Shades help - Pixel mode

Pixel mode

Pixel mode is for changing special colors on per-pixel level. It offers two tools in two variations: pencil (alters just one pixel) and color bucket (aka floodfill). These can either add special color where it is wanted, or erase it.

While area mode is suitable for dealing with large quantities of "wild pixels", pixel mode is intended for the more elaborate and precise work in places where eg. you already have correct special color mixed with single erroneous pixels.

The originally intended purpose of pixel mode was to allow painters to add special colors where wanted after cleaning them from other places. Since apart from pencil you also get bucket tool, there is no need to bother with special colors while painting a picture: First paint, then load in Shades, remove all special glowing colors, and finally add them where wanted.

Pixel editing mode's shortcut key is P.

Main window in pixel editing mode

Toolbar

The toolbar of pixels mode is rather different from the other "buttonized" toolbars in that it has two independent parts - regular toolbar and color selector.

Color selector
Color selector, displayed at the window bottom is - unsurprisingly - used to select color that will be painted. It contains all special colors in game; their order is glowing, player primary, secondary, and last one is transparent. When you move mouse cursor over it, a box with color value (in hexadecimal notation) and description will pop up to the left.
Popup box

Tool buttons
The only group of buttons here simply switches between the four combinations of two tools and their two variations. First comes pencil, which places single pixels of selected special color. Note that apart from clicking you can also drag it, the same way as in every normal graphic editor. Shortcut key for pencil is E. The next one is color bucket, which fills continuous areas of color with selected special color. Again, it is a widely used concept, so I don't feel a need to write about its usage. Keyboards shortcut F (as "fill"). The other two buttons are for the second variation of these tools, which cleans special colors instead of adding them, in order pencil - bucket. They don't have keyboard shortcuts.

Checkbox for diagonal fill
Since I had to implement the bucket tool algorithm all by myself from scratch, here comes a little bonus: it can also continue filling to neighbor pixels of same color if they are diagonally connected. Should the rare case occur that you ever need this ability, just check the box.