Imaginor

Imaginor is designed as an easy-to-use photo editor and viewer. It has an all-in-one editing screen — filter, adjustment, transformation, and layer controls all appear on the screen directly, with no nested menus and no drop-down selectors. The brush tools have preset feathering and pressure; you set only the size of the brush. Most features of Imaginor are learned just by using the slider and button controls. This help page covers the more intricate elements of the program.

It has six gold buttons that change the controls for some specialized operations. These include framing, changing canvas size, joining images, adding text, and using curves.

The Flow Painter module is called by the first of those gold buttons. This module is the artistic heart of Imaginor. It features manual and automatic painting of your image with brushes of your choice. Switch brushes and settings to apply a variety of brush strokes as you work. It has eight native brushes to try, and allows you to open your own PNG brushes. The variety of painting effects you can get is unlimited.

Imaginor is the name of the app. It is Latin for "I imagine." So happy imagining!

Layers

Two working layers, blended live — Normal, Darken, Lighten, Multiply, Screen, Color, Luminosity — with Fade, Undo/Redo, and an Eraser that reveals what's underneath.

1. Active layer shown on the main display.
2. Underlayer shown on the thumbnail (top right).
3. Swap Layers — exchanges the active layer and the underlayer.
4. Reserve layer — Record (copy) and Recall (paste).
   • Ctrl-C to copy and Ctrl-V to paste are also available.
5. Undo and Redo — up to 20 levels of history.
6. Open Layer — opens a new layer and fits it to the dimensions of the open image.
   • Useful for texture and framing overlays.
   • Invert to toggle between overlay and image areas.
   • Multiply and Screen to toggle light and dark areas.
7. RESET — makes the original the top layer.

Fade

1. Fades any filter or adjustment back toward the layer beneath it.
2. Combine it with any of the five blend modes for a wider range of effects than either gives you alone.

Blend modes

1. Normal 🌓︎, Darken 🌒︎, Lighten 🌔︎, Multiply 🌑︎, Screen 🌕︎, Color , Luminosity ☼︎.
2. Try Lighten and Darken after filters or adjustments.
3. Try Multiply and Screen after opening a new layer.
4. Color takes hue and saturation from the top layer, luminosity from the layer beneath — try it after Gaussian Blur to smooth color and skin tone while leaving all texture and detail sharp. Luminosity is the reverse: brightness from the top layer, color from the layer beneath.

Eraser

1. Must be turned on to erase and reveal.
2. Hold and drag left mouse button — erase top layer.
3. Hold and drag right mouse button — reveal underlayer.

Overlays

The Open Layer button opens a new top layer, called an Overlay. Overlays are used to add any image you want to blend with your current image — your imagination is the limit. They're commonly used to add textures or frames. Use the blend mode buttons and the Fade slider to get the effect you want.

These are two overlays that make jagged-edged framing:

1. Open an overlay with a black border (thumbnail on left) and set the blend mode to Screen for a black border. To change the border to white, click the Invert button and change the blend mode to Multiply.
2. OR open an overlay with a white border (thumbnail on right) and set the blend mode to Multiply for a white border. To change the border to black, click the Invert button and change the blend mode to Screen.

You can even make your own border overlays using the Draw brush. Press the Clear button, then draw a black border on white — you now have the first kind of overlay. Click Invert for the second kind. It's good practice to stick with just one type; they create identical effects.

Tool Buttons

There are five buttons on the left panel that change the cursor and its action. The one that is currently active is highlighted in light green. Select is the default on opening a new image. Press Tab to cycle Select → Erase → Clone → Heal → Draw → back to Select — disabled while a number box, slider, or dropdown has focus, so normal tabbing there still works.

1. Select — Draws a selection freely for cropping. Drag the sides or corners to adjust its shape, or drag inside the selection to move it. Click one of the format buttons — 1:1, 4x6, 5x7, or Letter (8.5x11), based on common printer paper sizes — to constrain the selection to that ratio. To select the entire image, click Ctrl-A. Click CROP when ready.
2. Erase — Use the Eraser tool to erase and restore: left mouse button hold and drag. If you make a mistake with the eraser, use right mouse button hold and drag to restore what was erased. The eraser uses a feathered brush with a light touch. Drag over an area more than once for complete erasure. Note that the Clone brush uses left and right hold and drag the same way. Right mouse button hold and drag always restores what you erased, cloned, or healed.
3. Clone — The Clone tool works as follows:
   • Ctrl-click to set a source point.
   • Hold and drag the left mouse button to paint from that point, at a fixed offset from wherever you're painting.
   • Hold and drag the right mouse button to restore the original.
4. Heal — The Healing tool works like this:
   • Hold and drag the left mouse button to blend in nearby texture — good for blemishes, dust, or small unwanted spots.
   • Hold and drag the right mouse button to restore the original.
   • The size slider is initially set to 25 instead of 50 as it is on Erase and Clone.
5. Draw — The Drawing brush is here mainly to allow you to create PNG brushes.
   • Hold and drag the left mouse button to paint in black.
   • Hold and drag the right mouse button to erase, restoring the image to how it looked the moment you switched into Draw.
   • Uses the same size slider as Erase, Clone, and Heal.
   • A quick way to build brush shapes from scratch: Clear the canvas to white, draw the shape, then run it through Blur, Simplify (Kuwahara), or Grain for texture if you like. Finish with the Trans button to turn it into a transparent PNG brush — see Making PNG Brushes further down.

Transformations

Transformations change the size, shape, or orientation of your image.

