There were no new versions of JugiPaint for some time so I think it is appropriate to give some information about what is going on with its development. JugiPaint is now out of beta and there will be no new development version. I am now working to push JugiPaint to its first commercial version – a version which will see some new features and have sorted out various quirks and missing bits.

One of the features in JugiPaint which needed improvement were its color adjustment possibilities. I don’t think there is a digital artist out there who doesn’t resort to color adjusting tools at least occasionally. JugiPaint inherited from Comicado two color filters (Hue/Saturation and Brightness/Contrast) which allowed basic color adjusting. Too basic really to be good enough so some serious improvements were needed to make JugiPaint stronger in that area:
– Two new filters have been added –  Color balance and Gradient colorize.
– All color filters now feature the “input range” selector where the user can precisely define ranges of affected pixels in hue/saturation/lightness color space.
– All color filters can now be used as “adjusting layers” (like in Photoshop, essential for multi-layered artwork).

Here are two images which show what can be achieved with the new color adjusting tools in JugiPaint.

The first image is an original image and the second has adjusted colors. No masks were used for adjusting layers – all color changes were made with six hue/saturation adjusting layers with different blending modes and opacity at the top of original image.

There were some other new features added to JugiPaint (various selecting sub-tools, including select with color range) and some are still planned for the forthcoming release version. Watch this blog for further news about the development  progress of JugiPaint.