korteck

I must be overlooking something. I can't figure out the purpose of the smooth/sharp option in the text. I've done lots of tests and the anti aliasing always seems to override whichever smooth or sharp option I choose. If that's the case, then why is there an option in the text to begin with? I searched this subject first but I didn't find this specific subject talked about. What am I missing here? Thanks

Just a little good natured political humor on Bliss mountain

The Teletubbies... Casualties of War

Yeah...cool beans Ok, this is why I'm afraid to visit China!

Well thank you very much jamc100! I was beginning to question my sanity. Kaiser Yoshi, would you care to elaborate? It would be appreciated. EDIT: After several hours of researching this subject, both here and on the web, I've come to the conclusion that it's mostly the transparency that's negatively affecting this picture. Apparently, transparency does not bold well for gifs. The original black and white pic has a layer of transparent black across the sky, and the glowing vacancy sign also contains transparency. In the future, I'll try to keep gifs as simple as possible, with as few colors as possible. Thanks to everyone who chimed in.

Haha, this is weird! It's totally doing the same thing here and I'm looking at the color picture posted on this website. Maybe different monitor screens are making a difference, I don't know. I will repeat though, it's harder to see due to the lack of contrast, but look as closely as you can. Don't look at the sky in general, because the sky seems to be calmer in this one. Concentrate on the backboard of the big sign. The gray area there shows it more clearly. Then look at the darks of the green grass. Come on guys, someone back me up here!

And I agree with you. I think you're probably right. Yeah, the picture is behaving exactly like the other one. It's a little harder to see since there's not as much contrast, but if you look closely, it's distorting across the entire image just like the first one.

Take a closer look TinSoldier. It's distorting just as bad as the gray picture.

Thank you both very much. I've been using nothing but best quality and had forgotten about the other resampling options. I didn't know what they were before, but now I have a better idea of what resampling means. Thanks for the links Rick. I'll study up this week. For now though, I'll continue to use best quality and be sure to paint in proportion to the final size of the image. Thanks for that tip William.

As someone with an obsessive compulsive personality, I really need to understand what happens to an image when it's reduced. I know that the overall quality of the image is diminished. If 800 pixels are squeezed into 200 pixels, then something has to go, but just exactly how does that work? Is there a simple mathematical equation (ratio proportion) that takes place? I'm mostly concerned about the lines of one or two pixels' width. In the process of reduction, are the single width lines the last to be affected? Can someone please give me the benefit of their expertise? Thank you.

Ok, here's a little test. It's basically the same pic, but in color this time. As you can see, it has the same problem as the grayscale pic. Say that a color photograph has the maximum of 256 different colors in it. It can be converted to greyscale with no loss of quality, but can't it also be initially converted into shades of different colors with no loss as well? Each of the 256 colors would simply be changed, not added to. The "loss" factor comes in when you try to introduce additional colors in a second frame of a GIF, whether they are color or gray. The example shows that this color picture was already maxed out at 256 colors to begin with. When the additional colors of the second frame are introduced, the first colors are disturbed. For all intents and purposes, gray can be thought of as any other color, right? Does it takes up more or less information than any other color?

I'm just curious... how does optimizing a png file help you? Is a fully loaded png degraded in picture quality, or maybe you just want to save storage space on you computer?

Thanks guys. So the lesson learned is to keep gif images simple. The original photograph was real, and in theory, using a real photograph to make a gif is probably a bad idea. (unless you keep it small enough not to notice the distortion) A real photograph probably contains way more individual pixels of different color than a hand drawn picture. In fact, every pixel of a real photograph is probably a different color. So if there's a limit to the number of colors in a single gif frame, I guess I was over that limit. The only thing that still confuses me is this: Didn't the colors of the second layer ( the vacancy sign ) simply overwrite the colors underneath them, keeping the number of different colors the same? If all the colors of the first layer were different to begin with, then any changes of color should have replaced them...not added to them. :? EDIT: When you said "gifs only support up to 256 different colors per image," did you actually mean per frame... or per the total of all the frames in the finished gif? You're talking about lossless compression, so if the first frame was saved whole, then maybe the addition of the new colors in the second frame pushed the total color count for the finished gif too high.

