MJW

This is getting silly, but you should notice that I italicized "almost." The purpose of italics is to draw attention to the particular word. I was emphasizing that the rule applied to most, not all, tutorials. Reply if you want, I'll have no more to say. I was on your side in my original comment, but I'm beginning to regret it. EDIT: I think you may have misinterpreted my intention when I said: " I hope you figured out that I meant to say 'not absolutely required.'" I wasn't trying to say you should have known; I just meant that I hope you didn't add the screenshots on my account, because I meant to say just the opposite.

Not my mind, but the following sentence where I said: Also, the idea that this is a rare exception that absolutely requires screenshots is a bit illogical.

I hope you figured out that I meant to say "not absolutely required." (The sccreenshots do improve it.)

I've got to say, I think this is one of those rare exceptions where screenshots are not absolutely required. The rule is: It be improved by having screenshots, but I think most anyone could follow it with just the text.

Well, I certainly appreciate what you both did. I hope my entry will justify the extra time.

Thank you!

I request that the Hourglass OOTF entry period not be closed on July 29th. It was opened on July 19th, which is only about ten days, instead of the usual fourteen. It's quite a difficult theme, and my entry will probably not be completed by tomorrow.

I hate to volunteer to do something, then not do it, but I'll try to write this plugin. I've probably got most of the stuff needed in other plugins. (Please no reps before I actually release the thing! It will only make me feel more guilty if I don't get it done.)

There is, I think, a non-trivial aspect to this. If the images are spaced closely enough, they could overlap. Perhaps spacing that close could be disallowed, but the are cases where the same image wouldn't overlap if rotated to other angles. Disallowing that spacing might be undesirable. Of course it could be handled, but it's more complicated that a normal tiling algorithm.

If you're referring to Paste From Clipboard, the Offset control allows the pasted image to be repositioned. However, I thought your goal was to paste the image into the middle of the canvas. As Ego Eram Reputo points out, if you paste an image in the normal, non-plugin, way, you can move it around afterward, since the Move Selected Pixels tool is automatically selected.

There's no way to make that the default PDN action, but you might try the Paste From Clipboard plugin. The default position to paste is the center.

Great to see you back here again, welshblue! I'm so sorry to hear about your health problems.

You can also set the Gradient tool's blend mode to Difference, which gives less control, but is easier, since it can all be done on one layer. You might also try using the Texture Shader in place of Emboss. To eliminate the graininess when the Texture Height is large, you can first smooth it with the Texture Smoother. Running Surface Blur prior to the Texture Smoother is sometimes useful to reduce the amount of smoothing needed. The potential disadvantage to smoothing is that it rounds the creases. In some cases that's desirable, in others it's not. One other suggestion. It's sometimes useful to use the Gradient tool in the the Reflected or Diamond modes.

Unfortunately, it is editor dependent. Microsoft more or less considers transparent to be "transparent white," since that's what the internal value Color.Transparent is defined as. Paint.NET mostly follows that, though not completely consistently. If you want to convert all the transparent colors to transparent black, you can run my plugin Transparent to Transparent Black before saving the image. (I think transparent black makes more sense then transparent white, since all the color values are zero.) If you save in a file format other than PNG or PDN, there are no guarantees that the file conversion won't change the transparent pixels to some other value.

Another approach is to select the white background with the Magic Wand in global mode with a high enough tolerance that the edge pixels are selected, then run the Grim Color Reaper or the Color Clearer. The white will be removed, and the edges will be made semi-transparent, making them smoother. (That's more or less what the HSV Eraser does when the non-erased color is preserved.)

The problem with using the Grim Color Reaper is that it will leave the remaining logo semi-transparent unless the the colors are fully saturated -- which in this example they're not. Also, not to push my own plugins, but for many cases, my Color Clearer is better than the Grim Color Reaper. It would, though, have the same problem when applied for this purpose, since the goal of both plugins is to replace as much of the selected color as possible with transparency. Non-saturated colors contain white, which can be removed. (I'll add that when removing white from opaque images, the Grim Color Reaper and the Color Clearer do almost exactly the same thing; it's when removing other colors, or when there's transparency, that the Color Clearer may do a better job.)

**** Removed because it didn't really answer the question. **** Sorry about that.

One thing I would suggest if using the HSV Eraser with this image is to set the Match Color to white, and Portion of Non-Erased Color to Preserve to 1.00. I think that will produce better edges.

I guess two entries is enough to hold a vote, but I sort of expected it would be cancelled due to lack of interest. I honestly thought the Pizza-Slice theme would attract a reasonable number of entries.

I don't think that solves the problem (assuming it's considered a problem -- which it is by me). No matter how big the canvas is, the image is still clipped to the rectangle that corresponds to the transformed quadrilateral. Increasing the canvas size would merely increase the size of the transparent area surrounding the rectangle. I would like the option of preserving the region outside the rectangle. In that case, first increasing the canvas size would be useful, if the plugin didn't have the option of scaling and moving the transformed image, since otherwise either some areas of the image would move outside the canvas, or the transformed image would need to be downsized to fit the canvas. If you consider Eli's Aug. 26, 2016 example image it may be clearer. In many cases I'd want to use the picture Eli selects with the nubs to establish the perspective transformation, but keep all the surrounding structure in the transformed image, not just the picture, itself.

I agree the theme is probably a dead horse, but I'm preparing an entry, which I'd kind of like to submit even if it's ultimately closed down for lack of interest. I thought this would be a theme theme would attract a fair amount of interest. I realize after working on my entry what a difficult theme it actually is.

I've had that problem, too. Another solution would be for the PDN color menu to have a mini-palette of recently used colors, containing, for example, the last 16 selected colors.

Thanks Andrew. Glad to hear it's fixed. I'm annoyed with myself for not getting it fixed in the original release. As I mentioned, I fixed it in the source file, then forgot to save the change.