Draw

Raster tools

Selections with real Modify tools, the gradient and fill buckets, Liquify, and the AE-style mask stack.

The pixel toolbox around the brushes: selections you can reshape after making them, flood fills and five gradient shapes, Liquify as a brush, and a full After-Effects-style mask stack on every layer.

Selections

Five ways to make one, all in the Paint tool’s mode row:

• Rectangle and Lasso — drag; Polygonal Lasso — click corners, Enter closes.
• Magic Wand — click to select a matching-colour region. Tolerance sets how far a colour may drift and still match; Feather softens the boundary in the same click — a soft matte edge with no second step.
• Selection Brush — paint what’s selected (Alt paints it away). The only way to make a hand-shaped or genuinely soft selection: a light touch selects partially, and the tint shows how strongly.

Shift adds to any selection, Alt subtracts, both together intersects.

Modify — the half most apps forget: Feather / Expand / Contract by an Amount in pixels (one number for all three — they’re the same measurement asked three ways; the default 2px is the amount a wand selection is usually a hair too wide by). Invert, All, and Restore — brings back the selection from before the last change, because a selection isn’t part of the document and Undo can’t reach it.

Using it: Copy/Cut/Paste (paste always lands on a new layer; ⌘⇧V pastes into the current one), Flip H/V in place, drag inside a selection to move those pixels (Alt-drag copies — a floating selection that commits as one undo step), and Generative Erase — fill the selection from its surroundings, on-device. Mask / Mask Out turns the selection into a real layer mask, paintable afterwards and saved with the project.

Fill & gradient

Fill flood-fills the matching region under a click, with the same Tolerance + Feather pair the wand uses — so fills land with soft matte edges too. Fill with a palette swatch and the region stays linked: recolor the swatch later and the fill updates.

The Gradient tool drags one of five shapes — Linear, Radial, Cone (a swept highlight), Mirror (a tube, a spine), Diamond — into the selection, or the whole layer without one. Fade to transparent is on by default (the most common gradient there is), and Dither breaks up the flat banding an 8-bit sweep otherwise shows. Costs nothing; leave it on. Shift constrains the axis.

Liquify

Photoshop’s Liquify, as a brush — for pushing a character’s mouth a little further open on one frame. Four gestures: Push (drag the pixels along), Bloat, Pucker, Twirl. Strength is how far one pass moves things — build a warp in several light passes, the way you’d push clay. (The keyframable, animatable warp is the Mesh Warp effect; neither replaces the other.)

Masks

Every layer carries an AE-style mask stack: closed bezier shapes that non-destructively clip it. Per mask — Add / Subtract / Intersect modes, Invert, an enable eye, and three keyframable dials: Opacity, Feather (softens that mask’s own edge before it combines), Expansion (grow/shrink in pixels). Draw one with + Add Mask → the next finished pen path or shape commits as a mask instead of a layer.

The quiet superpower: a mask’s path keyframes like any drawn shape — set a key, move its points at another frame, and you’re rotoscoping by hand. (For the automatic version, see Cutout.)

Frame layers — cel animation

The Frame layer is the frame-by-frame desk: a strip of drawings (cels), each exposed until the next — cuts, never tweens, the Toon Boom model. Cels can be vector or painted raster, drawings can be re-exposed (held) anywhere on the strip, the layer loops or ping-pongs, and onion skin shows up to five drawings each way. Auto Paint fills a freshly-inked cel’s regions from the nearest earlier drawing’s palette-linked colors — the classic ink-and-paint step, one click per drawing.

Recipe — clean cutout from a busy photo. Magic Wand the background (Tolerance ~0.25), Shift-click the patches it missed, Contract 2px to shed the halo, Feather 2px, then Mask Out. The subject stays, the background hides, and the mask stays editable forever.