Manual

Getting Started

Installation

Fog Panther is available as a native Linux application. Visit the download page to grab the package for your distribution — we ship .deb packages for Ubuntu and Debian, .rpm packages for Fedora and RHEL, and an AUR package for Arch Linux.

If you prefer the terminal, you can install with a single command:

curl -fsSL https://fogpanther.com/install.sh | bash

The script detects your distribution, downloads the right package, and installs it. Once finished, you can launch Fog Panther from your application menu or by typing fogpanther in a terminal.

First Launch

When you open Fog Panther for the first time, you'll land on the welcome screen. From here you can create a blank canvas, open a recent file, or drag an image straight onto the window. If you're a photographer importing shots from a camera card, this is the fastest way in — just drop your RAW or JPEG files and start editing immediately.

Creating a New Document

Press Ctrl+N to open the New Document dialog. Here you set your canvas dimensions, resolution, and background color. The dialog includes presets for the most common use cases:

• Print — A4, A3, US Letter, and US Legal at 300 DPI, ready for offset or digital press.
• Web & UI — Common screen sizes (1920×1080, 1280×720) at 72 DPI for website mockups, banner ads, and UI design.
• Social media — Instagram post (1080×1080), Facebook cover (820×312), YouTube thumbnail (1280×720), and more.
• Photo — Standard print sizes like 4×6", 5×7", and 8×10" at 300 DPI.

For example, if you're a designer creating an event poster, choose the A3 preset, set the background to white, and you'll have a print-ready canvas at 300 DPI waiting for your artwork.

Opening Files

Press Ctrl+O to open an existing image. Fog Panther reads all major formats including PSD, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, WebP, SVG, RAW, AVIF, ORA, BMP, and its own .fog format. You can also drag and drop files directly onto the application window — even multiple files at once, each opening in its own tab.

Working with a team that uses Adobe Photoshop? No problem. Open their .psd files directly — Fog Panther preserves layers, masks, blend modes, and text so you can pick up right where your colleague left off.

Interface Overview

Fog Panther's interface is built around a familiar layout that will feel natural if you've used Photoshop, GIMP, or Krita. Everything is arranged to keep your canvas front and center while giving you quick access to the tools and panels you use most.

Toolbar

The vertical toolbar on the left side holds all your drawing and editing tools. Hover over any icon to see its name and keyboard shortcut in a tooltip. Some tools share a slot — you'll see a small triangle in the corner. Click and hold to reveal the hidden tools underneath (for instance, the Rectangular Select and Elliptical Select share the M slot).

As a photographer retouching portraits, you'll spend most of your time in just a handful of tools: the Healing Brush (J) for blemish removal, the Clone Stamp (S) for patching larger areas, and the Brush (B) for fine dodge-and-burn work on a separate layer.

Panels

The right side of the window holds dockable panels. By default you'll see:

• Layers — Your layer stack, blend modes, and opacity controls.
• Channels — Individual color channels for advanced masking and compositing.
• History — A scrollable list of every action you've taken, so you can jump back to any point.
• Color — A color wheel and sliders for picking your foreground and background colors.

You can rearrange panels by dragging their title bars, dock them side by side, or tear them off into floating windows. Toggle any panel's visibility from View > Panels. If you're working on a laptop with limited screen space, try pressing Tab to temporarily hide all panels and give the canvas the full window.

Canvas

The central area is your canvas — the live view of your document. The checkerboard pattern you'll see behind transparent areas is a visual aid only; it won't appear in your exported files. The title bar above the canvas shows the document name, pixel dimensions, current zoom level, and color mode at a glance.

Tool Options Bar

Directly above the canvas is a horizontal bar that changes depending on which tool is selected. When you pick the Brush tool, for example, the options bar shows brush size, hardness, opacity, flow, and blend mode. When you switch to the Text tool, it shows font family, size, alignment, and color. This context-sensitive bar means you never have to hunt through menus to adjust a tool — the controls you need are always right there.

Status Bar

At the very bottom of the window, the status bar displays your cursor's X/Y coordinates, the document dimensions, current zoom level, and memory usage. Click the zoom percentage to type a precise value — handy when you need to check pixel-level details at exactly 200% or 400%.

Tools

Fog Panther ships with 18 tools organized into four groups. You can activate any tool by clicking its icon in the toolbar or pressing its keyboard shortcut. Learning the shortcuts will dramatically speed up your workflow — most professionals rarely touch the toolbar once they've memorized the keys.

Selection Tools

Selection tools let you isolate a region of your image so that edits only affect that area. They're essential for compositing, targeted color correction, and cutting objects out of backgrounds.

Tool	Shortcut	What It Does
Rectangular Select	M	Draw a rectangular selection. Hold Shift while dragging for a perfect square. Great for cropping a section of a photo or selecting a rectangular element in a UI mockup.
Elliptical Select	M (cycle)	Draw an elliptical selection. Hold Shift for a perfect circle. Useful for selecting circular objects like buttons, badges, or the iris of an eye during portrait retouching.
Free Select (Lasso)	L	Draw a freehand selection outline by clicking and dragging. Use this when you need to quickly select an irregularly shaped area — for example, tracing around a person's silhouette to separate them from a busy background.
Magic Wand	W	Click on a color to select all contiguous pixels of a similar hue. Adjust the tolerance in the tool options to be more or less strict. Perfect for selecting solid-color backgrounds — a product photographer can click on a white studio backdrop to select and replace it in seconds.