This is a bliss wallpaper entered into the bliss parody thread. I made a gif out of it with the vacancy sign. Notice that when the sign flashes, it distorts the rest of the whole image, from border to border. The glowing vacancy lights are on a layer completely alone, yet when that frame flashes, it seems to be affecting the other layers. I've done a lot of tests. I've made sure that the vacancy lights are on the very top of the layer stack. I've tried merging the picture into only two layers, with the lights on one and everything else on the other, but that didn't fix the problem. I've made several gif pictures in the past and have never seen this happen before. Albeit, this is the most effect laden gif I've made... with lots of lighting adjustments and glowing. Still, if the layers are stacked properly, then one layer shouldn't effect another layer should it? Is it possible that it's an issue with the MS animator? I don't see how it could be. Thanks for taking the time to read this.

That was a good suggestion Bob. My skills are very limited with adjustments, but I adjusted the red and green curve to make it more yellow and lighter. It's much closer now. Thanks.

Haha, this is the last bliss pic for me. I'm ready for a new challenge. I give you... The Teletubbies

Ok, one more. This is fun. I hope you start another thread like this one wontstoptalkinga. As a newbie to paint.net, I need the practice and I'm tired of making sigs and avatars. I've made desktops for everyone I know.

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain" ( just a note: My bricks are drawn by hand )

There are some really cool pitcures in this thread! I realize the shadows don't match up with the light source in my picture, but for the sake of composition, I took some artistic license with it. I needed those shadows on the hillside. A professional would probably never use multiple objects with different light sources in one image. Unless...maybe he could change how the light falls on each object by altering the levels somehow. My idea of bliss would be to travel in my own personal hot air balloon.

Thanks for asking. I only have MS paint and PDN. This is a text file. Since it's on a notepad, I probably used notepad to open it already and forgot. The only thing that's in there is about 30 paragraphs of the same stuff. It's dated the 27th of last month. I looked up the first picture I made with paint.net and it was also Nov 27th. It must be associated with PDN in some way. Maybe like Rick said, it's from a plugin, or maybe it's from my scanner. I also installed my scanner on the same day. The C folder seems like a strange place to drop something like that though. It's really no big deal. I'll just leave it alone for now.

I noticed a file in my 'C' folder tonight. It's a text document written on a Notepad. It's called "balance" and the whole page is full of this: ( R Offset32 Gain 0 Black131 White199 Avg165 G Offset32 Gain 0 Black131 White239 Avg185 B Offset32 Gain 0 Black131 White198 Avg164 ) I checked the properties and there's absolutely no information about it's origin. I'm also not able to delete it. (Possibly because I don't have administrator privileges) I'm assuming it has to do with PDN, but I'm curious why it's in my C folder. All the other PDN stuff is in my program files. Is it a PDN file that I simply downloaded in the wrong place? If so, can it be safely moved, and to where? Thanks in advance.

This is pretty neat! I don't pretend to understand how it works though. I just followed the instructions. I'm a two week old newbie to paint.net and I still can't get the basics of blending. Hue, saturation, level adjustments... I think I need a degree in color theory to understand this stuff. :?

I'm not sure how much memory I have right now. I couldn't find that answer. This computer is only about 6 months old and had 512.00 MB of memory installed. Out of 74.51 GB on my hard drive, I've only used 16.64 GB. I don't know if that tells you anything.This is day two with Beta 3.0 and the lagging hasn't been a problem today. Yesterday, in the first few hours of use, practically everything was lagging, like switching tools and moving cutouts around. Even the history and layers were slow. It seems to have cleared up now though. I can't recall for certain, but there's a 95% chance that it would have been 800x600 pixels. This problem continues today. No, it had never crashed while I was using it. It had lagged, but never crashed. I typically close using the top right corner of the browser, not that little pic window in the right/top. Yesterday, I would have only been working with one image at a time, so I would have closed the paint browser. Both times yesterday, and just now today, I closed out just fine...no problems, but then the next time I tried to open a pic with the program, nothing happened. Neither could I open the program directly with the desktop icon. I tried entY8's suggestion the last time, and indeed the program was there. I ended it and it appeared to end from the task manager, but that didn't fix the problem. I still had to restart a moment ago. One other note... I had used v2.72 for the past two weeks and had never had any of these problems. I hope this helps.

I'm also not sure if this is a bug, or just my computer. I downloaded Beta 3.0 yesterday and it was doing fine most of the day. It lagged a lot worse than v2.72 did and the zoom feature didn't want to work right. I couldn't zoom above 2400% without first zooming to a lower percentage and then zooming on up. Not once, but twice, I had to restart my computer because the program wouldn't open. Neither directly, nor by opening a pdn file. I never had these problems with v2.72 Otherwise, it's a great paint program!