dawn

Really? The only blurring I did was on the floor... Well, maybe it's the "warmth" effect; I'll tone that down, thanks. Thanks Your pic is interesting; reminds me of one of those Magic Eye things. I like the 3D effect.

Here's a picture of my new puppy, Persephone (11 weeks old, shepherd/hound mix), I took yesterday: Left side is before some PDN-ing, right side is after. Not completely satisfied with it, I think the floor reflection could use some work. Any thoughts?

As a knitter, this is one of the most useful plugins for me in Paint.net. This chart would have taken me ages to do by hand... It still took a while, but your grid plugin makes charting go a lot faster -- thanks, MadJik!

Nothing special. I drew an asterisk (with the cross spokes on different layers) and then played with various blurs and color balance/hue-sat till I got something I liked. I think I also did some gradient fade outs. (Basically fading from the center out to black.) Just play around with pdn, and I'm sure you'll be able to come up with something similar fairly easily.

Heh, glad I'm not the only one. 8)

Thanks, I totally missed the bottom of the interface.

Here's a more refined version of what I was going for earlier: By the way, is there any way to change the lighting angle in Shape 3D? (I wanted the light source to mesh with my cast shadow, but I couldn't find a way to do it other than by manipulating the cast shadow -- not the light in the plugin itself.)

Rikku, you're gonna get yelled at if you don't resize your avatar. (It should be no bigger than 100x100px I think.)

Do you mean on the squiggle or the sphere? The original squiggle had anti-aliasing turned on already; here's the sphere with AA set to 5 (and transparency 'cause I wanted to see what that would look like ): I know it's not perfect. But I still think it has a pretty high coolness:effort ratio. 8)

I dled this plug-in a while back but have been avoiding using it since the interface intimidated me. (Yes, even with the English translation. All the tabs and buttons and angles freaked me out. ) Anyway, today I decided to try it out and I'm amazed by the results. Shape 3D took this 5-second squiggle: and turned it into this: . (Okay, I added a little cast shadow. But still!) I know I'm a little late in saying so, but thanks MKT!

Thank you!

Something I slapped together last night after receiving the latest pics of my nephew: He has the funniest expressions. I think I'm gonna do a whole series.

Wither, very nice!

Sorry I haven't checked this thread in a while. Any of you may use any of the pictures I post here for whatever you want! And thanks for the compliments!

Wow! I can't believe I missed this before. This is really useful, thanks. ETA: Some more pics of this plugin in action: original: mirror: lighten: darken:

This is lovely.

Here's an avatar I made for another forum a while back: I wanted a sort of ghost-like feel to it. I found that dragging a transparent cloud layer across my base worked quite nicely. Unfortunately, the .gif itself turned out about 200kb too big, but I still keep it around just to look at.

Hint for those of us (like me, heh) who hate fussing around with layers to make them line up just so: Before you do ANYTHING, record the pixel widths of both your front and side images. Open up your front image and adjust the canvas size like BuzzKill tells you to (remember to anchor center right, secondary color transparent, uncheck "maintain aspect ratio") but instead of just doubling the width, add the number of pixels in the side image's width to the number of pixels in the front image's width and input that. For example, say your front image is 500x1000 and your side image is 250x1000. Instead of just doubling the width on the first canvas resize to 1000x1000, make it 750x1000 instead. (500 + 250 = 750) Now paste into a new layer your side image. You should find that it is perfectly aligned with your front image, no fussing necessary! Ctrl+Shift+R (resize canvas size again) this time doubling your original canvas size. (eg., If your original front image was 500x1000, now make it 1000x1000.) Follow BuzzKill's tutorial from where s/he says "Time to give it perspective" (using the rotate/zoom function).

Huh, I never noticed that drop-down menu before. Yeah, that works too. I usually do gradients by playing with the color palette. I click "More>>" and set either my primary or secondary color to transparency 0 and the other to white, black, or whatever I want the image to fade out to. Then I apply my gradient, usually in a new, top layer. The advantage of this is that you can also set the transparency to something that isn't 0. (e.g., If you wanted to do a subtle color wash, you could choose your transparency color and then set it to 50 or something, and then do your gradient.) As far as I know, you can't do that with the drop-down menu, that's for pure transparency fades only.

Very pretty! I love all your different colors. And did you use some kind of grid/perspective thing on the edges? How'd you do that?

I did this tutorial a while back and I find that if you add a little fade-to-white gradient it makes for a nice backdrop on websites, desktops and things: Here's a linear (reflected) fade out: And here's the same image only with a radial fade out:

Pretty cool. It looks like an exploding red giant; like a doomsday sunset.

cjmcguinness, that's very close to what I was looking for, thanks! The main thing I wanted was a "glossy" effect that wouldn't overly distort the layers beneath. That way I could hopefully put any kind of picture as a background layer and still get that glossy/3D look on top. I wasn't even sure in my head what that would look like, but your pics have given me some idea, thank you.

Thanks pyrochild! The real credit goes to all the creators who make such great plugins around here. I love that you can get such cool effects just by clicking and adjusting a few knobs here and there.

The author of this tutorial suggested playing around with round gradients, so I made... ... a fire-sphere. Because, well, I like spheres. Looking at it now, I think I should have made the highlights more transparent, but I stupidly didn't save the .pdn before I merged the layers, so, oh well. I still think it looks nifty. Great tutorial!