Pixia is a full-feature digital painting program. Pixia is one of Maruoka's labors of love. He descibes Pixia as "the dream" that people can use to create beautiful, vibrant digital artwork of all types. Pixia is an environment that's always evolving and improving so you can express your creativity fully!

Features

Tablet Pressure Support

Pixia boasts full pressure-sensitivity compatibility with today's top brands of Tablets, such as Wacom and Intuos. Now you can draw beautiful line art and paint with professional ease!

Full-Feature Layers

Paint masterfully with layers! Pixia supports over a dozen layer modes (such as Hybrid [Multiply], Lighten, Darken, Highlight, Luminosity, and Overlay) and full layer masks with advanced Alpha Channels.

Extendable Brushes

Enjoy creative painting with Pixia's built-in brushes panel. Increase or Decrease brushes sizes dynamically with Pixia's brush size scale. Flip brushes vertically and horizontally and make your own, too!

Essential Painting Tools

Experiment with painting techniques with Pixia's Color (Paintbrush), Blur, Rub, and Blur 2 tools. For those who like advanced tools, Pixia offers Dodge, Burn, Clone, Noise, and Stir as well!

Palettes and Rich Color

Define colors with Pixia's 6-tier Color Palette panel. Enjoy blending and painting with millions of full color. Use Pixia's wheel, triangle, or square and 4 additional ways to view and change color.

Photoshop PSD Support

Work on and save your artwork files as PSDs. Never worry about being unable to cross-edit your illustrations. Open them in Pixia, Photoshop, or any other PSD-compatible program!

Filters

Pixia comes with several built-in filters for your painting fun, such as Blur, Mosaic, Edge, Shadow, Sharpness, and Toning (great for comics)! Pixia has many custom filters you can download, too!

Paths and Selection Tools

Don't like to draw line art with a tablet? Use Pixia's Bezier (Paths) tools to draw smooth, crisp lines! Or use Pixia's plethora of other selection tools from traditional Circles and Squares to Line, Polygon, Free Bezier, and more.

Advanced Gradients

Apply gradients to your canvas like you've never done before! Specify color and textures in all 4 corners to make gradient designs like you've never been able to in other painting tools!

Textures

Create and apply textures to your canvas as fills – or use them as a Brush Pentip! Pixia's Partsbox is your personal Texture database. You can also define and save your own Textures!

Advanced Image Adjustments

Modify and enhance your image and line art with ease using Pixia's color and tone correction tools: Color Adjustment, Color and Contrast, Color Balance, Tone Balance, and more.

Painting Transparency

Never paint outside the lines again! Use Pixia's Transparency tool to "lock" color in where you've already painted. No more wasting time erasing out-of-bounds color, or messing with masks!

