frio

Glad to hear that, despite that I noticed an important point about the render->clouds part: I forgot to mention to use render mode: "in". That mode fills opaque areas only with the clouds, and leaves transparent spots intact, but you can work around that in other ways as well. Figured I'd mention it anyway for posterity.

Assuming you have a separated, filled lineart figure (black lines, white fill, transparent surroundings) and you want the "plasma/flame" look, something like this might work: 1) Put figure on its own layer. 2) Duplicate figure layer. 3) Select topmost copy, set blend mode to multiply in layer properties. This will keep the lineart intact and on top of the colors. 4) Choose desired "plasma" colors in color palette. Effects->Render->Clouds, choose small scale, high-ish roughness. 5) Effects->Noise->Median, low radius (2-3), percentage 33 or so. Smothers the clouds. 6) Effects->Blurs->Surface blur. Further smothers the clouds. 7) Duplicate color layer. Select the bottom copy. Effects->Blurs->Zoom Blur, point it below the star, choose a length of your liking. Pushes the copy of the colors outside the figure. 8 ) Effects->Blurs->Gaussian blur to taste. 9) Adjustments->Hue/Saturation, lower saturation and brightness to taste.

How about using multiple copies of the layer set to different blend modes? I often use that as a lazy non-destructive way of spicing up layers. This is what you get if you duplicate the layer, set the bottom layer to normal blend 63/255 opacity, top layer overlay 255/255.

Can't reproduce with your included image in the last post. However, applying gamma 2.2 with the levels tool to your paint.net vs. paint comparison the text looks the same, so your images might have a color profile which the programs handle differently. Try Image menu->Apply embedded color profile after opening in paint.net. If it's grayed out, then that can't be the cause.

The the key to choose those modes was changed to alt. Line tool: alt = draw from center, alt-shift = draw from center with 15 degree angles. Shape tool: alt = draw from center, alt-shift = draw from center, constrain aspect ratio.

The glasses are most likely pure white for highlights, #3c93f9 the rest. 255 alpha, multiply blend. I just based it on guesswork: since the whites (pure white #ffffff) of the eyes are unchanged under the highlights but become blue elsewhere, using multiply blend with the blue-on-eye-whites color sounded correct, and after testing with a dummy layer it appears to be at least very close.

First run a Tube Oblique to turn it cylindrically bent along X direction: Then use the built in rotate/zoom command (Layers->Rotate/Zoom, control-shift-Z) to give it perspective. Recommended to work in higher resolution than you need and then scale down to correct size afterwards, so any pixelation or blur from doing 2 distortions will be minimized.

I mentioned this with the crashing issue some weeks ago, but looking at it again since it came up in the general discussions I'm pretty convinced the Apply Mask plugin is not working as intended. Initially I thought it was just clobbering transparent pixel color values to 0, 0, 0 and shrugged it off since I have an alternative, but looking at it again it seems to also have some strange results on not fully transparent pixels. Transparent pixel color values are important to my texture work. Here is a demonstration image: 1) Image that is getting masked 2) Alpha mask. The result is the same if using an alpha channeled layer+alpha mode instead of a grayscale+shades of gray mode. 3) Expected result on checkerboard transparency (done with the Alpha Mask Import plugin) 4) Actual result on checkerboard transparency 5) Actual result on white background 6) Actual result with alpha channel set to opaque. I'm pretty sure the colors saturating with lower alpha isn't what is supposed to happen? Additionally, although the plugin no longer crashes if the number of layers in the image changes between applications, it seems to get stuck on the wrong layer and ignores what you choose in the dropdown if the layer number has been changed. After restarting the program, it regains functionality.

The Apply Alpha Mask plugin destroys color information (uses premultiplied alpha or something like that). It might be by design, but it it makes it unsuitable for purposes where that color information in transparent areas is important. You can use this instead, it's a bit more rudimentary but despite the disclaimer on the page, works just fine in modern PdN and most importantly does not damage colors in transparent areas.

HSV is more human-intuitive in many aspects. What's the twice as saturated version of RGB 109, 178, 153? I don't want to calculate or eyeball that, but changing the saturation slider from 38 to 76 to get RGB 42, 175, 126 is simple enough. What's the violet version of equal saturation/value that color? Add 120 hue to get the next primary color to use as the basis. The downside is, as demonstrated, the mapping to RGB isn't 1:1 (in PdN, RGB has 256*256*256 combinations, HSV has 360*101*101, which is around 22% of the total RGB space), so you can't expect colors chosen in HSV to be exact or unique to a given RGB value.

It sounds like you've accidentally changed file type to .png while saving, but saved it over the .pdn (the thumbnail still works in Explorer, but trying to open the file without renaming it to .png gives the above error). Unfortunately that means it's unrecoverable back to .pdn form, all layers are gone. You can try to see if Windows has kept an older version of the file (right click, properties, previous versions) but otherwise I can't think of a way to go back.

From the existing image you uploaded, the buttons are more or less pure black or white with varying states of transparency, instead of shades of gray with varying transparency, so best I can think of is just an approximation but not exact. The "Make color transparent" adjustment from KrisVDM's pack seems to do a reasonable job (set target color to 128, 128, 128, set power to 1). However since the insides of the buttons are close to the background gray, it would pretty much require more manual work than just a simple effect to get the transparency and color levels to match.