Painting Tools

Whether you're painting a digital illustration from scratch, hand-coloring a black and white photo, or retouching skin, these are the tools you'll reach for.

Tool	Shortcut	What It Does
Brush	B	The workhorse painting tool. Paint strokes with full pressure sensitivity if you're using a graphics tablet. Press [ and ] to quickly resize the brush, and hold Shift while clicking two points to paint a perfectly straight line between them. Digital artists use the Brush for everything from rough sketching to final detail rendering. Portrait photographers use it on a low-opacity layer to dodge and burn — painting white to brighten highlights and black to deepen shadows.
Pencil	N	Draws hard-edged, aliased pixels with no anti-aliasing. This is the tool of choice for pixel artists creating game sprites or retro-style icons. Each stroke lands exactly on the pixel grid with no blurring.
Eraser	E	Removes pixels, leaving transparency (or the background color on a flattened layer). Use a soft-edged eraser on a layer mask to gently fade the edges of a composited element into the scene below.
Paint Bucket	G	Fills a contiguous region with the foreground color or a pattern. Use it to quickly fill flat areas of a design — for example, coloring the background panel of a poster layout or filling line art with base colors.
Gradient	G (cycle)	Draw smooth color transitions between two or more colors. Choose from linear, radial, and angular modes. Designers use gradients for everything from subtle background washes to eye-catching header overlays. Photographers use them on layer masks to create smooth exposure blends — for example, darkening an overexposed sky without affecting the foreground.
Clone Stamp	S	Paints a copy of pixels sampled from another part of the image. Hold Alt and click to set the source point, then paint where you want the cloned pixels to appear. Photographers rely on this to remove distracting elements — erase a stray power line from a landscape shot, or clone grass over a piece of litter in a park scene.

Transform Tools

Transform tools let you reposition, resize, and reshape layers and selections.

Tool	Shortcut	What It Does
Move	V	Click and drag to move the current layer, selection, or guide. When compositing elements from different photos — say, dropping a product onto a new background — you'll use Move to position each piece exactly where you want it. Hold Shift while dragging to constrain movement to horizontal or vertical.
Crop	C	Draw a crop region and press Enter to trim the canvas. Use this to tighten a portrait composition, straighten a tilted horizon by rotating the crop box, or cut a large photograph down to a specific aspect ratio like 16:9 for a website hero image or 1:1 for Instagram.
Transform	Ctrl+T	Enters free-transform mode, where you can scale, rotate, skew, or warp the current layer or selection using handles. A designer placing a logo onto a product mockup would use Transform to scale and rotate the logo into the correct position, then warp it to follow the surface contour. Press Enter to apply or Esc to cancel.

Advanced Tools

Tool	Shortcut	What It Does
Text	T	Click on the canvas to place a text cursor, or click and drag to define a text box with word wrapping. Covered in detail in the Text & Typography section below.
Color Picker	I	Click anywhere on the canvas to sample a color and set it as your foreground color. Designers use this constantly — sample a color from a client's brand photo to match it exactly in a layout, or pick a sky color to use as a background gradient.
Pen	P	Create precise vector paths using Bezier curves. The Pen tool gives you the cleanest possible selections for cutting out objects with smooth, hard edges — like a product bottle or a car silhouette. Click to place anchor points, and click-drag to add curve handles. When you close the path, convert it to a selection or use it as a vector mask.
Measure	U	Click and drag between two points to measure the distance in pixels, inches, or centimeters, along with the angle. Print designers use this to verify margin widths and element spacing before sending artwork to press.
Healing Brush	J	Like the Clone Stamp, but smarter — it samples texture from a source area and blends it with the color and lighting of the destination, producing seamless results. Portrait photographers use this to remove skin blemishes: Alt+Click on a nearby area of clean skin to set the source, then paint over the blemish. The Healing Brush matches the surrounding tone automatically, so the fix looks natural even across areas with varying lighting or skin color.

Layers

Layers are the backbone of non-destructive editing. Think of them as transparent sheets stacked on top of each other — each sheet can hold its own content, and you can rearrange, hide, or blend them together without permanently altering anything. Nearly every professional workflow depends on layers, whether you're compositing a magazine cover, retouching a portrait, or designing a poster.

Layer Types

• Raster layers — Standard pixel layers where you paint, paste photos, and apply filters. When a photographer composites a subject onto a new background, each element lives on its own raster layer so it can be repositioned or masked independently.
• Text layers — Editable text that you can change at any time without re-creating it. A poster designer can tweak the headline wording, switch fonts, or change the color weeks later without starting over.
• Adjustment layers — Non-destructive color and tonal corrections (Curves, Levels, Hue/Saturation, and more) that affect all layers beneath them. Since they don't touch your original pixels, you can tweak or delete them at any point. A photographer might stack a Curves adjustment to boost midtone contrast and a Hue/Saturation adjustment to warm the shadows — then revisit either adjustment days later to fine-tune for a different print run.
• Embedded objects — Embedded files that preserve the original full-resolution data no matter how many times you scale, rotate, or warp them. Place a client's high-res logo as an Embedded Object into your design, scale it down for a business card, and later scale it back up for a banner — no quality loss.
• Layer groups — Collapsible folders that help you organize complex projects. A web designer building a homepage mockup might group all header elements (logo, navigation, hero image) into one group and all footer elements into another, keeping the layer stack manageable even with dozens of layers.

