MJW

Congratulations to @lynxster4 and @Pixey! Thanks to @DrewDale and Pixey for co-hosting! I'm very pleased to see so many high-quality entries for this theme.

Trail Blur is more or less a souped-up Motion Blur. I considered calling it Motion Blur+, but decided not to, since the default settings are quite different. The main extra feature is the ability to cause the blur to fade at the trailing end, giving a direction to the motion. That's something I've sometimes wanted that isn't available with Motion Blur. The other significant additional feature is the option of curved (circular) paths. The plugin: Trail Blur.dll Here is the UI: The description from the Help menu: Trail Blur creates a movement blur similar to the built-in Motion Blur effect, but with a number of additional options. The blur can fade away, and the blur's path can curve. The controls are: Angle: For straight blurs, the direction of motion. For curved blurs, the final direction of the motion. Distance: The length of the blur, in pixels. Curvature: The motion curvature. When 0, the motion is straight. When positive, the motion is clockwise. When negative, the motion is counterclockwise. Shift: The blur's position. When 0, the motion ends at the original position. When 1, the motion begins at the original position. Fade Amount: The maximum amount of fading. When 1, the path nearly disappears at the beginning of the motion. When 0, the blur does not fade. Fade Profile (Linear to Exponential): The profile of the blur fade. When 0, the blur fades linearly. When 1, the blur fades exponentially. Sample Spacing: The distance between blur samples. There are always an integer number of samples over the blur path. When 0, the number of samples equals the blur length, so the samples are one pixel apart. Positive values increase spacing, decreasing the number of samples. This can be used to produce multiple-exposure effects. Negative values decrease spacing, increasing the number of samples. This is sometimes useful for producing smoother blurs. Brightness Enhancement: The amount to increase brightness. In some instances, particularly when used with black backgrounds, increasing the brightness can be used to counteract the decrease in brightness that results from spreading out pixels over long blurs. Opacity Enhancement: The amount to increase opacity. In some instances, particularly when used with transparent backgrounds, increasing the opacity can be used to counteract the decrease in opacity that results from spreading out pixels over long blurs. Clamp to Canvas: The method for treating off-canvas pixels. When unchecked, pixels that are outside the canvas do not affect the blurred image. When checked, outside pixels are included, and are considered to have the color of the border pixels. This option is mostly intended for backgrounds of constant color. Some of the controls, such as the Brightness and Opacity Enhancements may be of delectable usefulness, Though I'd normally have an antialias feature for this type of plugin, it's already slow enough for long blurs on large images, and setting the Sample Spacing control below 1 can often achieve a similar result.

I'd do it by filling a layer with the desired color, as explained by Ego Eram Reputo, then using BoltBait's Paste Alpha plugin to copy and paste the inverted alpha values from the image into the colored layer. Set the alpha source to "clipboard alpha," and check the "invert calculation" checkbox. If you have to do it for 1000 images, it might get kind of tedious, but Paint.NET isn't a batch-processing program

Unfortunately, there's currently no plugin to do that. The requested method is called "polygon offsetting." In an earlier thread on the subject, I give a little detail on what's required.

Excellent cherries by @Pixey and @lynxster4! I've noticed that for the themes that attract only a few entries, the quality of the entries is generally very high. I thought it was a good theme, and I'm surprised there weren't more entries. As I mentioned on the discussion thread, I wonder if cherries are a little too much, in shape and color, like apples, so that to some it seemed repetitious. I planned to enter. I had an entry mostly done, but didn't have time to create a satisfactory equirectangular reflection map.

A plugin that might me useful for this is Recolor Using Palette. A trick I tried that seemed to have potential is to Gaussian blur the image by about eight pixels, enlarge it, then replace the pixels in the enlarged image with the selected colors using Recolor Using Palette or a similar plugin. Sometimes there are regions where two colors meet that get that wrong color. Those can be selected with the Magic Wand (with a low tolerance) and filled with the correct color, or filled with the Paint Bucket. I only tried it fro a small example, so I don't know if it's practical for a full image. EDIT: After a quick try with the full map, I doubt my idea is very useful. An approach that might be worth a shot is to vectorize the map with InkScape.

