The ItsPaint guide
Thirteen tools, what each one is actually for, and the drag that makes it work. Written to be read with the app open beside it — every shortcut here is one you can press right now.
Your first edit
The shortest path from a screenshot to something you can send.
- Take a screenshot with ⇧⌘4, then press ⌘V in ItsPaint. The canvas grows to hold it if it is bigger than the current picture.
- Press N and click across the screenshot. Numbered badges appear, counting up on their own.
- Press R and drag over anything that should not be readable. It pixelates.
- Drag the picture straight out of the header into Slack, Mail or the Finder — no save panel, no file left on the Desktop.
The window
Artwork to all four edges, with one glass rail over it. Everything that matters is on screen at once.
- The tool rail runs down the left by default. Press ⌥⌘T to move it along the bottom instead — it remembers.
- The options panel opens beside whichever tool you picked and closes the moment you touch the canvas. It is a step in choosing how to draw, not a permanent inspector.
- The header carries the clipboard, undo and redo, zoom, the Image and View menus, and the things you do to a finished document: sign, share, duplicate.
- Hover anything and it names itself in a moment, with its key, on one line under the header.
Drawing
Five tools that make marks. All of them paint with Colour 1 on the left button and Colour 2 on the right.
Pencil
Drag to draw a hard single-pixel line. No anti-aliasing, no softness.
The tool for pixel work and for anything that has to line up exactly with what is already there. Zoom in past 400% and turn on the pixel grid with ⌘' to see what you are actually touching.
Brush
Drag to paint. Four tips in the options: round, square, soft and spray.
Size is a slider in the panel, and ] and [ step it up and down without opening anything. The soft tip feathers its edge; spray builds up the longer you hold still.
Highlighter
Drag over text to mark it. One stroke never darkens where it overlaps itself.
That is the whole difference from a translucent brush: doubling back over a word with a normal brush leaves a dark patch where the two passes meet. The highlighter keeps its own ink and lays one even tone.
Eraser
Drag to erase to transparent, not to white.
Which matters when you export a PNG: erased areas stay see-through rather than becoming a white block on someone else's dark background.
Clone
Click a part that is intact, then drag over the part that is missing.
The repair tool, and the only one that puts missing content back — the brush paints a colour, fill floods one, and Shape draws a new thing rather than mending this one. It can also soften what is already there. Use it to take a date stamp off a photo or patch the hole a deleted selection left.
Adding things
Five tools that put something new on the picture rather than painting it by hand.
Shape
Drag out one of fifteen shapes — lines, curves, arrows, rectangles, ellipses, triangles, polygons, stars and a speech bubble.
Outlines can be solid, dashed or dotted, and any shape can be filled. Outline uses Colour 1, fill uses Colour 2, and a shape with no outline is filled with the colour you picked. Curves and polygons are built in more than one click — the chrome tells you how to finish one while it is half-built.
Text
Click where the words go, then type.
Bold, italic and underline are ⌘B, ⌘I and ⌘U while you are typing. Text becomes pixels once you commit it — to change the wording afterwards, undo and retype.
Step badge
Click to drop the next number. It counts up on its own.
The tool for numbering the steps of a bug report or a how-to: click 1, 2, 3 across a screenshot without going back to a palette between them. You can reset the count or set the next number by hand, so a sequence can continue across several screenshots.
Fill
Click an area to flood it. Match sets how close a colour has to be to count as the same area.
Turn Match down for a photograph, where almost no two pixels are identical; turn it up on a flat diagram to stop the fill leaking through an anti-aliased edge.
Eyedropper
Click to load a colour. Hold ⌥ with any tool to do the same without switching.
That modifier is the one worth remembering: mid-stroke, hold Option, click the colour you want, let go, and carry on painting with it.
Selecting and hiding
Three tools that work on a region rather than making a mark.
Select
Drag a marquee. Rectangle, ellipse, lasso or Instant Alpha, in the options.
See Selections below for what you can then do with it. ⌘A selects everything; ⇧⌘A or esc clears it.
Pixelate
Drag over what should not be readable.
Not secure redaction. It is visual de-emphasis — the right tool for a token in a screenshot going into a chat, the wrong one for a document that has to survive an adversary. If the original matters, crop it out instead.
Spotlight
Drag the part that matters. Everything outside it dims.
The alternative to drawing a red box round something: instead of adding a mark, it takes attention away from everything else, which reads far better in a long screenshot.
Selections
Four ways to draw one, and a bar that appears with it.
| Mode | What it is for |
|---|---|
| Rectangle | The default. Crop boxes, screenshot regions, anything with straight edges. |
| Ellipse | Faces, dials, round buttons. |
| Lasso | Trace an irregular shape by hand. Everything outside the trace stays transparent when you copy it. |
| Instant Alpha | Click a colour and it selects everything similar, with a tolerance you control. No model decides for you — the same click gives the same answer every time. |
The moment there is a selection, a bar appears at the bottom of the window with the four things people actually do next, each with its key on it:
- Crop ⌘K — throws away everything outside the selection.
- Copy ⌘C — puts just that region on the clipboard.
- Cut ⌘X — the same, and clears what it took.
- Delete ⌫ — clears the region without touching the clipboard.
Remove Background, in the Image menu, does the Instant Alpha job in one command with no dragging. It declines and changes nothing when the picture is too flat to key safely, rather than guessing at it.