Layer Masks

A layer mask is a grayscale channel attached to a layer that controls which parts are visible. White areas of the mask show the layer, black areas hide it, and shades of gray create partial transparency.

To add a mask, right-click a layer in the Layers panel and choose Add Layer Mask. Then select the Brush tool (B), set your foreground color to black, and paint over the areas you want to hide. Switch to white (press X to swap colors) to reveal them again.

Real-world example: Suppose you're blending two exposures of the same landscape — one exposed for the sky and one for the foreground. Place the sky exposure on top, add a layer mask, and paint with a soft black brush along the horizon line. The darker foreground from the layer below shows through seamlessly, giving you a perfectly balanced image without any HDR artifacts.

Blend Modes

Blend modes control how a layer's pixels interact with the layers beneath it. Select a blend mode from the dropdown at the top of the Layers panel. Here are the modes you'll use most:

• Multiply — Darkens the image by multiplying color values. Designers use this to overlay dark textures onto a photo or to make a scanned line drawing's white paper transparent so only the ink lines show through.
• Screen — Lightens the image. Use it to add light effects like lens flares or to brighten an underexposed photo by duplicating the layer and setting the copy to Screen.
• Overlay — Boosts contrast by combining Multiply and Screen. A popular sharpening technique: duplicate your layer, apply a High Pass filter, and set the result to Overlay. Only the edges get sharpened while flat areas stay untouched.
• Soft Light — A subtler version of Overlay. Photographers fill a new layer with 50% gray, set it to Soft Light, then paint with white to dodge (lighten) and black to burn (darken) — a completely non-destructive way to sculpt light and shadow in portraits.

Selections

Selections let you fence off a part of your image so that painting, filters, and adjustments only affect that area. The boundary appears as an animated dashed outline, often called "marching ants." Mastering selections is one of the most important skills in image editing — it's what allows you to change a sky without touching the foreground, recolor a single object, or cut a product out of its background for an e-commerce listing.

Combining Selections

You can build complex selections by combining simple ones. Hold these modifier keys while drawing a new selection:

• Shift — Add to the existing selection. Draw multiple rectangles or lasso shapes and they merge into one selection.
• Alt — Subtract from the selection. Use this to carve out holes or trim edges.
• Shift+Alt — Intersect. Keep only the overlap between the old and new selections.

Real-world example: You're cutting out a model from a studio backdrop. Start with the Magic Wand (W) to click the white background — it selects most of it instantly. Then hold Shift and click on missed pockets (between the arm and body, for instance) to add them. Finally, invert the selection (Ctrl+Shift+I) so the model is selected instead of the background. Copy the model to a new layer (Ctrl+J) and you have a clean cutout ready for compositing.

Feathering

A hard selection edge can look unnatural, especially when compositing. Feathering softens the edge by gradually fading the selection over a specified number of pixels. After making a selection, press Shift+F6 to set a feather radius. A value of 1-3 pixels produces a subtle, natural transition; higher values create a dreamy, vignette-style fade.

Quick Mask Mode

Press Q to enter Quick Mask mode. Your image gets a translucent red overlay — red areas are outside the selection, clear areas are inside. Now you can use any painting tool to refine the selection: paint with black to deselect (add red), paint with white to select (remove red). This is incredibly powerful for tricky edges like hair or fur, where geometric selection tools struggle. Press Q again to return to the standard marching-ants view.

Filters & Adjustments

Filters process your pixels to achieve a wide range of effects — from sharpening a soft photograph to creating stylized artistic looks. Access them from the Filters menu. Most filters display a live preview so you can dial in the settings before committing.

If you want to stay non-destructive, apply filters to Embedded Objects — they become Object Filters that you can re-edit, reorder, or remove at any time.

Blur Filters

• Gaussian Blur — A smooth, even blur controlled by radius. Use it to soften a distracting background behind a product shot, or to blur a duplicate layer and subtract it for frequency separation (a skin retouching technique that separates texture from color).
• Motion Blur — Simulates the streak left by a moving object or camera. Set the angle and distance to add a sense of speed to a stationary car photo, or blur the background behind a runner to create the impression of motion.
• Lens Blur — Creates a realistic depth-of-field effect with natural-looking bokeh. Feed it a depth map (a gradient on a separate channel) and it blurs near and far areas differently, mimicking the shallow depth of field from a fast prime lens — useful for making product photos shot on a phone look like they came from a studio camera.

Sharpen Filters

• Unsharp Mask — The industry-standard sharpening tool. Despite its name, it makes images sharper by increasing contrast along edges. Set the Amount (strength), Radius (edge width), and Threshold (which edges to sharpen). For web images, try Amount 80-120%, Radius 0.5-1.0, Threshold 0-2. For print, increase the Radius to 1.5-2.0 since print softens things a bit during reproduction.
• High Pass — Turns the entire image neutral gray except for edges, which retain their contrast. Duplicate your photo layer, apply High Pass with a radius of 2-5 pixels, and set the blend mode to Overlay. You'll get crisp edges without amplifying noise in flat areas — a favorite technique among landscape and architectural photographers.

