# ItsPaint Guide — every tool, and the drag that makes it work
Source: https://sites.fynesite.com/itspaint-guide/

[ItsPaint](https://itspaintmac.com/) [Home](https://itspaintmac.com/) [Source](https://github.com/joshlin2201/itspaint) [Get it free](https://apps.apple.com/us/app/itspaint/id6796493980?mt=12)

Start

Your first edit The window

The tools

Drawing Adding things Selecting and hiding

Working

Selections Colours The canvas PDFs and signing Getting it out

Reference

File formats Every shortcut Privacy

# 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.

1. Take a screenshot with ⇧⌘4, then press ⌘V in ItsPaint. The canvas grows to hold it if it is bigger than the current picture.
2. Press N and click across the screenshot. Numbered badges appear, counting up on their own.
3. Press R and drag over anything that should not be readable. It pixelates.
4. Drag the picture straight out of the header into Slack, Mail or the Finder — no save panel, no file left on the Desktop.

**Nothing here touches the network.** ItsPaint ships with no network entitlement at all, so macOS itself blocks it from opening a connection. There is no account and nothing to sign in to.

## 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.

The rail is the honest trade this app makes: it costs about 48pt of window on whichever edge it is on, and it buys never having to hunt for a tool.

## Drawing

Five tools that make marks. All of them paint with **Colour 1** on the left button and **Colour 2** on the right.

P

### 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.

B

### 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.

H

### 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.

E

### 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.

C

### 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.

U

### 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.

T

### 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.

N

### 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.

K

### 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.

I

### 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.

M

### 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.

R

### 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.

S

### 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.

**Invert Selection** ⇧⌘I swaps what is selected for what is not — the fastest way to keep a subject and clear everything round it. It is in the Select tool's own options and in the Edit menu.

**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.

**Pasting never loses anything.** Paste something bigger than the canvas and the canvas grows to hold it, and the window follows. The pasted pixels stay floating and movable until you click away or press Place.

## 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 |

**The .itspaint document is a lossless PNG with a JSON file beside it.** Which means the file opens anywhere, in anything, even on a machine that has never heard of this app — the extra file just carries what the app needs to keep editing it.

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 | Print |
| ⌘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.

[How that is proved, in three commands →](https://github.com/joshlin2201/itspaint/blob/main/docs/PROVING_NO_NETWORK.md)

ItsPaint is free and open source. [Source on GitHub](https://github.com/joshlin2201/itspaint) · [Report an issue](https://github.com/joshlin2201/itspaint/issues) · [itspaintmac.com](https://itspaintmac.com/)

Requires macOS 14 Sonoma or later. Runs natively on Apple silicon and Intel.