Channel Swap is a effect that I've made recently.
It allows to manipulate colour and alpha channels of image, switching them between a number of options, and mixing them with clipboard contents.
It's interface looks like this:
And it can serve a lot of purposes, combining pixel data for use with other effects among other things, which can be used to make effects like this, for example:
(I've also posted a step-by-step process of making that image on my blog)
Description of options:
Among it's sole uses, you can do the following with it:
Make image opaque (or of given alpha value)
Make image invisible (handy, as you can hide information in seemingly empty PNG images this way)
Fill image with colour while preserving alpha
Combine alpha of image with a constant value or alpha mask
Fill image with clipboard contents (with or without preserving alpha)
Invert alpha of image
Get alpha 'mask' of image
Apply existing alpha mask to image
(more possibilities)
Once installed, effect can be found as 'Effects/Color/Channel Swap...', and can be easily identified by a icon with green arrows, taken from FamFamFam icon pack to match up existing icons nicely.
Download: Zip file with effect DLL is attached to the post.
You can also download it from SolidFiles, if attachment doesn't work somehow.
Note: Currently, effect ignores alpha information of clipboard contents.
If someone (Rick Brewster?) could explain how normal clipboard manipulation works in Paint.NET (method reference?), it would be very helpful. My current implementation of clipboard reader part is as following:
I've rechecked code not once now, and have made long searches, but all relevant results are using same methods to obtain clipboard data.
Have a nice day.
Channel Swap.zip