Distort Filters

• Liquify — An interactive tool for pushing, pulling, and warping pixels by painting with specialized brushes. Fashion retouchers use it for subtle adjustments — smoothing the line of a garment, fixing a flyaway hair, or gently reshaping a pose.
• Perspective Warp — Correct converging verticals in architectural photography (buildings leaning backward when shot from the ground) or intentionally exaggerate perspective for dramatic compositions.
• Lens Correction — Fixes barrel and pincushion distortion from wide-angle or telephoto lenses, and removes chromatic aberration (color fringing along high-contrast edges). Architectural and real-estate photographers rely on this to keep straight lines truly straight.

Noise Filters

• Add Noise — Introduces random grain in uniform or Gaussian patterns. Adding a subtle noise overlay to digital illustrations or overly smooth gradients gives them an organic, film-like texture that feels less sterile.
• Denoise — Reduces noise while preserving detail. Essential for high-ISO night photography or low-light concert shots, where sensor noise can overpower fine details.

Artistic Filters

• Oil Paint — Simulates oil-painting brush strokes with adjustable stylization and bristle detail. Apply it to a landscape photo for a painterly fine-art look suitable for canvas prints.
• Posterize — Reduces the number of tonal levels, giving the image a flat, graphic look. Graphic designers use posterization as a starting point for screen-printed poster artwork or pop-art style portraits.

Adjustments

Color and tonal adjustments can be applied directly to a layer or, for maximum flexibility, as adjustment layers that sit in the Layers panel and affect everything below them.

• Curves (Ctrl+M) — The most powerful tonal tool. Drag points on the curve to brighten highlights, darken shadows, or boost midtone contrast. For an S-curve that adds punch: pull the shadows quarter down slightly, push the highlights quarter up slightly. Photographers doing color grading can edit the Red, Green, and Blue channels independently to shift the mood of an image — lifting the blue shadows and warming the highlights to get a cinematic teal-and-orange look.
• Levels (Ctrl+L) — Adjusts the black point, white point, and midtone gamma with a simple three-slider interface. Drag the black slider inward to deepen the darkest tones, and the white slider inward to brighten the lightest. A quick Levels correction is often the first step in any photo edit to ensure the image uses the full tonal range.
• Hue/Saturation (Ctrl+U) — Shift the hue of the entire image or target specific color ranges. A product photographer can isolate the Reds and shift them toward orange to match a brand's color palette, or desaturate the Greens in a landscape to create a moody, muted look.
• Brightness/Contrast — Straightforward sliders for quick global adjustments. Good for fast corrections when you don't need the precision of Curves or Levels.
• Color Balance (Ctrl+B) — Fine-tune color separately for shadows, midtones, and highlights. Push warmth into the highlights while keeping shadows cool for a natural, three-dimensional feel.
• Invert (Ctrl+I) — Flips all colors to their opposites, creating a negative. Useful for inverting masks (turning a "select background" mask into a "select subject" mask) and as a creative effect.
• Desaturate (Ctrl+Shift+U) — Converts the image or layer to grayscale while keeping the RGB color mode. Photographers converting portraits to black and white often start here, then add a Channel Mixer adjustment layer for finer control over how each color translates to a shade of gray.

Text & Typography

Press T to activate the Text tool. Click anywhere on the canvas to start typing at a single point, or click and drag to define a text box — text inside a box will wrap automatically when it reaches the edge, which is what you want for paragraphs, captions, and body copy.

Font Selection

Fog Panther has access to all fonts installed on your system. The font picker in the tool options bar shows a live preview of each font rendered with your actual text, so you can scroll through and compare options visually. You can filter by name to narrow down a long font list, and mark frequently used fonts as favorites so they appear at the top.

When you save your work in the .fog format, fonts are embedded directly in the file. This means you can share the file with a colleague or open it on a different machine and the text will render correctly, even if those fonts aren't installed there.

Formatting Options

• Font family, size, weight, and style — Set the typeface, point size, and choose bold, italic, or a combination.
• Character spacing (tracking) — Increase or decrease the space between all characters. Tighten tracking on a large headline for a more compact, editorial look, or loosen it on uppercase subheadings for an elegant, airy feel.
• Line height (leading) — Control the vertical space between lines of text. Generous leading (1.5× or more) makes body text in a print brochure feel open and readable.
• Text alignment — Left, center, right, and justify. Use justify for magazine-style columns, but watch for awkward spacing in short lines.
• Text color and stroke — Set a solid or gradient fill, and add an outline (stroke) for legibility over busy backgrounds. Event poster designers often use a white headline with a dark stroke so the text reads clearly over any photo.
• Anti-aliasing — Choose Sharp, Crisp, or Smooth depending on the output. Sharp works best for small UI text destined for screens; Smooth gives the cleanest look on large headings for print.

