Westrock

Had my wife take a picture of my while driving Original It was raining at the time, but the camera failed to pick up any of the clouds...so a perusing on Yahoo! images found me some good clouds to composite into the image. Balanced out the image much better. Modified Its my desktop at work now (1280x1024) PS, I use Paint.NET for mostly photo editing, you guys that actually "create" images are pretty talanted!

I also second this feature...especially the way MS Paint does it where you have like 5 different depth options. Its convient when your working with limited colors and are looking for a certain file size vs picture quality vs compatibilty.

As far as those two images, I have found that darker images almost always take up more space when working with the same dimensions and compression quality.

I just got a Wacom Graphire 6x8. Is there any way to implement the Eraser function in Paint.NET? Not a big deal. Also does the "intensity" of pushing the pen have any effect in Paint.NET?

You said that the Acquire feature is calling an external application, but would it be at all possible to make saved "user profiles" available on the document type screen? My scanner needs a little tweaking for each of the different kinds of pictures (color photo, B&W text, etc) and I always forget the values I used and have to do some tweaking to get the right settings each time. I expect that you will say no because its not actually Paint.NET thats doing the scanning...but your smart and may have some trick.

I've never been big on scanners and they've always been awkward in the past when I tried to use them (like TWAIN driver days). However recently I have had some situations where I needed to get some hard documents on the interwebs and I remembered Rick mentioning the Acquire feature. It works perfect and I like the basic options available. Plus it opens directly in Paint.NET which is exactly what I would want. So thank you guys for rekindeling my respect for scanners.

OK, I just wanted to make sure everything was OK on my end. It just seems like it use to be a little faster back when I was using 2.x.

Whenever I'm editing larger pictures (like 1800x1200 and up) when I use the Lasso to add to a selection its pretty slow, but when I take away a selection its pretty quick. When I draw the initial selection with the Lasso its very quick. This is on both my laptop and my main computer. My Laptop I can understand (1.8Ghz Turion64). My main computer is a AMD X2 4600 and if I bring up Task Manager while Lasso is sitting there updating the CPU Utilization only hits like 50% and really one of them is running at like 60%, and the other is maybe 10%-20%. Memory is 1.5Gb DDR2. Heres a screenshot to show. Down by the bottom is where it was still drawning the line while I had time to bring up Task Manager and hit PRNT SCRN. Is this normal behavior, due to the way the selection works or something?

OK, thanks! Thats pretty much what I was thinking. For static resizing I just tweak it and leave it, but the for image resize I undo and start over....just wanted to make sure I wasn't doing it wrong. Also as a side note, does Paint.NET do as much as possible strictly in memory and not rely on the harddrive? For example often times I have PDN taking up 50-100Mb of memory. I just want to know if the speed of the HDD has any effect once the image has been loaded.

I was just wondering how does Paint.NET resize images when using the Move Selected Pixels. If I scale a selection down to 50%, but then scale back up to 60% of the original does it scale the original by 50%, but then when I go up does it take the current image and scale it 120% or take the orignal source and rescale it to 60%? Same with Resize.... If I scale a 1600x1200 image down to 1024x768 but then decide 1280x960 is better, does up scale the 1024x768 or rescale the 1600x1200? Hope thats confusing enough!

A work around I have found is to right click on the other picture and choose Open With > Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Although there have been very few times I have needed to do that its usually when I need to look at the original and make sure my blendings look believeable or to see how much the color actually changed. But Windows Image Viewer is low profile enough that you can open it real quick and drag it over Paint.NET to compare. Plus it will auto-size for you (unlike MS Paint).

You can also select the item that you wish to affect, such as using the magic wand and getting just the object you wish to alter. Then do Ctrl-C on the layer you want to grab the pixels from. Create a new layer thats above the background layer and do Ctrl-V to paste the pixels. Now you have a copy of just what you want to alter, so you don't have to worry about other parts of the picture being affected.

When I select a small area, maybe 20x20 pixels and want to move it, how do it get the hand to switch to an arrow? In other words, the selection is so small that I can only stretch or rotate the selection because the "middle" area isn't big enough for the selection pointer to turn into the movement arrow.

Well my guess is that when Vista starts to support certain features that just aren't compatible with WinXP. Perhaps somewhere down the line DirectX10 (or 11) will add some excellent built-in features that will provide lots of use and WinXP just won't be able to provide that (right DX10 won't be released for WinXP??). So rather than have to seperate products and trying to make the older program emulate the newer one, its easiest to just have one product. Thats my understanding of whats happening with 3.0 (as far as Win2K support). Paint.NET will still work, you just won't have the next newest features.

