circlularthinking

Note: I have failed to recreate this myself, so I am not certain anymore. I have found an apparent fault... I clicked on magic wand and selected a portion, then I clicked add, but as soon as I did (without moving to the image area) the entire image became selected. I solved this by doing it in reverse by subtracting what I wanted to select, then subtracting the rest I wanted to select, then inverting the selection. Still the fault exist and doing it in reverse might not always be practical/possible.

It version 3.5x if you made a line, you had a read out of the number of degrees. With the beta, degrees is missing for lines, but present for rotating selections. But it is really useful with lines too. I must say though, in general 4 is a nice step up, great work guys.

I just found this out, and while it does not solve entirely my concentric circle difficulties if pixel perfect alignment is wanted, it does make tweaking all shape sizes MUCH easier! If you click down and drag to make a shape of a given size, then release, the shape is selected. It looks the same as any other selection, and if you normally resize a shape you get a raster resize, which is to say ugly. But if you resize a shape before clicking finish or something else that completes the shape process, I am glad to see that it remains as a vector! So you can draw a tiny circle and then drag it in multiple steps to fill the screen and it will not be blocky, and ugly in the least! Nor blury. This is a very nice feature and it took me ages to notice this, so I thought others might not have discovered this either.

This method actually works! Only catch is the circle size limitation. Thanks. The gradient fill method is interesting, but produces a jagged circle of hard to control thickness. Hopefully they will fix paint.net 4.0, but until then this plugin/effect will do, even if limited. I tried align tool, pretty good, though it only help to a point, it does not help with circles that are sized so as to be unable to be given a common center. if the center of one circle is a pixel, and the center of the other circles is between pixels, you can't align them. This requires having multiple goes to get a correctly sized circle, maybe if I watch the number of pixels is in each circle I can fix this?

I have only tried one other plugin, so maybe it is a user ignorance issue, but this does not seem to be working on the beta of paint 4.0, at least it doesn't show under effects for me which is where i assume I should look. Also what I was hoping this tool might do is draw a circle from the center out, is that what it does? I can't tell from the description. UPDATE: I can now answer my own questons, it does work in 4.0 (under effects > Render) and you can use it to make concentric circles. However I now will sound nitpicky, but it leaves a bunch of dots/lines around each circle for some reason requiring lots of fix up time to get the circle looking nice, so not really what I was hoping for, it is however very cool for making neat shapes which was it's purpose.

I have posted this elsewhere, but forgive me I believe this falls under 2 categories, both a 4.0 issue, and a general feature request. The 3.5 way of making a circle could be described as a diameter method i believe, this is ok, and it allows for making concentric circles (a very common thing for circles to be) quite easy with the help of the shift key to keep the circle in perspective. This is also the way the circle select toll works even in 4.0 Beta The 4.0 Beta way of making circles has the first click by in the corner of the circle, not generally as useful a location and moreover terribly hard to make concentric circles, really is is very hard and next to impossible and requires working on different layers and watching pixel numbers and re-positioning and so on, and if you want the gap between the circles to be small it is really hard to get this method to work without lots of trial and error redo's that take time. The IMHO BEST was would be for the click down to mark the center point of the circle and then as you drag the pointer one you describe the radius with the pointer. While I would love the latter, I could be very happy with returning of the 3.5 method, or the option to choose between all 3 would be pretty cool if anyone actually cares about the other methods. But the beta way ain't the better way.

Regarding the old system of making a circle, while initially finding it difficult, I found once I got used to it, it was brilliant for making concentric circles when used with the shift button to keep the the shape perfectly circular. The new corner system does not make this even vaguely as easy, it is quite hard, almost impossible without doing the work on another layer and then moving the circle. Even then it is not good. Ideally you could add an option to select between the old diameter like method and the new corner method. Additionally a 3rd option possible better than the others would be to have the first click be the center of the circle, you then drag it out to the desired radius. I like 4, but the difficulty it has with circles make me want to return to 3.5. Please don't stick us with the new method exclusively!