Flare - Photo Editor 26.7 for Windows is out. Copies from this site offer it through Help › Check for Updates…, and the Windows page has the new installer and ZIPs. This is the biggest release since the first one: new tools, new adjustments, new palettes and a long list of refinements.
New tools
- Magnetic Lasso, next to the Lasso and the Polygonal Lasso: the outline snaps to the edges as you move, with Width, Contrast and Frequency in the options bar.
- Freeform Pen and Curvature Pen: draw a path by hand and get smooth Bézier curves, or click points and let the curve flow through them.
- Warp (Edit › Transform) with a mesh of control points and fifteen ready-made styles.
- A live Gradient: dragging makes a gradient fill layer you can keep editing on the canvas — handles, color stops and midpoints — with presets from the Gradients palette. The classic gradient is still one click away.
- Refine Hair in Refine Edge and Refine Mask, and Isolate Background that runs on your PC.
Adjustments
- Auto Tone, Auto Contrast and Auto Color; Shadows/Highlights, also as an adjustment layer; Match Color and Replace Color.
- Posterize and Threshold as adjustment layers, Levels with the Alt threshold preview, and Edit › Fade after a filter or an adjustment.
- Hue/Saturation edits each of the six color ranges, with draggable markers on the color bar.
- View › Proof Setup, Proof Colors and Gamut Warning, to see how a picture will print.
Layers
- Select several layers and move them, nudge them with the arrow keys or transform them together; Auto-Select, Link Layers, Arrange › Reverse, Matting and a mask from transparency.
- Copy layers from one document to another.
- Layer Style gains Pattern Overlay and Global Light (Layer › Global Light… and Scale Effects…).
- Stack Mode and File › Scripts › Load Files into Stack, with Mean, Median and the other statistics.
Palettes and workspace
- The Properties palette follows the active layer: text, shapes, masks and adjustments in one place.
- The Glyphs palette shows every character of a font; a double-click inserts it in the text you are typing.
- History snapshots: keep a state of the document and go back to it in one step.
- Ready-made workspaces (Essentials, Photography, Painting, Graphic and Web) and Restore Previous Layout; palettes never open on top of each other.
Brushes, selections, shapes and text
- Brushes: Angle and Roundness on every tip, Symmetry with an axis, and pen pressure from the first touch.
- Selections: New, Add, Subtract and Intersect in the options bar, the Magic Wand edge with Refine Edge, and the eyedroppers of Color Range.
- Shapes and Free Transform: Corner Radius after drawing, Smart Guides, Snap To Guides and Snap To Grid; ✓ and ✕ in the options bar while transforming or placing.
- Text: Character settings for the whole layer, right-to-left text, sizes up to 1296 pt, and Area Type clipped to its box.
- Crop reshapes the canvas, New Document has presets, Define Pattern is one command, and Search Commands has its magnifier in the title bar.
PSD files
- Layer Style in full (multiple instances, contours, textures, gradients with many stops), native smart filters, type layers, patterns, vector masks, Blend If per channel and compressed channels.
- 32-bit and Duotone files open.
Fixes and changes
- Overlapping gradients, Clear and Cut on transparent layers, Stroke, Merge, Liquify, sharper text and Align now behave as expected.
- A canvas crash on some graphics cards is fixed.
- The AI pane is gone from Preferences, and Paste Into, Paste Behind, Paste In Front and Paste In Back left the Edit menu.
Keep the reports coming through Help › Send Feedback… or on Discord.