justingrant

I like that Paint.NET always checks for new versions and installs them automatically, but inevitably when I open Paint.NET it's because I need to edit an image RIGHT NOW and waiting several minutes for the install is never an easy decision. I often skip it because I don't want to wait. Also, when I open PDN via right-clicking on an image in explorer and choosing "edit", if I accept the auto-update it won't automatically open up the image... I need to go find it again. Could the auto-update process be streamlined to be less intrusive to the current editing session? Some suggestions: - can it be faster? - can you install a new rev in parallel to the current session, and offer the option to make the new version "active" the next time I start PDN? (Firefox does this-- great feature!) - can you restart with the new version without losing current state (e.g. current files open)?

Hi Rick - I realize that 20% on a standalone desktop PC ain't bad, but there are lots of environments (esp. terminal server & mobile PC) where that kind of CPU consumption for an idle application causes problems. In a perfect world, you'd detect a terminal server or on-batteries mobile PC and adapt your rendering (like the Office apps do, at least on terminal server) to be cheaper on the CPU. But simply having a user-controlled option to turn off animated selection would be fine too. I know there's a workaround to minimze the app, but when using PDN while flipping back-and-forth between it and other apps (e.g. PowerPoint for slides graphics and Visual Studio for web graphics), it's a big hassle (and hard to remember) to minimze paint.net after every time I switch away from it. Despite knowing the workaround for a few weeks, I've still drained a few batteries when I forgot it! ;-) Would it be possible to add an option to make the selection rectangle non-animated?

The animated moving box around a selection is cool, but it eats up CPU on my Vista laptop-- as much as 20% utilization on my 2GHz, dual-core Toshiba M5. On a laptop that kind of continuous CPU utilization will drain the battery very fast. Plus the continuous fan noise and fry-an-egg-on-it heat aren't fun eiither. I realize I could simply remember to always turn off the selection in Paint.NET to avoid draining the battery, but that seems like a big hassle. Anyway, I like my battery life and quiet fan-- possible to turn off the animation or at least make it optional? Not sure if the same problem occurs on non-Vista PCs.

aha, eraser 1 pixel does the trick. Nice! Where is the "overwrite" setting I need to beware of?

cool, thanks for the pointer. I just tried the alpha mask. Unfortunately, I found that the resulting "gray-and-alpha" image, when displayed against a white background, was much lighter than the original grayscale image. Any ideas how to correct this?

Is there an easy way to convert a grayscale image into a "gray-and-alpha" image where the resulting PNG would look exactly the same when shown over a white background, but would also work over colored backgrounds too? For example, if there's a pixel in my image with RGB #808080, I want to turn that pixel into RGB 000000 with alpha=80 hex. (assuming alpha=80 over a white backgorund is in fact the visual equivalent of RGB #808080) Here's more info about why I'm trying to do this. I'm trying to build reusable PNGs to enable a web app to replicate Windows Vista's "blurry drop shadow" effect around the edges of windows. I want to put the same effect inside a web page to raise foreground objects against the background. It's easy to get (via screenshot of a Vista window against a white background and cropping until I have only the shadow) a black-and-white version of the shadow. But now I'd like to take that and turn white into alpha so that I can display the shadow against any background. I created PNGs for the sides of the shadow by doing this: 1. creating a new 13x2 pixel image 2. pasing the pasting the 13x1 pixel shadow PNG into half of the new image, leaving the other half transparent. 3. creating a new layer and coloring it white, and putting it underneath the main layer 4. for each of the 13 pixels, setting color to black and pencilling pixels one by one into the second line of pixels, eyeballing the alpha value to visually match the brightness of the other row of pixels I copied from the screenshot. 5. save the second row of alpha-enabled pixels to a new 13x1 PNG This process was annoying but not too hard for the sides since they are only 1 pixel high or wide. But for the corners, that's 100+ pixels and will drive me nuts to eyeball it. I'm sure there's gotta be a better way. Any ideas? Alternatively, I guess I could abandon the screenshot approach and just draw a circular gradient or apply a blur to a circle to get the corners. But for now since I already have a perfect black-and-white example I was wondering if it'd be easier to convert to black-and-alpha.

Kaiser - Yep, I'm already running very zoomed (3200%), and can already use rectangle select to select a pixel. But I'd love a way to select one pixel without having to be as careful with the mouse-- invariably half the time I select an extra pixel or don't select any pixels when I'm just trying to select one. I was hoping for an easier way, like double-clicking on that pixel to select it. Even better if you could hold down the control key and double click other pixels and it'd add each pixel to the selection. (Like you can do in powerpoint or word when you want to do mulitple selection) Crosswalker's suggestion to use magic wand is a good one, but in practice I find that doesn't work too often since down at the pixel level the wand often brings in more than one pixel. Bob's suggestion to use the pencil and color picker is also a good one when drawing single pixels-- but I most often need this to select a single pixel so that I can turn that pixel transparent (using the Del key). Is there a quick way to draw one transparent pixel? I realize I could draw a pixel with zero alpha, but AFAIK that doesn't erase what's underneath so that won't actually turn that pixel transparent. Thanks again for all the suggestions... I realize now that "easier 1-pixel selection" is probably a feature suggestion for the next version and for now I'll just have to be more careful with my mouse using Rect selection. :-)

When working with small images (e.g. buttons for websites) it's really convenient to select single pixels. For me I do this most frequently when trying to round the corners of web graphics by putting a few transparent pixels at the corners. Anyway, is there an easy way to select a single pixel? Ideally, I could use Rectangle Select or Lasso Select and just double-click on the pixel in question and it would be selected. Possible to do this easily? And possible to add my "double-click single pixel to select it" as a feature request for next version? Thanks!