorials/src/animpainting/animpainting.md

April 17, 2024

Documentation

There has been a lot of work done by Stephane Anquetil to fill in the major gaps I had in the documentation. In fact the very first documentation page (the Picture menu) was pretty much just a placeholder I made until Stephane filled in all the descriptions along with examples and helpful screenshots. Thanks so much for your contributions! The documentation is here on the PyDPainter web site:

https://pydpainter.org/docs/TOC.md

 IFF ANIM support

The development of the PyDPainter code has also been continuing, albeit a bit more slowly than I would like. One of the big changes I have recently implemented in the "develop" branch is the saving of IFF ANIM files in addition to the animated GIF support I had already implemented. There are a few different types of IFF ANIM files, but most of the older (non-AGA) files are ANIM-5 format. The later ANIM-7 and ANIM-8 formats worked faster (especially on 68030 and 68040 machines) by copying data in larger chunks. For now, PyDPainter can only load and save ANIM-5 files and only up to 256 colors -- HAM and HAM-8 are not currently supported. I plan to add support for the ANIM-7 and ANIM-8 variants at some point and hope to also add conversion of HAM and HAM-8 mode to 256 color mode.

To save an ANIM-5 file, use the Anim/Save menu option and make sure the file extension is ".anim". You can also still save as ".gif" as well. I'll add a drop-down menu for the file extension in the future to make this discoverable.

Extending code to work with animations

When adding animation features, a lot of stuff stopped working right. I still haven't recovered from all the breakages yet, so that's why I haven't released a new version. Two of the worst offenders were: Screen Format and Page Size. Before I fixed them, they would only operate on one frame of an animation and could cause it to crash or just get really buggy. Now you can change any of these and it will apply to all the frames:

• Screen Format requestor:
• Screen mode (PAL, NTSC, or VGA)
• Screen resolution (with resizing)
• Number of colors (more colors or less with remapping)
• Page Size requestor:
• Size of canvas (with scaling or cropping)

These operations produce a progress bar and show the frames as they're being converted.

Color Keyframes - Global button

Animations can have a global color palette for the whole animation, palette changes throughout the animation, or even a palette for every frame. The Color Keyframes button in the animation toolbar brings up a requestor that now has a new "Global" button:

Clicking the "Global" button will convert the animation to a global palette:

Clicking "OK" applies that single palette to all frames and also remaps them.

What's Next

Here are some things on my to do list:

• fix Background and Stencil to work with animations
• add dropdown (with GIF and ANIM) for animation file saving
• add Move requestor
• add anim brushes
• fix any bugs that crop up

February 13, 2024

Wait... "profit?" Well, maybe intangible profit since I am giving this away. 😀 I do get pleasure in making something usable that makes other people happy, though.

Animation Changes Things

My spare time in the last few weeks has been filled with debugging code in PyDPainter that used to make sense and work just fine, but now that animation features are being added, it breaks. Some of these things are as simple as changing the resolution (Screen Format) of the screen. It used to scale the screen and reduce the number of colors if needed and everything was fine. Now it has to repeat the same thing for every frame of an animation. I haven't gotten to that part yet. Another thing is backgrounds: should there be a separate background for every frame of the animation? I think that's what I'll end up doing because it will also make way for a feature to load a video to trace over. How should stencils behave? Create or remake the stencil for every frame? Or are stencils something that are better left in the past because we have enough memory to do layers now?

So it isn't just adding animation features that I have been working on -- it's also fixing the things that don't play well with animation and extending other tools to work better in the context of an animation. This process has taken longer than I expected, so I missed my "early January" goal to release version 2.0.0. It turns out that this will take some time to do right.

Big Bang

If I implement these basic animation features and rush the release out the door, will people take a look at PyDPainter and dismiss it because it doesn't do much? At this point, I am leaning toward the "big bang" approach where I'll wait to release the new version and build up some more features that people would expect for animation. I'd also like to get it all running on the web. These things will ensure a good experience for new people trying out PyDPainter for the first time.

What's Left?

I'll keep working on the issues list:
https://github.com/mriale/PyDPainter/issues

I'll give updates periodically.

Keeping up with "develop"

At any time, anybody is free to grab a branch like "develop" at any time and get the latest features along with the latest bugs. I might make a more stable branch that is more like a beta version when I get some of the bugs worked out.

