SAI (software)

Infobox Software
name = PaintTool SAI


developer = SYSTEMAX
latest release version = Ver.1.0.0
latest release date = 2008-02-25
latest preview version = Ver.1.0.5e
latest preview date = 2008-09-17
operating system = Microsoft Windows
genre = Raster graphics editor
size = 5MB
license = Shareware
website = [http://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/ http://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/]

SAI or nihongo|PaintTool SAI|ペイントツールSAI is a painting program for Microsoft Windows developed by SYSTEMAX.

History

Development began on August 2, 2004, a first alpha version was released on October 13, 2006, and the software moved into beta stage on December 21, 2007. The first official release (1.0.0) was on February 25, 2008, and a first update preview (1.0.1) appeared on March 3, 2008.

The official English language translation of both the website and the application were released on March 31, 2008. Payments through PayPal, either by credit card or by using a paypal account, are also accepted from this date, in addition to the BitCash and TelecomCredit payment systems that have been available for users from Japan.

Features

SAI is a lightweight painting application, which starts up in seconds.

The user interface allows multiple documents to be opened at the same time. The drawing canvas can be both zoomed and rotated using the sliders on the navigator or the hotkeys configured on your keyboard.The toolbar on the top part of the screen also includes a button to mirror the drawing view without mirroring your actual drawing. It is also possible to open multiple viewports to the same document. An application-wide scratchpad (which can be used as a color mixing panel) is provided, which is saved between your sessions. Colors can be stored in the swatches panel.

Various raster drawing tools are implemented, such as the Airbrush, Watercolor, Pen, and Marker, which can all be easily customized, and stored in slots in the user interface of the application. There is also a set of vector drawing tools intended for inking, which, like the raster tools, can be configured to be pen pressure sensitive. The only downside of the vector tools is that they aren't affected by any selection features, and therefore need to be adjusted by their own special tools, which is confusing for anyone who is used to working everything with the Selection, Wand or Lasso tool.

Work can be done on separate layers, which can be grouped, and can have opacity masks. In addition to this, it is possible to mask a layer by letting the layer system automatically take the opacity of the layer below (or lower, if the layer below also has layer clip enabled) it into account, which is an efficient way of adding shadows and highlights onto your colored surfaces, without having to bother with creating special masks to take care of this.

There is also a pen movement and pressure smoothing feature which can be manually configured as to how much effect it has.

Selection tools include the simple square selection, the lasso, and magic wand, which all have configurable settings for things like anti aliasing. There is also a selection brush tool, which is fully customizable, similar to the drawing brush.

Some common features that exist in similar software, like text layers and gradients, are not implemented, as this tool focuses on the drawing/painting, while the final composition is often done using another application. There aren't normal drawing functions such as Circle/Rectangle making, and one thing that might confund new users to graphic programs, or even less-amateur ones, is that the White color is shown in SAI the same way the Transparency does. This means that an area might be transparent or might be white (and this may change the whole picture if not known perfectly), what may cause some troubles when exporting to programs that differ these two features, as Adobe Photoshop does. There is also no printing functionality, but documents can be exported to a range of popular formats, such as .PSD files or simply as .BMP files, in addition to the native .SAI format used by default.

As it was said, the program has no focus in image editing. By that, the only present adjustments are Brightness/Contrast and Hue/Saturation, and therefore no support to level editing, Channel extraction,etc. One may -and probably will - use another program for that, but when copying back the image to SAI, its properties will have been changed. For example, focusing in on the fact that it does not distinguish transparency from white, if you try exporting an image with a transparent background to other programs, and then paste it back, the once transparent area will have turned white.

External links

* [http://www.systemax.jp/ja/sai/ SAI Official Web site] (Japanese)
* [http://www.systemax.jp/en/sai/ SAI Official Web site] (English)
* [http://sai.detstwo.com/sai/ Unofficial English translation]
* [http://www5.ocn.ne.jp/~tane/sai/sai_his/sai_his.html SAI History by TANE] (Japanese)