Tom Jackson

I made this change because I realized that circles are conventionally drawn in a very useless way. You usually end up having to select the bounding box for the circle, and I hate that. It makes it terrible for selecting existing circles, or for drawing a new circle in a particular spot. The way it is now, you draw circles by selecting where you want the circle's edges to be. I've found that it's quite intuitive and much more useful. Having said that, yes circles are drawn differently from ellipses, yes. This is because circles are defined by 3 variables. No matter how you slice it, you end up having 3 degrees of freedom. Either it's center-x, center-y, and radius, or it's three edge points, or it's edge point and center point. I chose to use edge-to-edge because it's useful. Ellipses, on the other hand, are much more complicated. Ellipses are defined by 5 degrees of freedom. One example of how this ends up working out is: center-x, center-y, direction-of-eccentricity-x, direction-of-eccentricity-y, eccentricity-factor. This presents a problem because, with a mouse click + drag, you only get 4 values. Start-x, start-y, end-x, and end-y. This simply isn't enough variables to do an ellipse. So, ellipses are constrained to using the 'old' (and lame) method. Possible fixes (methods for getting more than 4 variables from the user to Paint.NET): 1. Have a UI that allows the user to stretech out a circle to define the major-radius, and squish the circle back to define the minor radius. The direction of eccentricity is then derived from the final start->end direction of the mouse click. This is okay, but it doesn't allow the user to go back to 'major radius' mode without another mouse key. 2. Have the user drag the mouse around to define the 5-point outline of the ellipse. The user would simply click and drag, and the smallest ellipse that contains every trace-point would be drawn. This ends up being very complicated to implement, and it still does not allow the user to decrease the size of the ellipse. Anyway, that's the way it is right now. If you have another idea for an intuitive and complete method for drawing ellipses, reply.

Try this: Select the area you want to be transparent with the magic wand tool, then pres DEL to delete it. What you will be left with is a transparent area where your selection was. Repeat this as necessary, then save the image as either a PNG or a GIF. If you're saving it as a GIF, make sure you're using 2.2 Alpha1.

What you're trying to do actually can be accomplished quite simply by using Layer->Adjustments->Levels and changing the input black point. This can be changed by adjusting the bottom value of the left-side gradiant bar. This will modify the other pixels of the image, but I think you'll find that the result will look nicer. The contrast of the image will be improved, and the colors will be slightly brighter. If you find that you do not like the increased contrast provided by this effect, you can set your output black point to match your input black point. This will accomplish something very similar to what you described--it will remove the near-black noise without modifying the other pixels. The catch with this method, however, is that it will not result in a dark black in the output image. For that reason, I'd recommend you stick with method #1.

This will be in the next release.

There is now!

The old forum we were using was being hosted on a server that was going to be shut off, permanently, in mid-August. Switching to this server got us phpBB, which is a much better forum system, and a reliable, permanent server. We're looking into transferring the old content to the new server.

So, you want to be able to zoom to 150%, then when you do rotate/zoom again, you want "100%" to give you the image you started with from the beginning? This isn't the way Rotate / Zoom works. Rotate / Zoom actually stretches out/rotates/shrinks the image in place. What you are selecting in the Rotate / Zoom dialog how much of a change should be performed. If you want to get your original image back, you'd have to re-zoom it to 66%, and even then, you wouldn't get the content near the edges.

Are you talking about resetting where the location (0, 0) appears? If I understand you correctly, you want to be able to set the ruler's direction and where it's zeroed? Is this correct?

That's right. It doesn' precisely replace the colors, however, because pictures rarely contain solid blocks of precisely the same color. This shifts from the source color to the destination color, preserving small amounts of luminosity in the color transformation. The result? Recoloring a picture of something like a face can be done in such a way that preserves the shading of the face while replacing the hue (see help file for example pic).