Paint a mask

A painted mask is a mask you draw. Use it to dodge and burn by hand, or to fix the edge of an AI mask. It is listed as Painted in the Layers pane.

Start painting

1. Click the Draw button next to Layer in the Layers pane. It starts a new layer with a Painted mask. To add one to an existing layer, right-click the layer and choose Add Mask (or Add, then Painted).
2. The brush turns on and a red overlay shows what you have painted. Drag over the photo.
3. Adjust the sections on the right. They reach only what you painted.

The brush stays on while the Painted mask is selected. Press Esc to put it down, and select the mask’s row again to pick it up. It also ends when you switch photos or open the crop tool.

Paint, erase and smooth

To	Do this
Paint	Drag
Erase	Alt-drag
Smooth (blur the mask under the brush)	Shift-drag
Pan the photo	Hold Space and drag, or drag with the middle button
Change the size	Mouse wheel, or ] and [
Change the feather	Shift and the wheel, or Shift+] and Shift+[
Show or hide the overlay	O

The bracket keys and O are defaults that you can change in Preferences. The cursor shows the brush as two rings. The outer ring is its full size. The dashed inner ring is where the soft edge starts.

The mask’s card has the same choices. Paint, Erase and Smooth pick the mode for plain drags, and Clear removes every stroke from this mask.

Control	What it does
Size	Width of the brush
Feather	How soft the brush edge is. 0% is hard, 100% fades across the whole radius
Flow	How quickly paint builds up as you go over the same spot
Density	The most one stroke can add, however many times you cross it
Pen → Flow	A light pen touch paints fainter (on by default)
Pen → Size	A light pen touch paints smaller

Size, Feather, Flow and Density all run from 0 to 100. A new brush starts at Size 25, Feather 50%, Flow 100% and Density 100%.

Below those, Expand and Feather under Mask edge grow, shrink or soften the whole painted area.

Each stroke is one undo step. Erase removes only strokes in this same mask.

Tip

To carve a piece out of an AI mask, don’t erase. Right-click the layer, choose Subtract › Painted, and paint over the part to remove. The AI mask stays untouched under it.

Technical details: what a painted mask stores

The mask is saved as a list of strokes (their points, size, feather, flow, density and pen pressure), not as pixels. DarkRay replays the list at whatever resolution it needs, so a stroke is exact at full size as well as in the preview. A copy of the finished raster is written to disk about a second and a half after your last stroke, and rebuilt from the strokes if it is missing.

Strokes are stored as positions on the whole photo, so cropping or rotating does not move them. If you change the lens correction, the strokes move with the photo’s geometry at that moment. Each brush dab is full strength inside the inner ring and eases to zero at the outer one. Smooth blurs the mask under the brush.