If you're saving PNGs with automatic settings, it chooses the minimum bit depth required. If you want to ensure things are 32 bit, you have to choose the setting while saving. An additional pitfall is saving images that have transparency with automatic settings: if the transparency is 1-bit i.e. purely opaque or transparent, the file might get saved at a lower bit depth if it has few colors and some game engines can't handle those files properly (Binding of Isaac sprites come to mind), even if they look right in editor. Tl;dr just choose 32 bits while saving

Makes perfect sense, thinking back I've had the hang-ups while working with multiple related textures that need alpha masking at the same time. Thanks for checking it out, I'll take extra care for now.

@BoltBait Some issues with the paint.net 5+ compatible versions that didn't exist in 4: Apply Mask and Switch Alpha to Gray completely hang paint.net often. It happens so often that I have to be sure to save every time before using either filter or lose work. Usually it gets stuck after displaying the option dialog, but sometimes even instantly just trying to open the effect. There are no crash logs, since it's a complete hang, and the only way out is to terminate the program. After a lot of testing, I finally figured out a way to reliably cause the crash but it seems to depend on the file size, layers and what's in the layers so I have to include this particular file that causes problems. Steps: 1) Open file, select layer "sun colors", apply mask with shades of gray from layer "mask3". 2) Undo the effect. It seems relevant the effect has been run to completion at least once. 3) Copy "sun colors", paste into new image. 4) Copy "mask3", paste as a layer in the new image. 5) Attempt to apply mask on the new image's "sun colors". Hangs. Edit: system info just in case. Additionally, apply mask produces inconsistent results compared to what I imagine it should. Once you've applied to mask (like on the "sun colors" layer in the test image), the transparent colors are blended towards RGBA 255, 255, 255, 0 and 0-alpha becomes 0, 0, 0. That is to say, applying a mask and then removing the alpha channel produces a completely different image (and generally unusuable, the transparent pixel colors are important for texture work) to the original. As such I have to use an alternate "paste alpha from clipboard" plugin that does simply that, preserving the colors. synthwave sun.zip

I don't know if this is something forum admins even have power over (is there a setting somewhere, or is something just broken at Invision side?), but the page up/down keys don't work anywhere on these forums. Tested Chrome and Edge, no difference. I can't remember for certain but I may have checked Firefox too, but I don't usually have it around. Scrolling with mouse wheel is fine but I don't use a physical mouse generally (long story) and my brain always gets confused when I have to use the emulated scroll wheel instead of pg up/down only for this forum. The same problem does *not* happen on other Invision forums I visit, so I have no idea what's causing it. Can't see any kind of keyboard hooks for the keys either, not that I'm very adept with browser dev console stuff. Haha disregard that it was my Autohotkey page up/page down for paint.net getting confused by the forum window title, I should change the window matching mode to something more strict. On the plus side I wouldn't have figured it out if I didn't see weird characters pop up while typing into this very message field and checking that page up/down do nothing... The below point still stands but it's even more minor: Visiting on a mobile device, the sidebar that you log in through opens *outside the right side* of the screen with no indication it's there (Chrome, Android), took me a long while to figure out. Of course these aren't huge problems, and if the answer is "no idea what's up, sorry", that's fine.

So far so good, not seeing any flashing errors on a quick check. I'll report back if I see it again after some actual usage.

Higher filesize does not mean better quality. When you save a file with lossy compression like JPEG, it introduces differences to the image - higher quality means fewer differences, but there always will be some. When you resave it, you save those differences which increase image complexity and size, and introduce more on top. For a good visual example, for instance, an image saved 500 times with the same quality (10/12 in Photoshop terms, no idea how that translates to PDN quality slider): https://youtu.be/Fk6kV5N1rzs

Just in case it is related, I notice it happening very often in 5.0.4b when I draw shapes, but didn't see that ever before. I managed to grab a video clip with Gyazo: https://i.gyazo.com/73d57ab366d42bd7e156e393bdafd261.mp4 Something about "wrong state" exception. No further crashes or exploding handle usage so far, though, staying around 25000.

Oh ok, Windows was total 100k handles after the crash so I misunderstood. PDN was around 10k since a fresh start, now after working for a couple hours it's up to 24k.

Services hold 63000, Explorer has 15000. Sounds like Windows 11 and its splitting services into dozens of subprocesses to me, none of them appear out of ordinary by themselves, just many, many small svchost.exe processes, I should probably look into tuning the value that controls the splitting. Edit: yeah, that immediately dropped the handle count by 15000 or so.

Yes, I don't close the program between bouts of using it, it had been sitting idle for a couple hours before I started working on a new file. Probably related, I see error messages flashing in the canvas as I draw shapes (basic shape tool, rounded rectangle), but they happen for like a single frame so I can't see what it was other than some kind of a .NET exception maybe. The messages are rendered in canvas resolution and I work very zoomed in, so they were very pixelated. Pretty sure I haven't seen this happen in 5.0.3 (and I've had the program open for literally days without issue), and yes I know I'm taking a risk by running a beta version but figured I'd mention something is afoot. Better make more frequent saves for now I suppose!

Crash log below. Had just drawn some lines with the line tool on a layer and alt-tabbed away, came back to a crash report.

You could try making a conic gradient with black and white, then using the Levels adjustment (control-L) to compress the range. If you wanted a slice that's compressed to about 30 degrees, using input levels low: 234 (about 330/360*255), high: 255 gets you that. You can also adjust the high end of the input levels to compress it towards white instead of black.

I'm pretty sure I have both, since the effects have different names (one calls itself v2, the other doesn't) and doesn't have the extra color settings/stuff. I prefer the more simple presumedly-v1, and since I also use the blur (I don't use it at strength 0 at all times) it's more useful to me than just alpha thresholds. Thanks to everyone involved with PDN and its plugins, in either case, it's been what, like 15 years now, and so, so many textures made.