tsjipko

And hello to you, too! Sorry for misplacing this thread; an honest mistake. And now that it's clear to me that this isn't even feasible as a plugin, it would be nice if a mod could move it over to the GD & Q forum. And with that, this thread can be considered as a feature request for Paint.NET itself and not a plugin request anymore. And thanks for suggesting the outline tool for this. That plugin actually made me think that it would be rather easy to cook up a plugin that could expand a selection. Using the outline plugin actually works for expanding a selection. But it involves a lot of steps - making a new layer, filling a selection, deleting the newly created layer, returning to your original layer - that can be easily avoided if this simple feature would be included in the program.

Hi people. I suck at coding, so I decided to post a request here and see if one of you smart people is able to come up with the following plugin. What I miss in Paint.NET is the function that is present in other image editing programs: expanding and shrinking of your selection. What this does, is add a specified number of pixels to the border of the selection (adding an 'outline' of the selection to the selection) - "Expand". Or it subtracts the specified number of pixels from the selection border - "Shrink". A very basic version of this function actually is present in the 'move selection' tool of Paint.NET, where you can expand or shrink a selection by carefully dragging the top-left and the bottom-right handles of the selection until you've added the desired amount of pixels to the border of the selection. However, this doesn't work anymore when you're trying to manipulate more complex selections. The best example is a selection with a hole in the middle. By dragging the selection to 'expand' it, as described above, you're actually increasing the size of the hole in the middle of the selection along the way. What an 'expand selection' tool would do, is add pixels to all the borders of the selection, making the hole in the middle smaller. I hope I've described the function clearly and that somebody can actually find the time to implement this in a plugin. Thanks for any responses already: I'm always willing to explain more about what I'm talking about here.