What's New

  • Resolved an issue where freehand drawing was sometimes not possible when using a pen tablet.
  • Fixed a bug where mouse pointer noise was sometimes left behind when drawing freehand. - ver. 6.62a (23 July 2024)
  • The noise that appeared when the font tool was used has been eliminated. - ver. 6.61p (11 March 2024)
  • A little adjustment of the UI for improved look. - ver. 6.61j (29 June 2023)
  • Improved overall quality and better command on fractal drawings. Also improved drawing speed for mirror drawings (both horizontal and vertical). - ver. 6.61h (22 May 2023)
  • "Leaf" is added to the Fractal. The noise that sometimes appeared while rectangle or circle selection tool was in use has been fixed. - ver. 6.61d (19 March 2023)
  • "Tree" is added to the Fractal. The program is adjusted to smoothen operation when you use a mouth and a pen at the same time. - ver. 6.61c (6 February 2023)
  • The splash image is fixed to show the correct version number. - ver. 6.61b (25 December 2022)
  • A new function is added: "Fractal" is added in Supplementary Settings. - ver. 6.61a (19 December 2022)
  • The noise that the Clone Tool created on the screen when the cursor was hovering is now eliminated. - ver. 6.51e (2 November 2022)
  • The Clone Tool is fixed; it is now functioning. - ver. 6.51d (27 October 2022)
  • The difficulty of parallel transport of a straight line is fixed. Some other small fixed, too. - ver. 6.51c (20 May 2022)
  • There was a bug that the Dropper Tool did not pick a color properly. It is now fixed. - ver. 6.51b (19 January 2022)
  • The problem that changing the pen size caused dead-lock is solved. - ver. 6.51a (7 January 2022)
  • The malfunctioning of the Magnifier (Loope) is fixed. - ver. 6.50z (6 January 2022)
  • The program is tuned for Windows 11 compatibility. The malfunction of the Selection Tool is fixed. - ver. 6.50w (17 December 2021)
  • The quality of drawn lines improved. - ver. 6.50v (9 September 2021)
  • Eraser function now works only while "E" key is pressed down. - ver. 6.50t (28 April 2021) - The installer revised; now it contains Visual C++ Redistributable files so that it no longer needs internet connection on installation when they do not exist in the target PC. (7 May 2021)
  • A bug that prevented adjustment of hue and histogram by the digitizer stylus on Windows 10 1909 and 2004 is fixed. - ver. 6.50s (28 March 2021)
  • A long-lasted problem that a part of the program does not behave the same on the recent versions of Windows 10 as they did on the earilier versions is now solved and the response of the program improved further. - ver. 6.50r (27 January 2021)
  • A bug that prevented change of layers and the problem on change of the brush size being difficult on Windows 10 ver. 1909 and later are now fixed. - ver. 6.50p (23 December 2020)
  • A problem that degraded the smoothness of pen strokes on Windows 10 ver. 2004 and 20H2 is fixed. The ripple effect noise that shows up when you move the color slider with Windows Ink on is also fixed. - ver. 6.50n (3 December 2020)
  • The quality of pen strokes has improved. - ver. 6.50m (27 September 2020)
  • The bug of the pen pressure being wrongly reflected is now fixed. When a PC equipped with Wacom AES pen system is used, rubbing with your finger is now treated as the "blur" function. - ver. 6.50k (24 May 2020)
  • The problem that the newest Wacom tablet driver sometimes mistakenly detects a pen as a mouse is now fixed. Channels of color adjustment can now be saved. - ver. 6.50h (23 April 2020)
  • The bug of Clone Brush not working properly is fixed. - ver. 6.50g (24 August 2019)
  • The program is adjusted to work better on tablet PCs. Now you have better control when you move panels and choose functions on tablet PCs. - ver. 6.50e (19 August 2019)
  • The graphics API used for Pixia is changed from OpenGL to Direct2D. Now the program is readjusted to work properly on the API. - ver. 6.50c (8 March 2019)
  • A bug that froze the program during the mouse being used for painting is fixed. The problem where the coordinates get shifted and out of position when the display magnification is set to other than 100% is also fixed. - ver. 6.04z (14 Sep. 2018)
  • The response time and the quality of drawn lines on using a pen tablet have very much improved. Also the check-box of antialiasing at the Paint tab in the supplemental toolbox which did not work now works. - ver. 6.04y (10 Sep. 2018)
  • A bug that caused a fatal error when you use the text tool is fixed. - ver. 6.04u (9 July 2018)
  • A bug that caused flickering or a fatal error in the worst case when you used the Tone Filter is fixed. - ver. 6.04t (30 May 2018)
  • A bug that caused image corruption when you edit alpha channel is fixed.
  • Specification change: left-clicking the pentip page switcher used to switch pages one by one. Now left-click skips font and 3D pen pages; right-click the switcher to switch to the font and 3D pen pages. - ver. 6.04s (5 May 2018)
  • A bug that caused a fatal error when you click Text icon before the canvas has not finished being displaed is now fixed. - ver. 6.04r (28 Apr. 2018)
  • The positional displacement of alpha channel at saving PXA is fixed. - ver. 6.03q (16 Apr. 2018)
  • Gesture function at Color Panel and Option Panel is taken off to avoid mulfunctioning. Improved pressure sensitivity and coordinate accuracy. Some Japanese texts left in EXIF window are now all translated. - ver. 6.04p (15 Apr. 2018)
  • 64bit Pixia can run simultaneously with 32bit Pixia running at the same time. - ver. 6.04n2 (14 Apr. 2018)