Heres another one I did at work last night. (those are not actual Athlon64's in the background, just a random wafer we had lying around). Its the sticker that came with my processor. I went through and got rid of the dust and stuff. Solidified the black and white areas. Got rid of the yellow banding where the white and black met. Lots of gaussian Added a little more pop to the green arrow thing. This was with Super Macro mode on my S3-IS. Obviously the lens isn't quite what an SLR could have as the focused area is kind of narrow. PS: if you'd like a different size for a wallpaper let me know. The original is 2805x1713, so I could even do a native 30" background with this :shock:

Honestly I don't think I remember it ever asking me to update to 3.0. It did back when I went from 2.70 to 2.72 or whatever (in fact I usually updated after I got tired of seeing that thing pop up everytime). So as far as the auto-updater being helpfull, it is...but I don't think it will try to update to 3.0.

Haha, so obvious actually!

Just wanted to say that I really didn't see a reason to upgrade to 3.0 (laziness on my part I guess).....but somehow I stumbled upon that gradient video on YouTube and I just had to download 3.0. So, good advertising

Is there a way to select an object, and then select the opposite of that? Like If I wanted to erase most of a picture, I could select the object I want to preserve, then somehow erase everything else around it.

To select the whole car I use the Magic Wand and hold control to "add". If the wand picks up too much, I just lower the tolerance and I can usually get it within what I need. Then I can come back afterwards and trim here and there. To BarkBark00, The Easy Button looks better now, the original one has some dithering showing up, but this one is more solid...I'm guessing you blurred it? However I would have seperated the "EASY" to another layer so that it didn't get blurred as well. And the little lens flair is a good choice. I actually really like that brushed metal look And no I wasn't the driver, I have no idea who that was...poor guy doesn't even know he's an Internet superstar 8)

Help paying for the server each month could be helpfull. Other than that? Caffiene, lots of caffiene.

Post Process 4 layers. Changes include, B&W, Hue/Saturation. Gradient, Clouds & Glow. Original I didn't crop very well as the "XAS 3" looks odd, it should say "TEXAS 3", not a big deal, just a picky thing. All in all I just wanted to play with the Gradient and Clouds. BTW, you guys doing the actual drawning, are you using a tablet? Its pretty hard to sculpt a selection area with a mouse

Its true! I read it on Wikipedia...and it knows everything 8) Considering that I found Paint.NET while look for an alternative to shelling out $600 for Photoshop ( I don't want to download a hacked version), I'd have to say that we are extremely greatful for your passion. I needed to upgraded one of my computers either way for editing big pictures and it was either Aperature for Mac (cheap program, expensive upgrade) or Photoshop for PC (expensive program, cheap upgrades)....Paint.NET let me get great features and it helped saved a lot of money (cheap program, cheap upgrades).

If you just use the Rectangle Select you will have a hard time getting say an exact 1600x1200 pixel selection area. Also once you get the selection to the right size you would want to be able to move it around slightly to get the perfect frame. You can use the move selection tool... So thats what the white arrow does :shock: I'll probably start doing that now, however you still have to drag the mouse out to the dimensions you want. And maybe its just my mouse's resolution but sometimes the closest I can get in 1280x1025 or 1023, it won't go to 1024. So then after I crop to selection I just do Canvas Size and correct it. Again that could be the limitations of my mouse. I still think it would be nice to be able to have quick references, especially for photo sizes. That way you could go and take a big 6MP picture and then you've got plenty of space to work with to get a 4x6 or something out of it. Though would it have to take into consideration the DPI of the image since it will take a larger resolution to go 8" at 120 DPI then say 90 DPI? I'm not demanding this, and hell I'd probably try my luck at it if I learned how to program in whatever language Paint.NET uses.

If you do the Canvas Size you'll get the exact size no problem, however positioning the frame will be extremely limited, because you will only be able to use those "anchor points" in the Canvas Size. If you just use the Rectangle Select you will have a hard time getting say an exact 1600x1200 pixel selection area. Also once you get the selection to the right size you would want to be able to move it around slightly to get the perfect frame. In picture 2 I actually am using the method that I have been using to do this. Thats just a blue box made in a top layer with the transparency set to like 155. I can then drag that box all over the place to position it right where I want it, and then do a Crop To Selection. It works perfectly, it just takes a little bit of time to add the layer, draw the box, and change the settings, then position it. A menu option would allow you to quickly do the same thing.