January 04, 2024

GIF Animation Saving

A milestone passed yesterday: animated GIF saving is working now in the development branch! As a bonus it also optimizes the file size by trying both the delta and the full image and seeing which compresses the smallest. The animated GIF loading which was previously added to the development branch now pairs perfectly with this feature.

Numbered Animation Frame Export

This new feature on the development branch allows you to export the frames of an animation to individual image files so you can manipulate them however you want with other programs. It numbers each frame sequentially to keep them in order. There is also a new button added to the file requestors to make a directory to keep all the exported frames in one place. Of course the import functionality is still working on the development branch so you can import the frames back in again.

Palette Key Frame GUI

There is now a new requestor that pops up when you have an animation and you click on the "P" icon in the anim toolbar at the bottom of the screen. This shows all the palettes in the frames of the animation and you can insert, copy, and delete palettes. It also includes a remap button to automatically remap the colors on the affected frames to their new palette.

Summary

So these things are done for the 2.0.0 release:

• save numbered frames
• save GIF
• create palette key frame user interface

These things still remain:

• save IFF ANIM
• user interface for editing frame delays
• converting some of the picture manipulation menu items so they work with animations as well as single frames

The last two bullets I just added because I noticed they were missing.

I still hope to have version 2.0.0 out in the beginning of January.

December 14, 2023

I have been making progress on a few things in the PyDPainter project:

Running PyDPainter on the Web

I was able to get parts of PyDPainter to run on the web. Here is a screenshot of it running it in a web browser:

As you can see, the mouse pointer has a weird green block around it. Also, bringing up any requester freezes the program, so you can't load and save files for example. It's a start though, and I think it can get full functionality with some more work on it.

Animation Features

 I've crossed off some things from my list in my last update:

• playback of animations
• fix the palette bugs that were introduced by having multiple palettes in animations
• save numbered frames
• save IFF ANIM
• save GIF

The big things left are to allow for saving of animations now. I am contemplating whether to write my own animated GIF saver which probably will take a while and won't be very efficient or to use ImageMagik's animated GIF conversion. That would introduce another dependency which I don't really want to do.

I probably have to write an interface to deal with multiple palettes per animation, so I guess I have to add that to the list, too:

• create palette key frame user interface

Release 2.0.0 Projection

I am still on track to get version 2.0.0 out in early January. There will be no animbrush or move requestor functionality, but just basic animation capabilities. Other features to come later.

November 25, 2023

I've been working on a few things with PyDPainter:

PyDPainter Web Site

I recently got the PyDPainter web site up and running. It is mostly a copy of the content that is already in GitHub but in an easier-to-read format. I made a script that refreshes this content directly from GitHub when any of it changes. There is also some exclusive content like the art gallery, where artists have submitted some amazing pieces of art that they have drawn with PyDPainter. I also included some of my simple squiggles just for balance.

Running PyDPainter on the Web

There is a project called PygBag that allows you to run Python programs in a web browser. I've tried to get PyDPainter running in the past but with no success. I tried again yesterday and had some limited success showing the initial PyDPainter screen but only occasionally. I hope I can get a version of PyDPainter running on the web soon. That would really lower the barrier to entry for people who would want to try it out. It would also allow me to have it on the HippoPlayer web site, whose author has been clamoring for me to get it running.

Animation Features

These basic animation features are working now: 

• load IFF ANIM 5 animations
• load GIF animations
• load a series of numbered frames into an animation
• support for multiple palettes for animation
• toolbar at bottom of screen for animations
• seeking through animations with a slider, VCR buttons, and keys
• insert/remove frames

These things I have left to do: 

• playback of animations
• fix the palette bugs that were introduced by having multiple palettes in animations
• save numbered frames
• save IFF ANIM
• save GIF

 Release 2.0.0 Projection

I hope to release the 2.0.0 version of PyDPainter with animation features in early January if I can resolve some of these things over the holidays. With more free time however also comes more family responsibilities, so the standard disclaimer applies:

Estimates and forward-looking statements refer only to the date when they were made, and we do not undertake any obligation to update or revise any estimate or forward looking statement due to new information, future events or otherwise, except as required by law.