Asyncritus

Nice work, Rick! Thanks. I was gone to Africa for two weeks, and I come back to not one but TWO updates, fixing a number of bugs. And the program installed it all so nicely without me even having to play around with it. I've only been using Paint.net for a couple of months now, and I'm already wondering how I ever got along without it!

I actually use both those methods. I was used to the "copy-paste" system with the old software I had, and I still use it a fair amount. It has the big advantage of being able to flip a selection sideways (left-to-right inversion) to break up patterns when you're filling in foliage or something. That was easier with the old software (maybe I just haven't found the way to do it easily with PdN; in the old program, as long as something that had been copied and pasted was selected it was considered as being on top of the picture until you shut off the selection, and "flip horizontally" just reversed it the same way putting it into a different layer and flipping the whole layer does it with PdN, with a few less manipulations to boot) but works wth PdN, too. Still, I love the clone tool, and as long as you make sure you're aiming at the right layer (both for anchoring and for drawing), I really don't see how it's hard to use.

Personally, I found the cloning tool incredibly easy to use, even though I have never used a graphics program that had something like that in it. It took me just a few minutes to get the hang of it, though I am still learning tricks to do it even better. The commonest mistake at first was not using the "ctrl-click" to anchor it. The next common mistake was not having selected the correct layer. (If you have a lower layer selected than the one you are looking at on the screen, you will have the impression that you aren't doing anything. But you are, and it may well be something you wish you weren't doing...) As long as you do things "by the rules", though, it is easy to use and very powerful. What I like is the ability to anchor it to one layer, then switch layers and clone to another. That makes it possible to do some really neat photo retouching.