Editing Text Later

Double-click any text layer in the Layers panel (or double-click the text on canvas) to re-enter editing mode. Text layers remain fully editable — you can rewrite the copy, change the font, adjust the size, or recolor it at any time. This is why designers keep text as live type for as long as possible.

You can also apply layer styles to text without rasterizing it. Add a drop shadow to lift a heading off the background, a gradient overlay for a metallic look, or an outer glow for neon-sign effects. The text stays editable throughout.

If you need to apply pixel-level filters to text (like a blur or distort), go to Layer > Rasterize to convert the text layer to pixels. Be aware that this is a one-way operation — you won't be able to edit the text as type after rasterizing.

File Formats

The Native .fog Format

The .fog format is Fog Panther's own file format. It captures your entire project state with perfect fidelity — every layer, mask, adjustment layer, Embedded Object, text layer, blend mode, and embedded font is preserved exactly as you left it. Always save a .fog copy of your work so you can return to it later with full editability.

Think of the .fog file as your master document and exported formats (PNG, JPEG, etc.) as delivery copies. A photographer might keep the .fog file with all retouching layers intact and export a flattened JPEG for the client and a TIFF for the printer.

Supported Formats

Save vs. Export

Save (Ctrl+S) writes your work in the .fog format (or the file's current format if you opened a PSD, for example). Save As (Ctrl+Shift+S) lets you choose a new name, location, or format.

Export (Ctrl+E) is designed for producing delivery files. It opens a dialog where you choose the format and quality settings, and optionally resize the image on export. For instance, you might export a web-ready JPEG at 1200px wide and quality 82, while keeping your full-resolution .fog master untouched.

Color Management

Color Picker

Click the foreground or background color swatch in the toolbar to open the color picker. It gives you several ways to choose a color:

• Color wheel — Click the wheel for hue, then adjust saturation and brightness in the inner triangle.
• HSB sliders — Dial in Hue, Saturation, and Brightness numerically.
• RGB sliders — Specify exact Red, Green, and Blue values (0-255).
• Hex input — Type a hex code like #2563eb directly. Web designers working from a brand style guide will use this constantly.

You can also sample a color from the canvas at any time by pressing I to activate the Color Picker tool and clicking on the pixel you want.

Foreground & Background Colors

The toolbar shows two overlapping swatches — the top-left one is your foreground color (used by brushes, text, and fills) and the bottom-right one is your background color (used by the eraser on flattened layers and as the second color in gradients).

• Press X to swap the two colors instantly. Useful when painting a mask — paint with black to hide, press X, paint with white to reveal.
• Press D to reset to the default black foreground and white background.

ICC Profiles and Soft-Proofing

Fog Panther supports ICC color profiles for accurate color reproduction across devices. You can assign a profile to your document via Image > Color Profile — this tells the software (and the printer or display) how to interpret the color values.

For print work, go to View > Proof Colors to enable soft-proofing. This simulates on your screen how the image will look when printed with a specific profile. A print shop will typically provide you with their press profile (e.g., a FOGRA39 or GRACoL profile). Load it in the soft-proofing dialog, and you can spot out-of-gamut colors before sending the job to press — saving you an expensive reprint.

Color Modes and Bit Depth

Fog Panther works in RGB color mode with either 8-bit or 16-bit per channel. You can convert between bit depths via Image > Bit Depth.

• 8-bit — 256 levels per channel, suitable for most web and screen work.
• 16-bit — 65,536 levels per channel, essential for high-quality photo editing, HDR work, and print. Working in 16-bit prevents banding in smooth gradients (like blue skies) and gives you more latitude when pushing tonal adjustments in Curves or Levels.

History & Undo

Undo / Redo

Press Ctrl+Z to undo your last action and Ctrl+Shift+Z to redo it. Fog Panther supports unlimited undo steps, constrained only by available memory. So if you paint a hundred brush strokes and then decide the whole approach is wrong, you can undo every single one.

History Panel

The History panel gives you a visual timeline of every edit you've made to the document, from the moment you opened it. Each entry shows the action name (e.g., "Brush Stroke," "Gaussian Blur," "Move Layer") and a thumbnail. Click on any entry to jump straight back to that state — everything after that point grays out. If you make a new edit from that point, the grayed-out entries are replaced.

Real-world example: You're retouching a portrait and have spent the last twenty minutes smoothing skin, dodging and burning, and adjusting color. The client calls and says they prefer the look from before you did the color grading. Instead of undoing step by step, open the History panel, scroll up to the state right before your color work, and click it. Done in one click.

Snapshots

Snapshots let you bookmark the full document state at a particular moment. Click the camera icon at the bottom of the History panel to take a snapshot. Snapshots appear at the top of the History panel and persist for the life of the session.

This is powerful when you want to try multiple creative directions without losing your work. For example, a designer exploring two different color palettes for a poster can take a snapshot of version A, try version B, then compare the two by clicking between snapshots. When you save the document in .fog format, the full undo history is preserved with the file — close today, reopen next week, and every step is still there.

View & Navigation

Efficient navigation keeps you in flow. Whether you're scanning a 50-megapixel landscape for dust spots or checking a single pixel in an icon, these controls help you get around your canvas quickly.

