Tool options reference

Every option in the Tool Options bar, tool by tool, with its range, its default and whether it is remembered between sessions.

The Tool Options bar sits under the menu bar and changes with the active tool. It is a fixed-height strip: it does not resize or dock elsewhere. When a tool has more options than the window is wide enough to hold, what does not fit moves into a menu at the end of the bar, dropping out from the right, and comes back out the moment there is room for it again.

Every bar follows the same shape. Values you adjust while working sit out in the open as compact boxes, each one sized to the number it has to show rather than to a fixed width, so a two-digit field is not as wide as a six-character one. Toggles are icon squares with their names in the tooltip. Related controls are grouped between thin dividers, and an amount always sits with the buttons that use it.

What does not fit goes into that menu, and nothing else does. There is no curated drawer of set-once settings: on a wide enough window every option a tool has is out on the bar, and the chevron does not appear at all. Its tooltip counts what is hidden behind it, so you can tell at a glance whether anything is out of sight.

Options marked Yes in the Remembered column are written to the settings file when you close Celas Studio and come back on the next launch. The brush Size, Opacity and Flow belong to the brush preset instead, and travel with the brush set. See Settings persistence for the full picture.

With a Shape layer selected, the Move, Pen, Node, Brush, Pencil and shape tool bars also carry the layer's fill and stroke swatches and its stroke width, so a quick restyle needs no trip to the Properties panel. See Fill and stroke.

Move#

Sub Layer only appears while Auto Select is on. The bar also carries the four boolean operations: Union, Subtract, Intersect and XOR. With two or more layers selected they build a boolean group from the selection; with one piece of a boolean group selected they set that piece's own operation; with neither they are greyed out rather than hidden, so the row never reflows as you click around. With the group itself selected the four give way to a single Boolean switch. Blend Radius, Elasticity and Blend Colors join them whenever a boolean group or one of its pieces is selected, and a selected piece adds its Blend Weight. See Boolean and liquid shapes.

Transform#

While a pixel selection is up on a Raster Cells or Pixel layer, the Move and Transform bars add Anti-alias, Flip Horizontal, Flip Vertical, Apply and Cancel, then W and H as percentages, Rotation, and Skew X from -85 to 85 degrees. The fields grey out once the box is no longer a parallelogram. Center Pivot, Separately, Lock Children and Show Anchor grey out while the pixels own the transform.

Pen#

The mode pill is hidden on a mesh layer, where Line Mode and Connect / Remove take its place. With a shape selected the bar also carries the six curve buttons shared with the Node tool: Split Curve, Break Curve, Close Path, Simplify, Join Curves and Reverse.

Node#

To Line and To Curve sit with the curve buttons and act on the segments between two or more selected neighbouring points.

Weld Vertices, Join Curves, Unweld Vertex and Convert to Curves appear only when they apply: two or more selected vertices, two open endpoints, a vertex that already has a weld, and a vertex with a corner radius above zero.

Pencil#

With a pen, Size is the line width at full pressure, and a lighter touch draws thinner. Anti-alias is one shared setting: changing it here changes it for the Brush, the Pen and the shape tools too. It only affects paint layers. The stroke-brush swatch is on the Pen, Node and Shapes bars as well, and it both draws the next line brushed and converts a shape you already have selected.

Eyedropper, Hand, Rotate View and Zoom#

The Eyedropper bar ends with the hint Click: Fill | Shift+Click: Stroke. The Hand, Rotate View and Zoom tools have no options at all, so their bar stays empty.

Gradient#

None and Solid leave the tool inert, so they deliberately do not survive a restart: coming back to a dead tool with nothing on screen to explain it is worse than losing the setting. Solid also hides the five stop operations and Extend, since two stops locked to the same colour have nothing to reorder or extend.

Picking a type on a shape that has no gradient yet creates one from the stops the strip is showing, and the choice is applied to every editable vector shape in the selection. Switching between kinds keeps the geometry each kind already had rather than resetting the handles. The step is undoable and auto-keys the style channel.

Shape tools#

With a shape selected, dragging Width or any of the shape's own settings edits that shape and lands as one undo step per drag. With nothing selected they only set the values for the next shape you draw, and are not undoable. The full list of each shape's settings, with ranges and defaults, is on the Shape tools page.

