New Things:

• New color picker! Hold down the option key (while in the canvas) when using the brush, pencil, gradient, or fill tools, and you’ll get a fancy new loupe to select a color from anywhere on the screen (just click to pick your color). You can also scroll in and out with your scroll wheel (with shift+option down) to change how far in the loupe zooms. And finally if you’d like to get finer control when choosing your color, click and drag the mouse and let up when you’ve chosen your color. (You can also use the arrow keys to move it by single pixel increments). This is amazing. And if your hands are on the keyboard instead of mouse, you can use the keyboard shortcut Control-C to pick a color out.

• Two new dithering filters under Color Adjustment: “1Bit” which will turn your layer in a (seemingly) one bit, black and white image. As well as “Dither”, which is a filter which lets you choose from four different types of dithers: Atkinson (old school Mac OS), Floyd Steinberg, Gaussian Blue, and Ordered Reproducible.

• Color profile, bit depth, and DPI of an image are now listed in the Metadata window.

• New “Spacing” option in the “Arrange Shapes in a Circle” shape processor. A setting of 0 will mean shapes are auto-spaced around the circle evenly. Any other value between 1-360 is the distance (as an angle) between shapes. This means that shapes can either not make it all the way around the circle, or even go around multiple times. Bonus- combine this with the Translate shape process to make shapes do a loop across your canvas.

• Layer alignment options: Select multiple layers, and use the various options under Layer ▸ Rotate and Transform ▸ Align to have edges line up or center in canvas, or so on. Hold down the option key for more menu items.

• The Layer ▸ Rotate and Transform ▸ Rotate 90° layer menu items now work on a selection.

Changes:

• Tightened up some colorspace issues when using the system color loupe from the color panel.

• The return of no working pixel processing profile (WPPP for short?) as default. As part of the color profile overhaul, Acorn 5.4 changed the default WPPP to Linear Light and in while this is awesome for doing things with brushes and most other alpha blending scenarios, it probably wasn’t the right choice for general webby use and setting colors in general. It also didn’t match what most other image editors did as well. So in Acorn 5.5, we’re changing it back.

• Rolled back the bits from 5.4 where shape layers would draw in a linear RGB colorspace if your document was set to run pixels through a linear colorspace as well.

• Removed the View ▸ Select Color menu item, in favor of the Edit ▸ Pick Color menu item. Why didn’t anyone notice that we had two different menu items for the same thing till now?

• New code for matching your image’s color space to the display color space. It’s fancy.

• Changed the minimum radius of the “Arrange Shapes in a Circle” processor to 0. You can now use this processor to stack all your shapes into a single pile.

• The “Monitor Resolution” preset now does the right thing for retina displays.

• QOL improvements for the gradient palette: Single click to select and change the color of a color stop. Better drawing and handling of the gradient palette color handles. In addition, if a color handle has the focus of the color palette, it will now draw a little highlight on top of the handle letting you know this.

• It is no longer to move layers into or out of locked group layers via the layers list.

• Pressing the fx button in the tool palette will now toggle showing the filter sheet if there aren’t already filters on the current layer.

Bug Fixes:

• Fixed some snapping issues when moving selected pixels around the canvas.

• Fixed a bug where changing the bounds of a rotated box (or text area) would put it in a funky location.

• Tightened up the trim bounds for shape layers.

• Fixed an issue where filter descriptions weren’t showing up in the filter browser.

• Web export will now remember your last “Embed color profile” setting.

• Fixed a problem where swapping the front and back colors with the fill tool selected would cause both color wells to get the same color.

• Fixed a bug where the ‘bitmap layers’ AppleScript property was returning more than just bitmap layers.

• Fixed a bug where rasterizing a shape layer with selected shapes could cause incorrect drawing.

• Fixed a bug where nearest neighbor scaling would clip off an edge of pixels when they were next to a transparent area.

• Fixed a problem where text would sometimes smear on the canvas when the text box it was in was too small to contain the text.

• Fixed a bug where filters wouldn’t be applied to selections if the filter palette wasn’t already open.

• Fixed a bug where you couldn’t use the pencil toll to put a tiny little stamp at 0,0.