How to become unbeatable at Retusch

Learn the shortcuts and you double your useful time

Two minutes of drawing goes very fast when you fetch every tool with the mouse. Shortcuts easily win back twenty or thirty seconds a round, and those are the seconds you will spend on detail.

• B for the brush, P for the paint bucket, I for the eyedropper, H for the hand.
• 1, 2 and 3 for the three brush sizes, without going through the toolbar.
• Ctrl+Z, or Cmd+Z on a Mac, to undo one stroke at a time.
• Holding Alt switches to the eyedropper and hands back to the previous tool as soon as you let go. It is the most useful of them all: you pick a colour mid action without ever changing tools.

A word on AZERTY keyboards: the 1, 2 and 3 keys work without Shift, even though your keyboard prints &, é and " there. The game reads the position of the key, not the character it produces.

Paint from broad to fine

The classic beginner mistake is to start with one corner and polish it. The clock runs out, three quarters of the square is still background, and the patch is visible from across the room.

The right method is the reverse. Start with a big brush, or the paint bucket, and lay down the large masses of colour: the sky, the wall, the shadow on the ground. In twenty seconds your square already has the right overall look and no longer reads as a foreign block.

Only then reduce the size and handle the transitions: the horizon line crossing through, the edge of an object, the shade that changes halfway up. If you run out of time, you will have lost detail, not the round.

Always pick your colours with the eyedropper rather than choosing them from the palette. An approximate shade is enough to give away an entire square, whereas the exact shade makes it invisible.

Never leave the corners empty

This is clue number one, and the first thing experienced players look for. A square with a well treated middle but four corners left at the background colour draws a perfect rectangle on screen. You do not even need to look at the drawing: the geometry leaps out.

Get into the habit of treating the outline first, then the middle. A well blended frame forgives a rough interior; the reverse is never true.

Deliberately paint past the edges. The game clips your stroke at the boundary of the square, so you risk nothing by going well beyond, and it is the only way to be certain no pixel of background survives in a corner.

And when it is your turn to hunt

Sweep the whole painting first without zooming: a badly blended square looks like a stain, and zoom only serves to confirm. Then follow the long lines, the ones that cross the image: a border shifted by a hair is almost always a patch.

Finally, remember you only get one mistake per round. Three seconds of checking cost less than the whole round.