Colours
Two loaded colours and a palette, always visible on the rail.
- Colour 1 is the left mouse button. Colour 2 is the right button — every drawing tool paints with it on a right-drag.
- Click a palette swatch to load Colour 1, right-click it to load Colour 2.
- X swaps the two. So does ⇧⌘X.
- ⇧⌘C opens the full macOS colour picker, including the system eyedropper for grabbing a colour from anywhere on screen.
- Hold ⌥ with any tool to pick a colour off the canvas without leaving the tool you are in.
The canvas
Zoom, the grid, and changing the size of the picture itself.
- Zoom is centred on the pointer, so the thing under your cursor stays under your cursor. ⌘+ and ⌘− step it, ⌘0 is actual size, ⌘9 fits the window. Clicking the percentage in the header returns to 100%.
- The pixel grid ⌘' appears once a pixel is comfortably bigger than the line that would draw it — from about 400% up.
- Snap to grid ⇧⌘' makes drags land on an alignment grid. Turning it on draws the grid too: snapping you cannot see is a drag that fights you.
- Image Size ⌘R resizes the canvas or scales the picture, with a preview of what you will end up with.
- Rotate ⌘] and ⌘[ turn a quarter at a time and are exact. Any other angle goes through Rotate…, which resamples and grows the canvas to fit the corners.
- Trim Borders ⌘T shaves off a uniform border — the fast way to lose the desktop round a window screenshot.
PDFs and signing
Open a contract, sign it, save it back as a PDF.
Open a PDF and it arrives as a page you can draw on. Sign it, mark it up, then save: the page keeps the size it was printed at, and every page you did not touch keeps its text selectable. Multi-page documents get a page control at the bottom of the window, and turning a page keeps what you drew on the last one.
The signature
The button is in the header beside Share, or ⌃⌘S. Two ways to make one:
- Sign it with a trackpad, mouse or tablet.
- Import a photo of a signature on paper. The white of the page is keyed to transparent and the ink is trimmed to itself, so it lands on the document rather than as a white patch over it.
Saved signatures stay on the Mac and are there next time.
Getting it out
Four ways, depending on where it is going.
- Drag it out. The picture glyph in the header is a drag handle — pick the image up and drop it into Slack, Mail or the Finder. It arrives as a named PNG, not as "Image", and nothing is left on the Desktop.
- Copy it. ⌘C with nothing selected copies the whole picture; with a selection it copies just that.
- Share. AirDrop, Mail, Messages — and Copy to Clipboard at the top of the list, because pasting into the window already open is what most people are actually doing.
- Export ⇧⌘E for a file, with the format and scale you choose.
File formats
| Opens | |
|---|---|
| Images | PNG, JPEG, TIFF, BMP, GIF, HEIC |
| Documents | PDF — arrives as a page you can draw on |
| Exports | |
|---|---|
| Lossless | PNG, TIFF, BMP, GIF |
| Compressed | JPEG, HEIC, AVIF |
| Other | PDF, ICO — with format and scale controls |
No WebP export: macOS reads WebP but ships no encoder, and adding a third-party one would be a dependency this app does not have. AVIF covers the same need.
Every shortcut
Every tool is one key. Nothing here needs a chord you have to look up.
| Key | Tool |
|---|---|
| P | Pencil |
| B | Brush |
| H | Highlighter |
| E | Eraser |
| C | Clone |
| U | Shape |
| T | Text |
| N | Step badge |
| K | Fill |
| I | Eyedropper |
| M | Select |
| R | Pixelate |
| S | Spotlight |
| X | Swap Colour 1 and Colour 2 |
| ] [ | Larger and smaller brush |
| ⌥ held | Pick a colour without leaving the tool |
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| ⌘A | Select all |
| ⇧⌘A | Deselect — so does esc |
| ⇧⌘I | Invert selection |
| ⌘K | Crop to selection |
| ⌘T | Trim borders |
| ⌫ | Delete the selected region |
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| ⌘Z | Undo |
| ⇧⌘Z | Redo |
| ⌘X | Cut |
| ⌘C | Copy — the selection, or the whole picture if there is none |
| ⌥⌘C | Copy whole image |
| ⌘V | Paste, still movable until you click away |
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| ⌘+ ⌘− | Zoom in and out, centred on the pointer |
| ⌘0 | Actual size |
| ⌘9 | Zoom to fit |
| ⌘' | Show the pixel grid |
| ⇧⌘' | Snap to grid |
| ⌥⌘T | Move the toolbar to the other edge |
| ⇧⌘C | Open the colour picker |
| ⌃⌘F | Full screen |
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| ⌘R | Image size |
| ⌘] ⌘[ | Rotate 90° right and left |
| ⌘I | Invert colours |
| Key | Does |
|---|---|
| ⌘N | New |
| ⌘O | Open |
| ⌘S | Save |
| ⇧⌘S | Duplicate into a new window |
| ⇧⌘E | Export |
| ⌃⌘S | Signature |
| ⌘P | |
| ⌘W | Close |
Privacy
Not a policy. A property of the build.
ItsPaint is distributed with no network entitlement. In a sandboxed Mac app that is not a promise in a document — the kernel refuses the connection. There is no account, no telemetry, no cloud, and no analytics of any kind, because there is no code that could send any.
It is sandboxed and reads only the files you choose. It is open source under the MIT licence, so the claim above is one you can check rather than one you have to take.