Grafx2 pipette shorthand
Printed From: Pixel Joint
Category: The Lounge
Forum Name: Resources and Support
Forum Discription: Help your fellow pixel artists out with links to good tutorials, other forums, software, fonts, etc. Bugs and support issues should go here as well.
URL: https://pixeljoint.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=26439
Printed Date: 10 September 2025 at 10:26pm
Topic: Grafx2 pipette shorthand
Posted By: kartonnnyi
Subject: Grafx2 pipette shorthand
Date Posted: 18 October 2018 at 9:49am
So, i've been using grafx2 for quite a while until i started using aseprite. i still come back to grafx2 because it has some really useful tools that aseprite doesn't have, but there's a some kind of a hotkey issue in grafx2..
So, my question, basically. Is it possible to shortcut to tools as long as you hold the key/combo?
In aseprite, for example alt+click picks a colour. If you try to make alt+click a shortcut for pipette tool in grafx2, pressing a shortcut would just change the tool.
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Replies:
Posted By: DawnBringer
Date Posted: 18 October 2018 at 10:58am
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Why would you need/want to?
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Posted By: kartonnnyi
Date Posted: 18 October 2018 at 11:07am
i just pick colours right from the picture most of the time, so altclicking is a more convenient option for me at least. I would stick to aseprite because i got too used to it, grafx2 just has many useful tools that come in handy sometimes
If it is not possible, that's just fine.
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Posted By: DawnBringer
Date Posted: 18 October 2018 at 11:43am
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I don't think I understand you, the "HOLD" thing trips me up. There's a shortcut to the pipette (you can set any shortkeys via help/help), did you miss that or is one key-click+mouse-click too cumbersome?
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Posted By: kartonnnyi
Date Posted: 18 October 2018 at 12:09pm
ah, i'm sorry to be so unclear.
Yeah, that is cumbersome. in different apps you don't need to switch your pencil to pipette. if you click somewhere holding the alt key (or any other, if you prefer) the colour you clicked becomes the colour you're going to draw with.
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Posted By: DawnBringer
Date Posted: 18 October 2018 at 12:55pm
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So, clicking a key when you need it rather than holding it down is too hard!? You should have been around when we drew C64-pictures with a joystick! :D
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Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 18 October 2018 at 2:40pm
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Being better than a bad UI doesn't mean this UI couldn't be improved xP
Holding down Alt to colour-pick is very useful since it returns you to whatever tool you were using, saving a good deal of hand movement in the long run, since switching between [current tool] and the colour picker makes up a large proportion of total tool changes in most workflows.
It also eases the cognitive load of remembering which tool you were using prior to needing to pick a colour, which is very nice when you're "in the zone". With alt-to-colourpick, it's a lot easier to just focus on what you're drawing, rather than on the tools you're using.
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Posted By: DawnBringer
Date Posted: 18 October 2018 at 2:46pm
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GrafX2 does return you to the current tool after using the colorpicker. And it only takes one keystroke to activate it.
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Posted By: kartonnnyi
Date Posted: 19 October 2018 at 1:35am
But hey, when you need to pan the picture you just hold spacebar and drag picture with a mouse. When you release the key, you get your previous tool back
Can the same type of shortcut be binded to pipette tool?
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Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 19 October 2018 at 4:48am
The panning was a very very special case to handle, sorry I found no way to generalize it for "any" shortcut.
If you want to test a little, you can try setting the following options :
- EDITING / Right click colorpick:YES
- INPUT / Key to swap buttons : Alt
You can then hold ALT and click to pick color.
Hovever you lose the right button as a BG pen color (or special function depending on drawing mode), since right mouse button is now also an implicit colorpicker. IMO this kind of setting is more useful for tablet users who don't have a right mouse button anyway.
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Posted By: kartonnnyi
Date Posted: 19 October 2018 at 9:08am
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Thanks! I didn't know that there's an option to set right click to a colorpick. however, yeah that gets somewhat awkward if you have to sacrifice your right mouse button. I guess i'll stick with usual way to switch tools.
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Posted By: O_MEG_A
Date Posted: 09 November 2018 at 11:20am
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Originally posted by DawnBringer
GrafX2 does return you to the current tool after using the colorpicker. And it only takes one keystroke to activate it.
Hello and thanks for the information, Yet I wonder to know is there a way to select bunch of pixels with similar color in an image in grafx2? If yes then how?
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Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 15 November 2018 at 4:30am
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If you mean a magic wand with >zero tolerance, there is really no equivalent, as there's no concept of selected pixels anyway. The closest idea would be to use a flood-fill algorithm to determine the enclosing shape, and create a brush from it (Assuming it's useful for you to obtain this shape as a brush). This can be done in Lua script.
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Posted By: eishiya
Date Posted: 15 November 2018 at 6:36am
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If your goal is to merge similar colours, then doing so in the palette would probably be easier, it'll replace the colours automatically.
(I'm not sure how palette management in grafx2 works, but I assume that it'll either do it automatically, or require applying the new palette, which is the same but with one extra step.)
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Posted By: DawnBringer
Date Posted: 15 November 2018 at 7:09am
@o_meg
So what is it you want to do with this "selection"?
Yrizoud & eishiya covered most options. My Toolbox has scripts for finding close colors, remove/replace similar colors and brush-filling by colordistance. But I think a function for "floodfill-replace pixels given a specific color-distance tolerance" is missing, but it should be easy enough to implement...if that's what you're after?
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Posted By: NancyGold
Date Posted: 15 November 2018 at 11:20am
Originally posted by DawnBringer
So, clicking a key when you need it rather than holding it down is too hard!? You should have been around when we drew C64-pictures with a joystick! :D Most older games art was drawn on a grid paper and then hardcoded as bitplanes. The actual revolution happened when EA's DPaint appeared. That was when EA were still good guys. And DPaint had nice UI, but unfortunately no layers, otherwise people would be using it even today, because DPaint has features most these new programs, like Aseprite, are missing.
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Posted By: yrizoud
Date Posted: 16 November 2018 at 3:14am
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@eishiya : I think it may be his general need, but I understand that sometimes you need to apply / test a change locally : a color merging that works fine for one part of image may be very wrong elsewhere. A step of manually reduction (posterization?) of some parts of image may also make any future auto-reduction give better results.
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