Paint with body.

The layers panel

Layers with height.

Every layer carries its own relief, so paint on a layer can blend into the stack beneath it, occlude it, or sit on top. Around that: 28 blend modes, 27 non-destructive adjustment layers with live preview, groups, masks and clipping, all composited on the GPU with thumbnails that update as you paint. Flattening can preserve height, so a flattened painting still responds to light.

• 28 blend modesThe 25 standard modes, Passthrough for groups, and two of Sable's own: Glaze and Spectral Glaze.
• 27 adjustment layersAll non-destructive: Curves, Levels, HSL, Gradient Map, Color Lookup, Film Grain, Halftone, Split Toning and more, each with a live-preview editor.
• Height-aware controlsHeight Blend merges a layer into the relief below. Occlude and Sit decide whether strokes cut into the surface or ride on it.
• GroupsIsolated group blending, group masks that apply to the whole folder, and clipping masks that chain.
• ReorderingMulti-select with Ctrl/Shift, drag selections together, and hover to open folders mid-drag.
• Live GPU thumbnailsLayer and mask previews refresh every frame from video memory.
• HousekeepingInline rename, colour labels, per-layer visibility hotkeys, merge down, stamp visible, and two flattens: one keeps height and re-lighting, one bakes the lighting in.

The Glaze layer

Light goes through the paint.

A Glaze layer is a transparent film of pigment that light passes through, down to the paint beneath and back. The same glaze reads bright over light passages and deep over dark ones, and stacked coats build the way real glazes do. Glaze also behaves like liquid on the surface: it pools in the furrows of thick brushwork and thins across the ridges. Spectral Glaze mixes colour across 38 wavelength bands, so a blue glaze over a yellow ground turns green.

• Optical model, in real timeLight makes a double pass through the glaze film, computed on the GPU in linear light as you paint.
• Backing-dependent colourOne glaze reads luminous over light grounds and deep and saturated over dark ones.
• Coats that buildStacked glazes deepen nonlinearly, like thin oils laid wet-on-dry.
• PoolingGlaze settles into the relief of impasto and sheds off the ridges. Viscosity, width and falloff tune it from watery to buttery.
• ScumbleAdd scattering and the glaze becomes a semi-opaque veil that can lay light over dark. A Fineness control sets how cool and smoky it reads.
• Wet, sunk-in, oiled outModel the life of an oil glaze, from fresh oiled darks to matte sunk-in patches, and restore them with Oil Out.
• Spectral Glaze38-band spectral compositing, so stacked glazes shift hue like pigment rather than greying.
• Four dialsStrength, Wet, Pool and Scumble sit in the layers panel, each with a fine-tune popup.

Interface scale

The whole interface, at any size.

One slider scales every menu, panel, label and control at once. Lower it and the canvas gets the room; raise it and the controls grow. One slider for the whole interface.

Adjustments

Levels, curves, colour.

Three of the adjustment panels. Each works on the painting live, on the GPU: a histogram to set black and white points against, a curve you bend by hand, and hue, saturation and lightness per colour range. The full menu follows below.

Get Sable Paint

Two editions, one engine.

The free edition is the full painting engine: every brush and blend mode, no watermark, no account. It limits canvas size and layer count, and leaves filters, adjustments, text and crop to Studio, a one-time purchase.

System requirements

A graphics card is required.

Every stroke is simulated on the GPU, so the graphics card matters more than the processor. Windows needs a dedicated card. macOS needs Apple Silicon.

For 4K canvases or several documents at once: 16 GB RAM.