We’ve rolled out a fresh batch of improvements in our August release. Keep reading to see what’s new!

Brush & Layers UI improvements

We’re working to make the Magma interface more accessible, especially for new users. We want you to be able to easily invite friends of any experience level and have a great time together in Magma!

We've received a lot of inquiries about the Pen Pressure setting, with some users not realizing it’s already supported for properties like Brush Size or Flow. To make this clearer, we’ve replaced the previously empty checkbox with a brand new toggle button, making it easier to see which brush properties can be mapped to the pen pressure of your tablet:

Recently, we added a way to “solo” the current layer, giving you more visibility into what you’re working on. In this release, we’re expanding this functionality by adding the option to the right-click the context menu in the layer panel. That way, you can easily single out any given layer, rather than just the one you’re currently drawing on:

Reference Window

We’ve also made several improvements to the beloved Reference Window feature.

You can now use the new “Open reference image” button to go to the canvas containing the image and make any necessary adjustments:

Once you finish the edits, you can use the new “Refresh image” option to load the latest state of the reference canvas and see the changes reflected in your reference window:

We hope this workflow will help you use the Reference Window more effectively.

Additionally, we’ve improved the performance of the Reference Window on mobile devices, with updates like adding the missing resize handle.

The Reference Window feature is available as part of our Blaze plan, and you can test it out with our free 7-day trial. Read more about it here.

Security improvements & Bug fixes

Some of you pointed out a permissions issue in sequences located in Artspaces, where users without editing rights were still able to link their own canvas to the sequence. This led to potential issues where the sequence creator couldn’t control who had access to modify it. In this release, we’ve closed this loophole, so users will now require the Change entities permission to add canvases to sequences in that Artspace.

We’ve also added several other fixes, with the most notable being:

• Fixed issues with storage recalculation

• Fixed unexpected crop tool behavior (in some cases, the crop area size was changing to 100px x 100px when opening the crop tool)

• Added a limit to how much the crop area can be moved

Japanese Language Support

Finally, in an effort to make Magma accessible to more artists around the world, we launched a fully translated Japanese version of our platform in June. Since then, we’ve been improving our translation system and adding missing translations in each release.

While we’ve received overwhelmingly positive feedback, some users found it difficult to figure out which of our fonts support Japanese characters. With this release, we’ve clearly marked all fonts available in Japanese as 日本語:

P.S. We have plans to expand to other languages as well in the future. If you’d like to have Magma translated into your language and are willing to help with translations, feel free to get in touch with our team!

That’s all in this release — see you next month!