AzPainter

A tiny image editor with big potential. FREE | BIT.LY/2M2WQPN

The hero of this month’s Linux apps is this tiny program, the source code of which occupies only half of an old-fashioned 3.5-inch floppy disk, or as little as 750KB. Yet it also poses a challenge to major image editors such as Gimp or Krita — the heavy-weight Linux apps for graphic enthusiasts and artists.

AzPainter is for drawing bitmap illustrations. It implements an original UI layout optimised for efficient drawing workflow. The application features support for 16-bit colour images with transparency (RGBA), automatic brush size adjustment depending on tablet pen pressure, Photoshop-style layers, dozens of artistic filters, various selection tools, support for many third-party image formats including PSD, and more. And this program packs all these features into a tiny package that also boasts astonishing speed in everything it does, from start time to general responsiveness. We think that there’s hardly anything on Earth that contradicts to the term ‘ bloatware’ more than AzPainter.

The application makes use of an original graphic toolkit called Mlib, which is super lightweight. It looks very compact, greyish and, of course, unobtrusive to help you concentrate on the content. AzPainter is very strong at drawing complex shapes and artistic painting, it has numerous brush settings (pressure, blend mode, interval, randomness and other such things), support for textures and lots of extra goodies here and there once you understand the interface.

There are very few AzPainter binaries on the internet and the official AzPainter home page is in the author’s native Japanese, making it slightly harder to get the application running on your system. However, building it from source doesn’t require many dependencies, and the process goes swiftly using the good old ./configure && make && sudo make install sequence.