SIndurkhya

Sweet, this program is awesome. Thanks for the help! I know for Photoshop CS, there are books to teach you how to do this stuff, but are there any ebooks or books that use Paint.NET?

I've used Paint.NET before, but only just to see what it was, and I've never really done any heavy image editing. I do a lot of coding(C/C++, C#, Java) so I end up using "programmer art." However now I need to do some image editing. I would like to know that if I have an image, how can I - Make the image a lot lighter, so that if I were to write text over it, the text would be readable. I tried alpha blending, but either I'm not using the tool correctly, or this isn't the tool I need. - Make the picture from shades of the same color. Like white, light blue, blue, dark blue, ... . Kind of like gray scale, but with a color. Thanks, I really am a beginner at image editing, so any help would be appreciated.