Masques dessinés

A drawn mask builds the per-pixel opacity handed to blending from shapes you draw directly on the image, so a module’s effect lands exactly where you place them.

Shapes are stored internally as vectors, rendered at whatever resolution the pixelpipe needs, and expressed in the coordinate system of the original image. A shape therefore keeps covering the same part of the picture no matter what you change elsewhere in the edit – with one visual side effect worth knowing about, see shape distortions below. Once drawn, a shape can be adjusted, removed, or reused by any other module.

Drawn masks are handled from the Drawn tab of the Masking & Blending tool, in the darkroom left panel, for whichever module currently has focus. The tab works alongside the Parametric and Raster ones, since any combination of masking methods can be active at once (see combining masks).

Blending has to be enabled for the module before any of it responds: the checkbox above the row of tabs, reading Enable in followed by the module’s name, is what arms the tool, and everything below it stays grayed out until you check it.

The Drawn panel

Disable Turns drawn masking back off when you want it out of the way; the shapes stay attached and come back with it.

Mask name A text field naming this module’s mask. It starts out showing Mask <module name> as a placeholder; type your own name and press Enter to replace it. Meaningful names pay off as soon as several modules carry masks.

Polarity Reverses the polarity of the whole drawn mask. A circle, by default, restricts the module to the area inside it; flipping the polarity applies the module everywhere except inside that circle.

Show and edit mask elements Displays the mask’s shapes on the canvas so you can edit them. Ctrl+click (⌘+click on macOS) enters restricted edit mode instead, in which a shape’s overall position and size are locked – neither dragging nor scrolling over it moves or resizes it – and only its individual nodes and segments respond. This is the safe way to fine-tune Polygon and Brush shapes.

Shape list The shapes making up this module’s mask, described in the shape lists below.

Attach shapes Switches the list above to every shape defined for the image, so you can attach or detach them. See reusing a shape.

Shape buttons Five buttons at the bottom right create a new shape: Circle, Ellipse, Polygon, Brush and Gradient. See creating a shape.

Mouse wheel A second collapsible section, holding the grid that decides which property of a shape each wheel combination edits. It is shared by every mask of every module – see the mouse wheel.

The shape lists

The panel has two lists that share the same slot; the Attach shapes button picks which one is showing.

The Shape list is the default view and holds the shapes this module’s mask is built from, applied in list order from top to bottom. Each row carries, from left to right: the set operator combining that shape with the ones above it, an icon if its polarity is inverted, its name, an unlink icon that detaches the shape from this mask while keeping it available elsewhere, and a trash icon that deletes the shape outright. Right-clicking a row opens the shape-level part of the context menu — its parameter sliders, the Operation submenu and Move Up / Move Down — which is handy for a shape that is hard to reach on the canvas, or hidden behind others.

The All-shapes list, shown while Attach shapes is pressed, lists every shape defined for the current image. A checkbox on each row attaches it to this module’s mask or detaches it, and its name can be edited in place by double-clicking.

The mouse wheel

Turning the wheel with the pointer over a shape edits one of its properties, and which combination edits which property is your call. The Mouse wheel collapsible section, at the bottom of the Drawn tab beside Brush options, holds a grid with one row per wheel combination and one column per property it can reach; ticking a cell maps that row to that property. No combination carries a meaning of its own, so any of them can be pointed at any property, or at none.

Out of the box, the rows are mapped like this:

The columns are the properties themselves:

Two columns carry two names because a Gradient spells those properties its own way, exactly as the context menu renames the matching sliders. One cell covers both vocabularies.

The grid is application-wide. Which property the wheel edits is a habit of yours rather than a property of one shape or of the module owning the mask, so a change made from one module’s Drawn tab applies to every mask of every module, and it is remembered between sessions.

A shape only answers for the properties it actually has. A Circle, a Polygon and a Brush have no rotation, so a combination mapped to Rotation does nothing over them, just like a row set to Nothing.

