Sending a painting from Easel to Paint by Zaweba

Easel and Paint are two different kinds of program. Easel by Zaweba is a natural-media studio, where tools behave like real materials on real surfaces. Paint by Zaweba is an image editor, the place for layers, selections, adjustments and the jobs you do to a finished picture. Edit in Paint by Zaweba is the bridge between them.

What the hand-off does

Edit in Paint by Zaweba sends a PNG of your picture to Paint by Zaweba. The hand-off goes one way: paint in Easel, edit in Paint.

That one-way design is deliberate. Easel keeps its own world of wet paint, pigments and surfaces, which only makes sense inside Easel. Paint works on pixels. Sending a PNG gives Paint a clean, lossless picture to work with, and keeps your Easel painting untouched.

Jobs that belong in Paint

Some things are easier in an image editor than in a painting studio. Typical ones are adding text, cropping and resizing for a specific use, adjusting brightness or colour across the whole image, combining the painting with photos or other graphics, preparing images for a website, and making a poster, card or social post with the painting as one element.

Easel deliberately doesn't try to do these, because they have nothing to do with how paint behaves.

A typical workflow

Paint the picture in Easel. Use the full studio: surface, paints, palette, tilt, masks.

When it is done, decide on lighting. Easel can export with or without the impasto lighting, and turning relief off gives a flat, clean image for editing. Set the light the way you want before sending if you want the texture to show.

Then choose Edit in Paint by Zaweba. In Paint, add the title, crop it for the card, adjust the colours for print, whatever the job needs.

Keep your .zeasel file. It is the only place the painting is still alive, with wet paint wet and the time-lapse intact. If you want to change the painting itself later, go back to Easel, change it, and send a fresh PNG.

Why not round trip

People sometimes ask why changes made in Paint don't come back into Easel. The answer is that a pixel edit has no meaning in a paint simulation. A sharpened edge or a pasted photo is not wet paint on a surface, so there is no honest way for Easel to bring it back as paint. A one-way hand-off keeps both programs doing what they are good at.

Getting good results

Do the painting in Easel and the finishing in Paint. Resist the urge to fix painting problems with image adjustments. A muddy area is better repainted in Easel than brightened in Paint.

Think about size before sending. Easel exports at 1x or 2x, and the canvas size is set when you start a new picture, at 72 to 300 DPI. If the finished piece is a large print, start the painting at a suitable size.

And keep both files. The .zeasel for the painting, the Paint file for the finished design. That way you can always go back to either, and Easel by Zaweba and Paint by Zaweba each keep doing the part they do best.