silverhammer

Well, while we're on the topic... the circle tool as well is very CPU intensive when holding SHIFT.

How about rather than posting snide comments you actually say what you don't like about my idea. What exactly is wrong with making the gradients in Paint.NET look more smooth?

Haha! Of course! That works great! I find that frosted glass :FrostedGlass: with settings 4,0,1 mimics the effect almost perfectly for most gradients. So there! Don't come to hasty conclusions. In order to fully implement this, one would merely need to make the gradient tool apply the frosted glass effect afterwards with the maximum scatter radius as a function of the difference between the two gradient colors and its total length. I see no reason why this should not be used in replacement of the current gradient tool. Um.... what? I've done the effect myself and it does solve the problem. You see, the issue is that Paint.NET gradients make rectangles of color transitioning between two colors. If you're going from FFFFFF to FDFFFF then there's only one intermediate color and hence there will be only three rectangles - which can be really bad-looking. Frosted glass fixes this because it blurs the edges between the rectangles. Gaussian blurring wouldn't work because the adjacent rectangles are already as close together as possible without being the same color - so frosted glass is the only way to go. Also, if you make the maximum scatter radius a function of the size of the rectangles and the overall gradient, the effect would work fine for any size of gradient. Bam. You can see pretty clearly the gradient lines on the left even outside of the selection. But on the right...

Purely dithered gradients do look bad, but that's because they only use two colors. What I'm talking about is the Photoshop style of dithering that combines your standard Paint.NET gradient with dithering to smooth the transition between the intermediate colors. Here's a magnified picture I made of two similar gradients with a selection using the magic wand tool on 0% tolerance. This seems to me like it wouldn't be all that difficult to implement and it really improves the look of gradients.

Well I've briefly used Photoshop and I can say that you cannot easily accomplish that effect in Paint.NET. Whither's result is just about as good as you're going to get. Sorry?

Actually my interest is now piqued. The solution you got wasn't really a gradient following a curvy line, just two straight gradients separated by a curving line. Would this even be possible in Paint.NET? What I have in mind is like the linear (refleced) gradient but with a curving line in the center a la :LineCurveTool: rather than a straight one. If we could pull this off (possibly through a plugin), it would be a really powerful effect.

Honestly you do not need any plugins to get this done. 1. First, as always, do not start on the default background layer. Either delete it (Ctrl-A, Delete) or make a new layer :AddNewLayer:. 2. Make your swoosh using the line tool :LineCurveTool: but right-click and drag the points to make it a Bezier curve. That way the two points will sort of "tug" on the line so that it will always look nice and smooth. 3. Use the paint bucket :PaintBucketTool: to fill the bottom portion of the image. Make sure to set the tolerance low enough to remove any line between the swoosh and the area you're filling. 4. Duplicate the layer :DuplicateLayer:, toggle visibility of the top one and select the lower one. Tinker with the brightness and contrast until it's a nice shade of gray/black. Use Gaussian blur :GaussianBlur: and then move the whole layer up and to the left or right a little. Toggle visibility of the top layer again. Tada! Drop shadow without a silly little plugin! Note that you might want to make the swoosh a little bigger than you want and then crop it at the end. This will allow you more freedom to place the layer containing the shadow.

When it comes to gradients, Paint.NET is pretty lacking. Since it doesn't dither, subtle gradients end up looking stripey and altogether not very attractive. Is there a way we could add this option? For those who don't know, dithering is when you make a checkerboard pattern of two different colors to blend them together. When used within gradients, it makes the gradient look even more smooth especially when transitioning between two similar colors. To see what I mean for yourself, draw a gradient and click on parts of it with at 0% tolerance. Notice the stripes? The larger the size and the smaller the difference between the two colors, the wider these stripes become - sometimes resulting in a very harsh look.