Zoom

Panning

Hold Space and drag to pan around the canvas. This works no matter which tool is active, so you never have to switch away from your current tool to scroll. You can also use the scroll bars or open the Navigator panel for a bird's-eye thumbnail with a draggable viewport rectangle.

Rulers & Guides

Toggle rulers with Ctrl+R. They appear along the top and left edges of the canvas, showing measurements in your chosen unit (pixels, inches, or centimeters).

To create a guide, click inside a ruler and drag onto the canvas. A thin colored line appears. Guides are non-printing reference lines that help you align elements precisely. A print designer laying out a magazine spread might drag guides from the rulers to mark column boundaries, margins, and the gutter. Use View > Clear Guides to remove them all when you're done.

Snapping

Enable snapping with View > Snap or Ctrl+Shift+;. When active, layers, selections, and guides snap to grid lines, canvas edges, other guides, and nearby layer boundaries. This makes precise alignment effortless — a UI designer can snap elements to a pixel grid, and a photographer can snap a crop boundary to a guide placed at the rule-of-thirds position.

Grid

Show the grid with View > Show Grid or Ctrl+'. The grid overlays a regular pattern of lines on the canvas for spatial reference. Grid size, subdivisions, and color can all be configured in Preferences. Pixel artists commonly set the grid to 1px intervals and zoom in to work tile by tile, while UI designers might set it to 8px or 16px to match their design system's spacing scale.

Preferences

Open Preferences with Ctrl+, or via Edit > Preferences. This is where you tailor Fog Panther to your hardware, your workflow, and your personal taste.

General

• Theme — Choose Light, Dark, or System. Many photographers and retouchers prefer the dark theme because it reduces the influence of a bright UI on their perception of color and exposure.
• Language — Set the interface language.
• Auto-save interval — How often Fog Panther silently saves a recovery copy of your work. The default is every 5 minutes, but you can shorten it to 1 minute if you tend to forget to save, or lengthen it if auto-saves cause a noticeable pause on very large files.
• Startup behavior — Choose whether to show the welcome screen, open a blank canvas, or re-open the last file you were working on.

Performance

• Memory for undo history — Set how much RAM Fog Panther can use for undo states. If you work on very large files (e.g., 16-bit TIFFs from medium-format cameras), allocating more memory here gives you more undo headroom.
• GPU acceleration — Enable this if your system has a dedicated GPU. It offloads canvas rendering and certain filters to the graphics card for smoother zooming, panning, and filter previews.
• Cache and scratch disk — Choose where Fog Panther stores temporary data. If you have a fast NVMe SSD, point the scratch disk there for the best performance with large files.
• Rendering threads — By default, Fog Panther uses all available CPU cores. On a shared workstation, you may want to reduce this to leave headroom for other applications.

Tools

• Default brush size and hardness — Set the starting values that new brush tools use. A retoucher who always starts with a small, soft brush can set this once and stop adjusting it at the beginning of every session.
• Tablet pressure sensitivity curve — Customize how pen pressure maps to brush size and opacity. Digital illustrators often want a lighter touch at the low end for delicate linework, with a steep ramp-up for bolder strokes.
• Scroll wheel zoom direction — Reverse the zoom direction if it feels backwards to you. This is a personal preference with no wrong answer.

Keyboard Shortcuts Editor

Open the editor from Edit > Keyboard Shortcuts. You can search for any command by name, assign a new shortcut, or reassign an existing one. If you're migrating from another editor and have years of muscle memory with a different shortcut layout, this lets you remap everything to match.

You can also export and import shortcut profiles. This is useful if you work on multiple machines or want to share your setup with a teammate.

Common Workflows

The sections above cover individual features in detail. Here, we tie them together into complete walkthroughs that show you how to accomplish real tasks from start to finish. Each workflow includes cross-links to the relevant reference sections so you can dive deeper on any step.

Retouching a Portrait from Start to Finish

This walkthrough takes a portrait from a raw camera file to a polished, print-ready result using non-destructive techniques throughout.

1. Open the RAW file and set the initial tone. Open your portrait with Ctrl+O. Fog Panther's RAW processor lets you adjust exposure, white balance, and highlight recovery before the image hits the canvas. Once you're happy with the baseline, the file opens as a full layer. Go to Filters > Adjustments > Levels and set your black and white points, then use Curves to add a gentle S-curve for contrast (see Filters & Adjustments).
2. Heal blemishes with the Healing Brush. Press J to activate the Healing Brush. Zoom in to 100% with Ctrl+1, then Alt+click on a clean area of skin to set your source. Paint over spots, scars, and stray hairs — the Healing Brush matches texture, lighting, and color automatically (see Tools).
3. Smooth skin with frequency separation. Duplicate the background layer twice (Ctrl+J twice). Name the lower copy "Low Frequency" and the upper copy "High Frequency." On the Low Frequency layer, apply Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur with a radius of 4–8 px (enough to smooth skin texture). On the High Frequency layer, set the blend mode to Linear Light, then go to Image > Apply Image, select the Low Frequency layer, set blending to Subtract with Scale 2 and Offset 128. Now you can paint on the Low Frequency layer with a soft brush to even out skin tones without losing pore detail (see Layers and Filters & Adjustments).
4. Non-destructive dodge & burn. Create a new layer, fill it with 50% gray (Edit > Fill > 50% Gray), and set its blend mode to Soft Light. Paint with a soft white brush at 5–10% opacity to brighten highlights (dodge) and a soft black brush to deepen shadows (burn). This sculpts the face with light without touching the original pixels (see Layers).
5. Color grade with Curves. Add a Curves adjustment layer from the Layers panel. For a popular teal-and-orange look: lift the shadows in the Blue channel (adds blue/teal to shadows) and lower the highlights in the Blue channel (pushes highlights toward yellow/orange). Fine-tune the Red and Green channels to taste (see Filters & Adjustments).
6. Sharpen for output. Stamp all visible layers into a new layer with Ctrl+Alt+Shift+E. Apply Filters > Other > High Pass with a radius of 1–2 px, then set the layer blend mode to Overlay. This adds crisp edge sharpening without halos (see Filters & Adjustments).
7. Export. For the web, use File > Export As and choose JPEG at 80% quality, resized to 2048 px on the long edge. For print, export a 16-bit TIFF at full resolution with the embedded color profile (see File Formats and Color Management).