Formes

Five shapes are available. The wheel acts in creation as well as in edit mode, wherever the pointer sits over the shape.

Shape actions

Anatomy of a shape

Every editing gesture acts on whatever sits under the pointer, so the elements a shape is made of are worth naming apart. Which of them a shape has depends on its type: a Circle has none of them, a Gradient has a pivot instead, an Ellipse carries four nodes, and a Polygon and a Brush carry all of them.

The nodes of the shape under the pointer are drawn along with its two lines, and the two kinds of handle appear on one node at a time – the one you last clicked. The hint at the right of the title bar names the element the pointer is over and what a drag there will do.

Lines	Solid (shape)	The solid line, the outline proper: on a Circle, an Ellipse and a Polygon it encloses the area the mask covers at full strength, and the feathering starts there. A Brush draws it down the middle of its stroke instead, and a Gradient draws it as the 50% opacity line you placed.
	Dashed (border)	The dashed line running alongside the shape line, marking the far end of the feathering: the mask fades from full strength at the shape line to nothing here, and the distance between the two is what Hardness – the context menu’s Fading – sets. A Gradient has two of them, one where the opacity reaches 100% and one where it reaches 0%, spaced by its Fade. It is part of the shape rather than a handle, so dragging it moves the whole shape – except on an Ellipse, where it is the ring that rotates the shape.
	Dotted (guide)	A guide rather than a part of the shape. A dotted line is drawn while a gesture is under way, to show where it is heading, and it contributes nothing to the mask: no opacity of its own, and nothing to grab or drag. A Polygon draw the stretch running from the last node you placed to the pointer this way while you create them, and a Gradient draws its axis right across the image while you turn it. Each goes as soon as the gesture ends.

Arrow

The tie between a clone or heal shape and its source – the patch of the image it copies its pixels from – and so retouch shapes only. It runs from the source to the shape and its head points at the shape, which is what tells you which way the pixels travel. It lights up while the source is under the pointer, where drag moves the sampled area without moving the shape itself. Where the two overlap there is no room for the shaft, so only the head is drawn, halfway between them. Being a guide, it is dotted and adds nothing to the mask.

What follows applies mainly to Polygon and Brush shapes:

Nodes

A point the outline runs through, drawn round where the outline curves through it and square where it turns a corner – a cusp. click it to select it, which is what reveals its handles. Drag one to move it.

Segments

The stretch of outline between two consecutive nodes. Its shape is not its own: each of the two nodes it joins lends it one curvature handle, and so it leaves a round node on a curve and a cusp node in a straight line. Between two round nodes it curves along its whole length, between two cusps it runs dead straight, and between one of each it does both – curved at the round end, straightening into the cusp. Polygon and Brush only: Drag a segment to move both of those nodes together, which slides it without changing its curve, and Ctrl+click (⌘+click on macOS) to insert a node into it.

Handle	Curvature	A small round handle joined to its node by a line, setting the direction and the strength of the curve running through that node, and so bending the two segments that meet there at once. There is one per node, not one per segment: both sides are derived from it symmetrically, which is what keeps the outline smooth across the node. It belongs to the nodes of a Polygon and of a Brush, shows on the selected node only, and a cusp node has none until it is switched back to a round one. Drag it to bend the outline; Reset round node in the context menu discards it and restores the automatically computed curve.
	Hardness	A small square handle sitting on the border line, on the axis running outwards from its node; dragging it slides along that axis and sets the border of that one node instead of the whole shape’s – how wide the feathering is there on a Polygon, how wide the stroke is there on a Brush. Like the curvature handle it belongs to the nodes of a Polygon and of a Brush, and shows on the selected node only.

Creating a shape

Click one of the five shape buttons to enter creation mode for that shape. The mouse cursor turns into a cross over the image, confirming that the next click will place a shape rather than interact with the picture.

Two shapes depart from that cursor. The Brush hides the cursor entirely and draws its own filled circle instead, showing the current brush size and hardness at the pointer. The Polygon switches to a pointing hand as you come back within reach of your first node, telling you that clicking there will close the outline.

