Stracian is a painting program, which I wrote because I was unable to find an existing program that worked the way I wanted. You can download and use it for free, but it comes with no guarantee or support whatsover. The download link is at the bottom of this page, which you should read before downloading.
Stracian is a 'painting' program, not an 'image manipulation' program, designed for creating images from scratch by 'pushing pixels around'. It is simple and deliberately lacks many features you might expect.
Options and settings are mainly controlled via the keyboard, not dialogs, menus, sliders, etc. This is good because you don't have to take your eye off the picture, or move the pointer away from where you're painting, in order to change some setting. It is bad because you have to learn the keys before you can use the program effectively.
The current colour, brush size, brush opacity, and other things can all be adjusted with single key presses. The active layer and type of brush can also be set with a single key press.
A key feature which makes this feasible is a full preview brush, which shows the effect the brush would have on the image before you press the stylus/mouse. For example, you can move the brush around and adjust its settings and the current colour using the keyboard without affecting the image. (I think that one day, all painting programs will have a full preview brush, and no-one will be able to figure out why any of them ever didn't.)
* Edits one image up to 4000x4000 with up to 9 layers.
* Full screen editing.
* Full preview brush - see above.
* Basic stylus support (pressure, not tilt).
* Zoom in/out with single keypresses, scroll by pressing space bar and dragging.
* Brush size, opacity (or strength of effect for filter type brushes), and hardness (opposite of feathering) are increased or decreased by single keys. Whether stylus pressure affects size and power controlled by single keys.
* Colour hue, saturation, value are increased or decreased by single keys. Pick up colour with Alt-click.
* Undo/redo are single keypresses. Undo/redo works for brush strokes but not for large scale edits (eg layer swap, re-size).
* Basic implementation of layers. Layer attributes of opacity, visibility, alpha (transparency) lock, and name can be set. Layers can be copied, swapped, merged, filled and cleared.
* Brushes include Plain, Erase (make transparent), Texture, Smear and Smudge, Clone, Blur, Adjust (increase/decrease brightness, contrast, saturation; smooth/sharp, add noise, colour edges).
* Uses Adobe Photoshop format (PSD) as its native format, so you can transfer image data including layers to other programs. (Its ability to read PSD files made by other programs is limited).
* Re-sizing (scale, crop, expand).
* Mask.
* Move layers.
* Text, drawing tools (rectangles, ellipses, etc), fills, gradients, cut-and-paste, multiple images, scanning, printing.
* Another feature which will not be added is brushes which attempt to simulate non-digital media. I take the view that such things are as daft as someone back in 1904 attempting to make a car work like a horse.
Stracian has only been tested on Windows XP. It may work with earlier versions of Windows.
Stracian is designed for use with a pressure-sensitive stylus. It has only been tested with the Wacom Graphire 3, but it should work with others. It seems to work OK with a mouse, but this has hardly been tested at all.
Like most image-editing programs, Stracian can use a lot of memory and processing power. It has been tested on a 1GHz, 384Mb machine. I don't recommend using Stracian if you have a lot less than that.
This is a beta version, and is likely to crash or otherwise misbehave from time to time. I can accept no responsibility for any harm it may cause.
The installation includes the program and two small PDF files (a guide and the keyboard layout).
If you want the PDF files without the program, here they are.