Preparing Artwork for Print

This walkthrough covers creating a print-ready document from scratch, with proper margins, color management, and export settings.

1. Create a new document at the correct size. Press Ctrl+N and choose a Print preset (e.g., A3) or enter custom dimensions. Set the resolution to 300 DPI and the color mode to your target space (sRGB for most digital press, CMYK if your printer requires it). Choose a white background (see Getting Started).
2. Set up guides for margins, bleed, and safe area. Go to View > New Guide Layout and add guides at your printer's bleed distance (typically 3 mm) from each edge. Add a second set of guides 10–15 mm inside for the safe area where all important content should stay. These guides are non-printing and ensure nothing gets clipped during trimming (see View & Navigation).
3. Design with layers and text. Build your composition using separate layers for background, imagery, and text. Use the Text tool (T) for live type — you can change fonts, sizes, and colors at any time without rasterizing. Add adjustment layers for global color corrections so you can tweak them non-destructively (see Layers and Text & Typography).
4. Assign an ICC color profile and soft-proof. Go to Image > Color Profile > Assign Profile and select the ICC profile provided by your print shop (e.g., Fogra39 for European coated paper). Then enable soft-proofing with View > Soft Proof to simulate how the final print will look on screen (see Color Management).
5. Check for out-of-gamut colors. While soft-proofing, enable View > Gamut Warning. Areas highlighted in gray contain colors that fall outside the printer's reproducible range. Adjust these areas by desaturating slightly or shifting the hue until the warnings disappear (see Color Management).
6. Export a 16-bit TIFF with the embedded profile. Go to File > Export As, choose TIFF, set the bit depth to 16-bit, and ensure "Embed ICC Profile" is checked. This preserves maximum color fidelity and gives the print shop the profile they need to produce accurate color (see File Formats).
7. Save the master file. Press Ctrl+S to save your working document as a .fog file. This preserves all layers, masks, adjustment layers, and text as editable objects so you can return and make changes later (see File Formats).

Cutting Out a Product for E-Commerce

This walkthrough shows how to isolate a product from its background and export it for an online store listing with both transparent and white-background variants.

1. Open the product photo. Press Ctrl+O and open the photograph of the product. For the cleanest results, start with a well-lit photo shot against a plain background.
2. Select the background with the Magic Wand. Press W to activate the Magic Wand tool. Click on the background area — the tool selects a contiguous region of similar color. If the background has slight color variation, hold Shift and click on the unselected areas to add them to the selection. Adjust the Tolerance in the options bar (try 20–40) until the background is fully selected (see Selections).
3. Invert the selection to select the product. Press Ctrl+Shift+I to invert. Now the product itself is selected instead of the background (see Selections).
4. Feather the edge for a natural transition. Press Shift+F6 to open the Feather dialog. Enter a radius of 1–2 px. This softens the selection edge just enough to avoid a harsh, cut-out look without making the edges blurry (see Selections).
5. Copy the product to a new layer. Press Ctrl+J to copy the selection to a new layer. You now have the isolated product on its own layer with a transparent background. Hide or delete the original background layer (see Layers).
6. Refine edges with Quick Mask mode. Press Q to enter Quick Mask mode. The mask appears as a red overlay: red areas are outside the selection, clear areas are inside. Use a small, soft brush to paint red over any background fringe that was included, or paint white to recover any product edges that were clipped. Press Q again to exit Quick Mask and return to a selection (see Selections and Tools).
7. Add a clean background. For a transparent background, you're done — the product sits on its own layer with nothing behind it. For a white background, create a new layer below the product and fill it with white (Edit > Fill > White).
8. Export for the store listing. For listings that support transparency, use File > Export As and choose PNG. For marketplaces that require a white background, hide the transparent layer, show the white-background layer, and export as JPEG at 90% quality. Many stores require specific dimensions (e.g., 2000×2000 px) — use Image > Canvas Size to pad the image to a square before exporting (see File Formats).

