User Guide

Canvas 12 User Guide
Painting & image-editing
Canvas provides a full palette of painting tools, including the digital equivalents of markers,
airbrushes, and paintbrushes, plus tools for creating effects like neon and blends. The Painting tools
palette also provides tools to select, retouch, color-correct, and clone images (see "Tool palettes" on
page 23). This section explains how to use these painting tools, choose image modes, and convert
objects into images.
Paint objects and images
A paint object is a Canvas object that contains an image. Paint objects are always rectangular and the
same size as the images they contain. Images are pictures defined by pixels. A scanned photo, TIFF,
or Photoshop (.PSD) file, and pictures you paint in Canvas are all images composed of pixels. Each
pixel in an image is a solid color. Pixels can also be semi-transparent or completely clear. You can
adjust the color, opacity, and transparency of pixels by using painting tools and commands.
About paint objects and images in Canvas
You can perform common object operations, including move, copy, and duplicate, on paint objects.
For details, see "Working with objects" on page 158. Or you can create images entirely in Canvas by
making a new paint object that you can paint in, or creating an image from vector or text objects, as
described in this section.
You can import images into Canvas documents using the following methods:
Place an existing image in a document using the Place, Paste, or Import commands. See
"Placing documents" on page 49 and "Importing and exporting images" on page 131.
Scan a photo using the Acquire command. See "Using scanners to acquire images" on page
446.
Creating paint objects
You can make new paint objects containing blank images or convert objects into images by rendering
them. You can also scan images directly into a Canvas document (see "To open or place a file:" on
page 130 and "Importing images" on page 131 as well as "Using scanners to acquire images" on
page 446).
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