How do I edit my painting afterwards in a photo editor?

To edit your painting afterwards in a photo editor, use Edit in Paint by Zaweba, which sends a PNG of your picture straight from Easel by Zaweba into Paint by Zaweba. If you use a different editor, export the painting as a PNG, JPEG or TIFF and open that file there. The hand-off is one way: you paint in Easel and edit in Paint.

That split makes sense once you think about what each program is for. Easel is a painting studio, where tools behave like real materials and wet paint stays wet. Paint by Zaweba is an image editor with layers, masks, live layer effects, a brush engine and one-click background removal. Painting goes in one, and retouching and editing go in the other.

When you'd want to edit afterwards

There are plenty of everyday reasons. You might want to add lettering to a greeting card, crop a painting to fit a frame or a social post, put a watercolour onto a coloured background, adjust brightness for print, remove a stray mark, or combine two paintings into one layout. None of these are painting jobs, so they belong in an editor.

Step by step with Paint by Zaweba

Finish the painting, or reach a point you're happy with. Save it as a .zeasel file first. This keeps wet paint wet, along with the palette, masks and time-lapse, so you can come back to the original later if you want to repaint anything.

Choose Edit in Paint by Zaweba. A PNG of the picture goes over to Paint, ready to work on. From there you can work on layers above the painting without touching it, and use masks to change one area at a time.

Because the hand-off is one way, edits you make in Paint don't come back to Easel. If you want to change the painting itself, go back to your .zeasel file in Easel, change it, and send it over again.

Step by step with any editor

Use Export to save a PNG, JPEG or TIFF. You can export at 1x or 2x, and with or without the impasto lighting.

PNG is a good default for editing because it keeps every pixel without compression losses. TIFF suits print work and many print shops ask for it. JPEG is smaller and fine for sharing online, but each time a JPEG is saved again it loses a little quality, so it's better as a final format than a working one.

Export at 2x if you'll crop heavily or print large. It gives the editor more pixels to work with.

Impasto lighting on or off

Easel lights thick paint with a light you can move, so oil ridges show real highlights. When you export, you choose whether that lighting is included. Leave it on if you want the picture to look like a photographed painting, with texture and shine. Turn it off if you plan to colour-correct or print, since baked-in highlights can fight with adjustments. Easel's flat light, L by default, shows you roughly what the unlit version looks like before you export.

Keeping the hand-off clean

Do the painting in Easel and the editing in the editor. It is tempting to fix brushwork in a photo editor, but a stroke repainted with real-feeling paint in Easel will look more natural.

Keep the original. A saved .zeasel file and an untouched PNG mean you can always start the edit again.

Check the size first. Easel's canvas sizes run from A-sizes and squares to custom millimetres at 72 to 300 DPI, up to 24 million pixels. If you know you'll print, set the size and DPI when you start the painting, so you don't need to upscale later.

Easel by Zaweba and Paint by Zaweba are both free software, offline, with no account, so moving a picture between them costs nothing and needs no upload.