Isolating a Subject with Channels (Hair, Fur & Fine Edges)

Automatic selection tools work well for clean, hard edges — but they struggle with wispy hair, animal fur, tree branches against sky, or anything with semi-transparent, irregular boundaries. The channel-based selection technique exploits the natural contrast already present in your image's color channels to build a precise mask that captures even the finest details.

Why channels work where other tools don't

Every image is made of Red, Green, and Blue channels. Each channel is a grayscale representation of how much of that color is present at every pixel — bright areas contain more of the color, dark areas contain less. In many photos, one channel already shows strong contrast between the subject and the background. By duplicating that channel and pushing it toward pure black and white, you create a ready-made selection mask that follows every strand and whisker.

Common challenges

• Color fringing — remnants of the original background color clinging to fine edges, especially visible when the subject is placed on a new background.
• Semi-transparent areas — flyaway hairs or translucent fur that aren't fully opaque. These need to be preserved as partial transparency, not forced to solid.
• Mid-tone edges — areas where the subject and background have similar brightness in all channels, making it hard to push to pure black or white without destroying detail.
• "Frying" edges — over-applying Levels or Curves to the channel, which burns out delicate mid-tone transitions and creates harsh, jagged edges.

Step-by-step walkthrough

1. Open the image and examine each channel. Open your photo with Ctrl+O. Open the Channels panel from Window > Channels. Click on the Red, Green, and Blue channels one at a time. Each appears as a grayscale image. Look for the channel where the subject is darkest and the background is lightest (or vice versa) — maximum contrast is what you want. For portraits with hair against a light background, the Blue channel is often the best choice because skin and hair contain little blue light, making them appear dark against a bright sky or studio backdrop.
2. Duplicate the best channel. Right-click the channel with the most contrast and choose Duplicate Channel (or drag it to the New Channel button at the bottom of the panel). This creates an alpha channel copy that you can edit freely without affecting the image's color (see Color Management).
3. Push the contrast with Levels. With the duplicated channel selected, open Levels (Ctrl+L). Drag the black-point slider to the right to deepen the darks, and the white-point slider to the left to blow out the lights. The goal is to push the subject toward pure black and the background toward pure white (or the reverse). Go gradually — pulling the sliders too far in one pass will fry the delicate edges where hair fades into the background. Make two or three moderate passes rather than one aggressive one (see Filters & Adjustments).
4. Refine with Dodge and Burn. Select the Burn tool (O), set the Range to Shadows and Exposure to around 30–60%, and paint over background areas that are still gray to push them toward black. Then switch to the Dodge tool (also O, cycle with Shift+O), set the Range to Highlights, and paint over the subject's interior to push it toward white. Working in Shadows/Highlights ranges protects the mid-tone edges from being destroyed (see Tools).
5. Paint the solid interior with a hard brush. Switch to the Brush tool (B). Use a hard, white brush to paint the clearly interior areas of the subject (torso, face, solid regions) pure white. Use a hard, black brush to paint obvious background areas pure black. Stay away from the fine edges — let the channel's natural tonal transitions handle those. This step is fast and cleans up the large areas that Dodge/Burn would take too long to handle.
6. Use the Overlay brush for tricky edges. Set the Brush tool's blend mode to Overlay in the options bar. In Overlay mode, painting white only affects pixels that are already lighter than 50% gray, and painting black only affects pixels darker than 50% gray — mid-tones are protected. This lets you confidently paint near the hair without destroying the fine semi-transparent strands. Paint white over the subject-side edges and black over the background-side edges (see Tools).
7. Load the channel as a selection. Hold Ctrl and click the thumbnail of your refined channel in the Channels panel. This loads the white areas as a selection (marching ants). If the subject is white in your channel, the selection already targets it. If the subject is black, invert the selection with Ctrl+Shift+I (see Selections).
8. Apply as a layer mask. Switch back to the Layers panel. Click the Add Layer Mask button at the bottom of the panel. The selection becomes a mask — the subject remains visible and the background disappears, with hair and fur edges fading naturally through partial transparency (see Layers).
9. Remove color fringing. Place a solid color layer behind the subject to check the edges against a contrasting background. If you see a halo of the original background color around the hair, create a new layer above the subject, set it to Color blend mode, then sample the subject's natural hair or fur color with the Eyedropper (I) and paint over the fringe. The Color blend mode replaces only the hue and saturation, leaving luminosity intact — so the fringe takes on the correct color without losing its transparency (see Layers).
10. Final cleanup and export. Zoom in to 200% and inspect the edges. Use a small, soft brush on the layer mask to paint black over any remaining artifacts or white to recover any lost detail. When you're satisfied, flatten or export as needed — PNG for transparency, or place the subject on a new background and export as JPEG (see File Formats).

Tips for best results

• Try multiple channels. Sometimes combining two channels (e.g., duplicating Blue, then using Apply Image to blend in the Green channel) gives better separation than any single channel alone.
• Use Curves instead of Levels for more precise control over which tonal range gets pushed. You can pin the mid-tones in place while aggressively darkening shadows or brightening highlights.
• Check against several backgrounds. Toggle between a white, black, and colored background behind the masked subject — fringing and artifacts that are invisible on one color often appear on another.
• Don't force transparency to solid. Hair and fur edges are naturally semi-transparent. Let the mask preserve those gray values rather than pushing everything to pure black or white.