Introduction

The Image Editor is where you can view/edit 2D assets like images or textures.

Image Editor with a test grid texture.

Toolbar

Sample Tool

Used to sample a pixel’s color from anywhere within Blender.

Sample Size

The dimensions of the square used to sample underlying pixels. If larger than 1 the resulting sample is an average of all underlying pixels.

Annotate

See Annotations for more information.

Header

Menus

View

Tools for controlling how the content is displayed in the editor. See Navigating.

Image

New

Creates a new Generated Image.

Open

Load image from a file.

Open Cache Render

Load the current scene’s render layers from disk cache, if available. This can be used to save RAM while rendering because the render layers do not have to be saved in RAM. This can also be used to recover some information from a fail render. For this to work, Save Buffers must be enabled.

Replace

Replaces the current image throughout the blend-file with another image.

Reload

Reload the image from the file on disk.

Edit Externally

Using the Edit Externally tool Blender will open an external image editor, as specified in the Preferences and load in the image to be edited.

Save

Save the image, if the image is already a file Alt-S.

Save As

Save the (rendered) image in a separate file Shift-S or you want to save it under a different name.

Save a Copy

Using Save as Copy will save the file to a specified name, but will keep the old one open in the Image editor.

Save All Images

Save all modified images. Packed images will be repacked.

Invert

Invert Image Colors

Invert the colors of an image.

Invert Channel

Red, Green, Blue, Alpha

Resize

Adjust the image size in pixels.

Pack

Packs the image into the blend-file. See Packed Data.

Unpack

Unpack the image to disk.

Important

Rendered images are not automatically saved, they have to be saved to disk manually.

Controls

Image

A data-block menu used for selecting images. When an image has been loaded or created in the Image editor, the Image panel appears in the Sidebar region. See Image Settings.

• Render Result
• Viewer Node

Modes

View

Displays Images.

Paint

Texture Paint.

Mask

Masking.

Multi-Layer

When a rendered image is displayed in the Image Editor, several new menu items become available.

Slot

You can save successive renders into the render buffer by selecting a new slot before rendering. If an image has been rendered to a slot, it can be viewed by selecting that slot. Empty slots appear as blank grids in the Image editor. Use the J and Alt-J to cycle forwards and backwards through saved renders. The Slot Name field in the Display Panel allows you to rename a slot.

View Layer

If you are using View Layers, use this menu to select which layer is displayed.

Render Pass

If you are using Render Passes, use this menu to select which pass is displayed.

Display Channels

In the dropdown menu on the right, the displayed channels can be selected.

Color and Alpha

Replaces transparent pixels with background checkerboard, denoting the alpha channel.

Color

Display the colored image, without alpha channel.

Alpha

Displays the Alpha channel a grayscale image. White areas are opaque, black areas have an alpha of 0.

Z-Buffer

Display the depth from the camera, from Clip Start to Clip End, as specified in the Camera settings.

Red, Green, Blue

Single Color Channel visualized as a grayscale image.

Main View

When LMB / RMB dragging mouse the color under the cursor is shown in the footer as well the cursor position and the color values in the RGBA, HSV and Luminance color space.

Sidebar Region

Tool

Displays the settings of the active tool.

Image

Tools for working with images, see Image Settings.

View Tab

Controls display options, see View Tab.