Line#

Bone#

Bone Type: Static, Move and Reparent are mutually exclusive: turning one on clears the other two. Snap is independent. Branch Switch appears only when the selected Stretched bone has at least two Stretched child bones, or is already a switch. A grey hint at the end of the bar tells you what a click and a drag will do in the current combination.

Bone Bind#

The bar also carries Bind, Unbind, Auto Weight, Link Layer (which becomes Unlink for a linked layer) and Mirror Weights. Weight Area appears only while a bone is selected, and edits every selected bone at once. The four painting controls appear only while Weight Paint is on; with it off you get the hint Click bone, select vertices, then Bind/Unbind. Every one of these is Edit mode only and shows as unavailable in Animate mode, where posing is what the rig is for.

Camera#

Depth of Field updates the canvas live and writes a keyframe on release when auto-key is armed; Reset sets it to 0 the same way. There is no zoom slider here: Zoom is set from the Properties panel, and it is keyframeable, with its own timeline track and graph curve. Camera dolly lives on the camera Position Z channel.

Brush and Eraser#

The Eraser tool shares this bar. Its Eraser toggle is hidden, because erasing is what the tool does, and so are Draw Into and New Layer: an eraser cuts into what is already there and never creates a layer, so both would name a decision the tool does not make. Streamline, Smooth, Pen Pressure and Symmetry are global, so they stay put when you change presets; the rest belong to the brush and travel with it. Hardness and every other preset parameter live in Brush Studio rather than being repeated here. Blend Mode is the one exception: the Brush shows it on this bar too.

Fill#

With Contiguous off the bucket fills every similar-coloured pixel in the cell, connected or not, and Gap is greyed out while it is off: a fill that ignores connectivity has no edges to bridge. Output only appears on a Shape or Vector Cells layer, where there is a choice to make; a paint layer target cannot hold a shape. Expand mode is live only while Expand is positive, since it governs the shape of the growth.

Marquee and Magic Wand#

These two build the same pixel selection, so Mode and the Expand, Inset, Feather, Invert and Deselect block are shared by both bars.

Mode is a dropdown rather than a four-segment pill: the pill cost about four times the width, and the bar has to survive on a small screen without pushing later controls off the end. A dropdown shows one word that is easy to read past, so any mode other than Replace draws an accent line under the control. Subtracting from nothing and intersecting with nothing both leave an empty selection, and a latched mode is the one way these tools can look broken.

Mode is one setting shared by both tools: a combine mode belongs to the selection rather than to one tool, so choosing Add once keeps applying whichever of the two you pick up next. Holding Shift, Alt or Shift+Alt overrides it for a single click or drag.

The amount always sits with the buttons that use it. Expand and Inset flank their shared number, one on each side, so it can only belong to them and the pair reads as one control with two directions; those two are icons rather than words, because flanking a number all they have to carry is direction. Feather has one direction, so its amount follows its button. Invert and Deselect take no amount at all and sit behind their own divider, out of reach of the eye trying to pair a button with the nearest field.

Both amounts are narrow fields you can also scrub by dragging sideways. Only the buttons need a live selection; the amounts stay editable so you can dial them in first.

Expand, Inset, Feather, Invert and Deselect are greyed out until a pixel selection exists. With Shape set to Polygon a hint appears: double-click or Enter closes the outline, Esc cancels it.

Smudge#

Tip, Tip Angle, Angle Jitter, Scatter and Direction Follow live in the tip popup. The popup, along with Size and Mix, is shown only on a Raster Cells or Pixel layer, where the tool runs the brush engine; on vector and mesh artwork it is a plain radius magnet, and Falloff appears there instead. Strength is the one slider both paths share.

Blur, Sharpen, Dodge, Burn and Clone replace the tip popup, Size and Mix with their own Size and Strength, shared by all five. Clone adds the hint Source: Alt+click.

Knife#

Split cuts straight through the shape; Trim cuts only up to the intersections it crosses. On a pixel drawing the knife cuts along the line as well, on any brush, scattered and textured ones included.