  • New functions are equipped: Flip Vertical, Flip Horizontal, Vertical Mirror Drawing and Horizontal Mirror Drawing. A bug that caused a corruption on saving a PXA file is fixed. Also the problem that caused unnecessary repeats of refreshing palette window is fixed. - ver. 6.04n (13 Apr. 2018)
  • The problem that caused a fatal error when Exif information is displayed is fixed. - ver. 6.04k (8 Apr. 2018)
  • Pen pressure of a pen tablet was not reflected on Windows 10 Ver. 1709, a.k.a. Fall Creators Update, while it works with no problem on previous versions of Windows 10. Now it is fixed and pressure works on Ver. 1709. - ver. 6.04j (1 Apr. 2018)
  • The selection tool bar is now permanently displayed. Previously it popped up only when you clicked on an selection icon.
  • [View] Menu has a new option added: Selection Panel. This is the panel which previously always popped up after you selected an area. Now it is suppressed since it is set to "off" by default. You can turn it on and off any time now.
  • The quality of drawn lines has improved. - ver. 6.03k (24 Mar. 2018)
  • A new setting is added: "Ignore Display Scaling" at Preferences. This fixes the scaling of text, dialogs, windows, and other items of Pixia to 100%, ignoring the Windows display setting. Those who hate the blurry appearance of the items and pictures displayed in Pixia due to the scaling set to other than 100%, try this function. - ver. 6.04f (2 Mar. 2018)
  • A bug in Pixexp that caused a fatal error is fixed. - ver. 6.04e (27 Nov. 2017)
  • A coordinate miscalculation of the function "Make Rotated Duplicate" on an image which is not square is fixed. - ver. 6.04d (23 Sep. 2017)
  • The bug that caused a fatal error on the previous version is fixed. - ver. 6.04c (14 Sep. 2017) - Revised installer uploaded: the setting button of Blur filter is fixed to function properly. - ver. 6.04c (17 Sep. 2017)
  • The speed of the function of image rotation is improved. The bugs in the "Save" function and some filters are fixed. - ver. 6.04b (13 Sep. 2017)
  • Pressure of the tablet pen can be reflected on the size of bitmap pens now. - ver. 6.03c (3 Nov. 2016)
  • Undo and Redo did not work properly since previously 64bit Pixia only used physical memory for fast speed. Now this version utilizes vertual memory for storing history files so undo and redo function correctly. - ver. 6.03a (2 Sep. 2016)
  • A revised installer containing PNG save module is uploaded. (20 Sep. 2016)
  • 64 bit version of Pixia only had WIA interface for scanners and cameras since TWAIN was originally designed for 32bit, but this version is now capable of utilizing TWAIN interface as well as WIA. Also fixed is a bug where dragging with SHIFT key down did not constrain proportions when expanding/shrinking an image or a selection. - ver. 6.02u (20 Aug. 2016)
  • The image browser, Pixexp, which was not working has been fixed. - The installer is replaced with a new one but the version number of Pixia stays the same.(23 Aug. 2016)
  • A file for Pixexp was missing so it caused a fatal error; a revised installer with the file is uploaded. (26 Aug. 2016)
  • The side switch of the tablet pen did not function as the alternative of right button of the mouse. Now it does. - ver. 6.02s (16 Jun. 2016)
  • Bugs found in the Selection Tool and Magnifier Tool have been fixed. (Certain procedure caused a fatal error.) - ver. 6.02r (15 Jun. 2016)
  • A bug found in the tablet setting has been fixed. (A certain combination of procedure caused a fatal error.) - ver. 6.02q (14 Apr. 2016)
  • Filters increased. Some functions are tuned for faster speed (x1.5 ~ 3): Color Adjustment, Tone Balance, Brightness and Contrast, Automatic Adjustment, Color Balance. If you choose "Fast" at Anti-Alias of Advanced Option in Preference dialog, the speed of brush stroke can now be as fast as that of Pixia ver. 4. A bug that Undo function of filter did not work is fixed. - ver. 6.02p (9 Apr. 2016)
  • A bug found in the magnifier tool to cause a fatal error is fixed. - ver. 6.02m (2 Apr. 2016)
  • Uploaded is a revised installer containing Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 Redistributable Package (x64). (28 Mar. 2016)
  • The program is redesigned to optimize multi core processors. Now this version works three times as fast as previous versions. (This version requires Microsoft Visual C++ 2013 (x64) runtime. If you encounter an error message saying "Vcom120.dll is missing", please download the x64 version of VC++2013 runtime file and install it.) - ver. 6.02j (23 Mar. 2016)
  • The program has become compatible with Wacom's new technology, Active ES. - ver. 6.02h (22 Feb. 2016)
  • The Selection tools have been tuned to work faster, and now new functions are added: Mirror Drawings (Horizontal and Vertical) under Paint menu. - ver. 6.02f (3 Feb., 2016)
  • Now 64 bit version of Pixia is out. It runs only on 64 bit environment of Windows 8 / 8.1 / 10 so cannot be installed on Windows 7 or any 32bit versions of Windows, but it operates much faster than 32bit Pixia.
  • This is, however, a sort of experiment, since it does not contain all the filters 32bit Pixia has, nor does TWAIN work properly yet.
  • Also, please note that 32bit filters will not work with this 64bit program, so importing the filters from 32bit Pixia may lead to malfunctioning. (17 Oct. 2015)
  • It has been found that the file set lacked one important file without which saving pxa format caused a fatal error. A new installer with the file equipped has bee uploaded. (2 Dec. 2015)