Painterly flow guide

Help

Short answers to what goes wrong most often.

The frame says the effect needs WebGL

Painterly flow draws with WebGL 2 and needs the graphics card to store fine-grained numbers in its working images. This browser has one of those turned off or missing. Turn on the browser's graphics acceleration, update it, or try another current browser.

Tapping the picture does nothing

A run only plays while B paints in is on. It starts on, and presets and Reset keep it on; if you turned it off, turn it on under Sliders and tap again. A tap during a run is also ignored; wait for it to finish, or press Replay. A run only starts from the main mouse button or a finger.

The picture looks unpainted

Check that Paint amount is above 0; at 0 you see the plain picture. A small Brush size or a short Stroke length also paints very lightly.

The run goes the wrong way

After each finished run the direction flips, so the pictures swap turns: A into B, then B into A. Tap or press Replay once more to go the other way. Reset and replacing picture A set it back to A into B.

My picture looks stretched

The frame takes the shape of picture A, and picture B is stretched to that shape. Crop both pictures to the same shape first. Replacing A changes the frame's shape; replacing B does not.

My picture did not change

A file the browser cannot open as an image is skipped without a message. Try a JPEG, PNG or WebP copy of it. See JPEG, PNG and WebP.

It is slow, or the page struggles with a big photo

Each picture goes to the graphics card at its full size, so a very large photo takes more memory; use a smaller copy on a phone or an older computer. The painting itself always works on 1280 pixels along the long side. Oil reads about twice as many nearby pixels as Comb, so Comb is the lighter choice on a slow device; Brush size does not change the cost.

Record video did nothing

The line under the buttons says why: some browsers cannot record a canvas, or offer no video format the page can use. Try a current Chrome, Edge or Firefox.

Where do my pictures go?

Nowhere. They are opened in your browser and drawn on your graphics card. Nothing is uploaded. The pictures you add stay on this device, in this browser, so the other lab tools can open them too; × on a picture removes it.

Are there keyboard shortcuts?

The tool has none of its own. Anywhere in the lab, Ctrl K, or Cmd K on a Mac, opens the list of all tools.

On a phone

It works with a finger: with B paints in on, tap the picture to start a run. The controls sit in a bar at the bottom of the screen; tap the bar to open them.