To leave creation mode, click the shape’s button again, press Escape, or right-click the canvas and choose Done shape creation. Any of these drops you into edit mode with the shapes you have placed.

The wheel adjustments made on a shape being created also update the defaults for that shape type, which the next shape you create will start from.

Editing a shape

The button displays the mask’s shapes on the canvas.

Click on a shape on the canvas to select it – it is highlighted in the shape list at the same time. Selection works both ways: click an entry in the list and the view centers on the matching shape. You can then Click on any of the elements the shape can contain.

Drag a shape to move it as a whole, or one of its elements – segment, node or handle – to reshape it.

The wheel edits whichever property you mapped it to in the mouse wheel grid – by default the shape’s size, its feathering with Shift, and its opacity with Ctrl.

For per-shape parameters, right-click on the shape and work from the context menu.

Removing a shape

There are two distinct outcomes, and the menu keeps them apart:

• Remove shape from mask detaches the shape from this module’s mask. The shape survives, still listed for the image and still usable by other modules — this is what the unlink icon in the Shape list does too.
• Delete shape removes it altogether, everywhere it was used. The trash icon in the lists does the same.

With the pointer over one of a Polygon’s or Brush’s nodes, the menu offers Delete node instead, which removes that single node rather than the shape.

Reusing a shape

A shape is a single object shared by every mask that uses it: edit it in one module and every other module using it follows.

Press Attach shapes to swap the panel’s list for every shape defined on the image, then tick a shape’s checkbox to add it to the current module’s mask, or untick it to detach it. Shapes greyed out as Already in ‘<group>’ are reached through a group that is itself attached.

The shape manager covers the same shapes from a separate window, where they can also be grouped, reordered and renamed across all modules at once.

The context menu

Right-clicking on the canvas opens a menu headed by the shape’s name. What follows depends on one thing: what sits under the pointer. There are four cases. The same menu is reachable without the canvas: right-clicking a row in the panel’s Shape list opens its shape-level part, described under over the shape itself below, minus the removal entries — the row’s own unlink and trash icons cover those.

While creating a shape

Over the shape itself

The menu opens with sliders for the shape’s parameters. Which ones depends on the shape:

They set the same values the mouse wheel reaches directly on the canvas, listed per shape under Shapes below; the menu is simply the precise way in. Opacity is how strongly this one shape contributes to the mask.

Over a node

Polygon and Brush only. The parameter sliders appear as above, followed by the entries below. The Operation submenu and the reordering entries are not offered here, and Delete node takes the place of Remove shape from mask and Delete shape — so a slip of the mouse deletes a node, never the whole shape.

Over a segment

Polygon and Brush only. This adds one entry to the shape-level ones (Operation, Remove shape from mask and Delete shape); the parameter sliders and the reordering entries are not shown.

Distorsions des formes

Because a shape is stored in the coordinate system of the original image, it travels up the pixelpipe before the module uses it and draws it on screen. Any distorting module active in between – lens correction or rotate and perspective, for instance – therefore distorts the shape too, on screen and in the exported image alike: circles can render as ellipses, and gradient lines can end up curved.

To draw a shape that follows the subject accurately despite this, prefer a Polygon over a Circle or an Ellipse, since its extra nodes let you compensate for the distortion. For a Gradient, bending its line counteracts the simpler distortion that lens correction introduces.

Panning and zooming

Mouse actions over a shape, or over its nodes and handles, apply to that shape. Away from it, dragging and scrolling pan and zoom the center view as usual, so there is no need to leave creation or edit mode to reposition the canvas.

On a zoomed-in image, dragging a shape towards the edge of the viewport pans the view in that direction on its own, and keeps panning while you hold the pointer there, so a shape can be moved past the visible area without interrupting the drag. The pan accelerates the closer to the edge you get. It also works while placing a new shape, but not while painting a Brush stroke, where dragging is the drawing action itself.