1. What's of note here are the cropping functions that apply an aspect ratio to your full image or your manual selection. For example, click Letter to get the largest selection possible for printing on letter-sized paper, then click CROP.
2. You can move or resize the selection before cropping.
3. You can also make a manual selection when the toggle is set to Select. Then, if you like, click one of the aspect ratio buttons to fit your printing paper.
4. RESIZE keeps the image's original proportions — enter either a width or a height, and the other dimension is calculated automatically so nothing stretches or squashes.
5. Free Resize uses exactly the width and height you enter, with no ratio correction — useful when you deliberately want to stretch or compress the image, but it will distort it if the two values don't match the original proportions.
6. Any transformation (Crop, Resize, Rotate, Mirror, Tilt) automatically switches the active tool back to Select. If you switch to Erase right after a transformation, before making any other edit, a popup will explain that there's nothing new to reveal yet — make one more edit first and Erase will work again. Clone, Heal, and Draw aren't affected by this and work normally right away. The Frames, Join Images, and Canvas Size modules are also transformations.

Filters and Adjustments

Most of these are self-explanatory from the button labels. Two things worth spelling out:

Black Point / White Point / Midtones

• Black Point / White Point stretches the tonal range so the darkest pixel becomes pure black (or the lightest becomes pure white).
• The histogram redraws instantly, so you can see the effect directly — if it doesn't visibly change, that end is already at full range.
• Red ticks on the histogram mark the 0/255 edges; the green tick marks the median.
• Midtones is a gamma adjustment — it brightens or darkens the middle of the tonal range while leaving true black and true white anchored in place.

Temperature (Blue/Yellow) and Tint (Green/Magenta)

• Temperature slides between Blue and Yellow; Tint slides between Green and Magenta.
• Both preserve overall brightness — only the color balance shifts.
• Red = Yellow + Magenta, roughly equal presses.
• Orange = mostly Yellow, with just a touch of Magenta.
• Cyan = Blue + Green.
• Purple = Blue + Magenta.

Flow Painter

Flow Painter Module

1. Click Change Brush to cycle through the brush styles, or load a PNG brush from your computer. While Flow Painter is open, Tab does the same thing as Change Brush.
2. Adjust the size and density of the brush.
3. The default Effect Opacity slider is set to 80%. This allows your image to appear faintly, which is helpful for manual painting.
4. Adjust Stroke Scale, Thickness, Length, and Variation.
5. Paint with the brush, or choose Auto-Painting.
6. If you choose Auto-Painting, select Painting Speed.
7. Use the Start/Stop Painting button for Auto-Painting.
8. Change brushes anytime — very small brushes restore detail.
9. Adjust Effect Opacity to blend. Blend further when you send the image back to the editor — try Darken and Lighten blend modes once the image returns.

Temp, Tint, and Full Spectrum

• Below Variation. Temp and Tint use the same gradient sliders as the Temperature/Tint adjustment described above — negative Temp = Blue, positive = Yellow; negative Tint = Magenta, positive = Green.
• Unlike the adjustment sliders, these push each stroke by a randomized amount rather than a fixed one. The sign of the slider sets the direction, so strokes vary in how far they drift but never cross to the opposite side — Temp pushed toward Yellow keeps every stroke on the warm side, just by varying amounts.
• Full Spectrum is a separate slider that spreads strokes in every direction at once, with no bias — the effect the two used to produce together before they became directional.
• Push Temp and Tint together to bias toward the in-between colors: warm + magenta toward red/orange, warm + green toward chartreuse, cool + magenta toward blue/violet, cool + green toward teal. Add some Full Spectrum on top for variation around whichever bias you've set.

Making PNG Brushes for Flow Painter

1. Click on Draw to activate the drawing brush.
2. Hold and drag the left mouse button to paint in black.
3. Hold and drag the right mouse button to erase, restoring the image to how it looked the moment you switched into Draw. Use this to introduce variations into your brush.
4. Uses the same size slider as Erase, Clone, and Heal.
5. Run your brush through Blur, Simplify (Kuwahara), or Grain for texture if you like. Blur or Gaussian Blur for softer brush.
6. Finish with the Trans button to turn it into a transparent PNG brush.
7. Select and crop down to just the brush shape. Keep it horizontal, and leave a little white space above and below it. Size doesn't matter much, but keeping the crop to 300px wide or less is good practice — it will be scaled properly once opened in the Flow Painter module.
8. Click the Trans button to make the white background transparent. This is what allows the image to be used as a brush.
9. Save the image as a PNG — it's now ready to use as a brush in Flow Painter.

Printing

The Print button prints reliably on your system's default paper size and orientation — for most people, this is Letter or A4 in Portrait mode.

To make prints on other size paper, press Ctrl-Shift-P and then More settings. That will take you to the Windows dialog for your printer. There you can set: Document Size, Orientation — Portrait or Landscape, Paper Type, Quality, Color. If you will use these settings frequently, you can save them as a Preset.

Notes

1. You can open an image for editing using Paste (Ctrl-V) or using the Open button. The image will open normally either way. But once your image is open, any new image you paste with Ctrl-V will be scaled to fit the dimensions of the already-opened image. This allows Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V to be used just like the Record and Recall buttons, and lets you keep two different reserve images in memory for later recall.
2. The New button closes out whatever's currently open — same as if you'd never opened an image at all. Use it right before Ctrl-V when you want to paste a new image at its own size instead of it being scaled to fit the one that was already open.
3. Imaginor can be used as an image viewer as well as an editor. Open many images at once, the number limited only by your computer's memory. Use the buttons at the bottom of the right control panel to navigate through your images. The right and left arrow keys on your keyboard can also be used to go to the next or previous image.
4. CLAHE (Contrast Limited Adaptive Histogram Equalization) boosts local contrast — it works on small tiles across the image rather than the image as a whole, so it can bring out detail in one area without blowing out contrast elsewhere.
5. The Stroke button draws a one-pixel black line around your image. You may click the button up to two more times to get a two- or three-pixel border.