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Chromatic Crucible: Slate

A native Android layer-based image editing suite built with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose in Material 3 design.

Graphics AGPL-3.0 Kotlin / Compose MVP Status

Overview

Chromatic Crucible: Slate is the native mobile Android counterpart to the flagship desktop image editing suite, Chromatic Crucible. Engineered in Kotlin with Jetpack Compose and Material 3 design principles, Slate brings professional layer-based raster editing, selection tools, and custom brush rendering to mobile tablets and phones.

Built with performance and modern Android storage standards in mind, Slate incorporates Hilt dependency injection, Room database persistence for project metadata, and multi-threaded image processing routines.

Key Features

Multi-Layer Compositing Engine

  • Layer Stack Management: Create, reorder, hide, merge, and delete raster layers with real-time composite previews.
  • Blend Modes & Transparency: Supports full per-layer opacity sliders and blend modes including Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, and Color Dodge.

Selection Tools & Mask Algebra

  • Versatile Toolset: Includes rectangular, elliptical, and freehand lasso selection tools.
  • Selection Mask Algebra: Perform mathematical mask operations including selection expansion (grow), contraction (shrink), edge smoothing (feathering), and inversion.

Customizable Brush Engine & Filters

  • Dynamic Brush Controls: Adjustable radius (1-100px), hardness (0-100%), opacity, and flow controls with anti-aliased stroke rendering.
  • Preset Library: Pre-configured brush presets including Round-Soft, Round-Medium, Round-Hard, and Mechanical Pencil.
  • Filter Suite: Apply non-destructive adjustment filters including Box Blur, Sharpening, Brightness/Contrast, Hue/Saturation, and Grayscale conversion.

Project File Format & Format Export

  • Custom .crucible Containers: ZIP-based project archives that preserve full layer hierarchies, layer metadata, and edit history across app restarts.
  • Multi-Format Export: Export finalized artwork directly to PNG, JPEG, TIFF, or WebP with configurable compression levels.

Building & Environment Setup

Chromatic Crucible: Slate targets Android 12 (API 31) and higher. It can be built directly using Android Studio or the Gradle wrapper CLI.

1. Hardware & Tooling Requirements

  • Android SDK: API 34 (Target), API 31 (Minimum)
  • JDK: Java 17 or higher
  • Gradle: 8.4 (Wrapper included)
  • IDE: Android Studio Jellyfish (2023.3.1) or newer

2. Build Debug APK

bash - Gradle Assembly
# Clone repository git clone https://gitlab.com/quantum-hue/chromatic-crucible-slate.git cd chromatic-crucible-slate # Assemble debug APK ./gradlew assembleDebug