Vince

Simon, I'm surprised to find artifacts in the normal maps created by this plugin. As no one has reported this before, I assumed it was something unique to my system or I was doing something wrong. I tried it on a different system, but got similar results. One is a Dell laptop with an integrated GPU, the other is a Falcon NW with a discrete nVidia card. The laptop is running Windows XP Professional, SP3. The desktop is running Windows XP Home, SP3. Although the artifacts appear to be present most of the time, they are most obvious when derived from artificial displacement maps with steep contours. The following picture shows the displacement map on the bottom, an artifact free normal map created from it in the middle, and one showing the artifacts at the top. I also created a normal map while zoomed in near the center at 800%. The resulting map is show below zoomed at 200% so you can see the artifacts more clearly. Note that the portion that was visible on the screen does not have the artifacts. The issue seems to be associated in some way with the aspect of the image and the zoom level when it is made. I tried with and without antialiasing, and with both normal blending and overwrite. I tried with the dimensions in pixels equal to powers of two and not. These seem to have no affect. I also tried NormalMapPlus in a new installation of Paint.Net (3.5.10) with no other .dlls in the Effects folder. If I have missed something obvious, I apologize. I understand that you converted this from someone else's work and may not be able to fix this. I would like to know if others can reproduce my results. Vince

APShredder and Simon Brown, thanks for your responses. From what you say, I understand that what I requested could not be implemented by a plugin. Do you think the ability to split up an image into its color (and possibly alpha) components as layers would be as useful as I believe it would? If so, maybe I should suggest it as a feature for a future version of Paint.Net.

There is a plugin that I, and I believe others, would find extremely useful. I have searched the PlugIn list and if it already exists, I could not find it. The idea is simple: the plugin would take a 32-bit image and create from it a 4-layer .PDN image. There would be an 8-bit additive layer for each color plus alpha. One can create a 3-layer .PDN from a 24-bit image by first creating a 3-layer .PDN where each layer contains a copy of the original image, then removing two of the three colors from each layer using the Levels adjustment. Automation of this process, and the addition of an alpha layer, would be very useful.

@BoltBait, thank you for making this plugin. I find it useful for the same reasons you mention in your initial post. I do have a request. Since I have come to depend on this plugin at home, I decided to download it to my Paint.Net at work. However, once I found this topic, to download the plugin I was redirected to another topic were I could download the Transparency plugin as part of a pack of about a dozen plugins. As I only wanted the Transparency plugin, I searched and finally found your site where I could download just the Transparency plugin. I hope you will consider editing your initial post, stating for those that only want the Transparency plugin, they can download it from: http://boltbait.googlepages.com/transparency. I believe this would be helpful to many and there doesn't appear to be a downside.