ArcBrush 1.6 brings a pressure-sensitive brush engine to its node-based image editor

SEATTLE, USA, August 25, 2026: ArcBrush today released version 1.6, rebuilding painting around a full brush engine and adding new nodes, comparison tools, and workflow features across the app. The app remains free for personal use, with a one-time $49 license for commercial work.

ArcBrush is a native image editor for Windows, macOS, and Linux built around a node graph instead of a layer stack. Every operation stays editable, and one source image can fan out into every color variant, size, and format in a single export. Version 1.5 took that pipeline into color-managed 32-bit float. Version 1.6 makes painting just as non-destructive as the rest of the graph.

Brush engine. Paint, Mask Paint, and Clone Stamp share one current brush, edited in a new Brush Studio and organized in a Brush Library with presets, categories, and shareable brush packs. Brushes respond to pen pressure and tilt (Windows and macOS), switch to the eraser tip automatically, and support image-based tips, grain textures, a built-in seamless Grain Generator, color dynamics, stroke stabilization, and per-brush blend modes. 29 built-in brushes ship across seven categories, and Photoshop (.abr) and GIMP (.gbr) brush files import through a review screen that shows how faithfully each one carried over. Because ArcBrush stores strokes rather than pixels, strokes already painted can be restyled with a different brush after the fact. A Swatches panel, bundled color libraries, a Painting workspace, and a Tablet Diagnostics window round out the painting release.

New and expanded nodes. Puppet Warp poses artwork by dragging pins on an auto-generated mesh, with live preview. Inspect reports everything about an image: size, channels, bit depth, statistics, color space, and source file, plus NaN and overbright detection in float documents. Inpaint runs on a new engine that rebuilds masked areas from texture and structure across the whole image, a large quality jump on brickwork, foliage, skies, and sand. Layer nodes gain per-layer transforms, click-to-select, and locking; Transform can skew; Crop can target an exact size; and Vignette, Mask From Image, Normal Map, Dither, Mask Refine, Edge Detect, Resize, Roto, and SVG Import all gain new controls.

Compare and analyze. A Compare mode puts any two viewer slots side by side with wipes, a split view, or a timed flicker, reading out both pixel values under the cursor. Waveform Luma and RGB Parade scopes join the Histogram.

Workflow. Every keyboard command is remappable, including a key to drop any node type at the pointer, and shortcut sets export to a file. A Variables panel defines named tokens for export and import paths. Node search is ranked, any preset can become a node type’s default, any panel maximizes with one key, and numeric fields accept arithmetic. Project files now save deterministically, so they diff cleanly in version control.

“Painting in an image editor usually means committing: once the stroke is down it’s pixels, and the brush that made it is gone,” said Albert Omoss, the independent developer behind ArcBrush. “In ArcBrush a stroke is data on a node in a live graph. I wanted painting to feel like a real tablet app, with pressure, tilt, and proper brushes, without giving up the part that makes ArcBrush worth using: you can go back and change any decision.”

ArcBrush 1.6 is available today at arcbrush.com.

Availability and details

• Windows 10/11, macOS 12+ (Apple Silicon), and Linux (Ubuntu 22.04+, AppImage). Native C++, no web runtime.
• Free for personal and non-commercial use. ArcBrush Pro is a one-time $49 license for commercial use, with a 14-day trial that needs no card.
• Pen pressure, tilt, and automatic eraser switching on Windows and macOS; Linux pen input is planned.
• Color management through OpenColorIO with a bundled ACES 2.0 configuration and a 32-bit float mode.
• Imports PNG, TIFF, OpenEXR, SVG, and common 8-bit formats; exports 16-bit PNG and TIFF and OpenEXR (Pro).
• No generative AI, no credits, no subscription. 99 nodes.