The primary, secondary, tertiary and quaternary drawing tool colors correspond to the left, right, X1, and X2 mouse buttons respectively. If your mouse does not have additional buttons that are designated as X1 and X2 then only the primary and secondary colors will most likely be pertinent.

When using a drawing tool, the color drawn is depenedent upon these tool colors and the corresponding mouse button is being used. To change a drawing tool color, click on it and select a new color from the color dialog

The selection tools let you select regions of pixels within the image. When a pixel region is selected, all drawing actions and modifiers will only be applied to the selected pixels.

Drawing tools allow you to paint colored pixels within the image, or modify pixels in some way. These are interactive tools that you control with the mouse. All drawing actions apply only to the first selected image in the image list. The image list window is shown below.

EIE has two separate working modes, which affect how images are displayed, edited and saved.

In frames mode, only the first image that is selected in the image list is rendered. This mode is useful for creating animations, doing batch processing on images, or working with a list of images to be exported to a file format such as .ico. This mode functions as if you are only editing one image at a time.

Layers mode allows you to work with a collection of layers that are rendered on top of each other (with alpha channel transparency) to produce a single, composite image. All layers in the image list are rendered concurrently, from top to bottom to produce the working image.

The main menu contains most of the options for working with your images. This include "Modifiers" which are common adjustments to the image such as brightness adjustments, hue adjustments, resizes, etc. The "Selection" menu gives options for working with the selected pixel region within your current image.