If you want a pre-built plugin, Black and White+ will work if you set the Blue and Green weights to 0. (Setting the Red weight to 1 isn't necessary, since the weights are normalized by default.)

I don't think tracing should be forbidden. I just think themes should chosen that don't require extensive reliance on tracing. If the goal is realism, it's pretty hard to avoid tracing when the theme is "Tennis Racket." When the theme is "Shield," it's a lot easier. The most tracing I ever used was for "Maple Leaf," where I traced a leaf's outline. I would have preferred to produce the outline in some other fashion, but nothing I tried produced the result I was after. My taste runs toward realism, but I have no problem with less-than-relistic renderings in OOTF (though I'm unlikely to vote for them).

I don't think the comp should be ended. Even though the last two themes attracted few entries, the "Pencil" theme before that had ten entries, and the recent "Umbrella" theme had eight. I certainly don't think photos should be used as the objects, themselves. I was just asking if photos can be used for producing reflections on objects. I'd be happy to live by whatever the rule is. Maybe the best rule is a clear-cut, no photos as part of the final image. I'm not sure which entries Woodsy is saying used photos, or what specifically is meant by "using" photos. Pixey's shoe entry used a photo in the sense that a photographic image was traced over to produce the shape of the object and its highlights, but I think that's entirely within the rules. I will say, though, that I prefer themes that don't depend largely on tracing, and I suspect they attract more entrees. For instance, for the pencil theme I used photos (and actual pencils) only to get the proportions, since pencils are quite geometric, so they can be produced more or less from scratch. Objects as complex and non-symmetric as tennis rackets and shoes pretty much require a trace-and-color approach, which while technically challenging, isn't, to me, as interesting. (BTW, I thought "Radio" was a fine theme; I had some good ideas.) I don't know why the "Cherry" theme hasn't gotten more entries. Maybe cherries are just too similar to apples, so there's a bit of been-there-done-that. I was working on an entry, but ran out of time.

I think either Photo or Selection makes sense. This plugin depends on the selection in a way most plugins don't. In most plugins, the same thing occurs in the selected area as would occur if there were no selections at all. The selection merely restricts the region that's affected. In this plugin, the results are determined by the pixels on the selection boundary.

The OOTF rules forbid the use of photographs. Does that extend to using equirectangular photographs as reflection maps? I can understand why it might, but on the other hand, the image isn't of the the object, itself, just the surrounding environment.

Congratulations to (taking a deep breath) @Pixey , @Seerose , @MadJik , @dipstick , @lynxster4. and @welshblue! Obviously a close competition. A wide variety of excellent entries by one and all. My favorites were Pixey's bunny and welshblue's (somewhat unruly) flower patch. @lynxster4's hosting is much appreciated.

Great entries by @Pixey and @lynxster4! Sorry I didn't submit something for this theme, but I don't think I could have come close in quality of the three entries. Thanks to @DrewDale for hosting.

You'll probably have a better chance of getting a meaningful answer if you add some more detail. Simply saying "it fails" isn't very helpful. How does it fail?

I don't know why some programs use transparent white and others use transparent black. I'd guess that in Microsoft, Color.Transparent is defined as transparent white, and that's why it's transparent white in Paint.Net. If you ask me, transparent black makes more sense. I wrote a very simple plugin called Transparent to Transparent Black which will convert all transparent colors to transparent black.

Maybe it's just because the majority of images I've posted here have been in comps, but I certainly think the archived comp section should be updated. Though I know almost nothing about website administration, and even less about this particular site, if there's read-write access to the underlying files, it doesn't seem like it would be too difficult to write a Perl script or something similar to update all the postimage links. Also, it seems there might be something that could be done to translate the the image-link lookups on the fly.

I sure wish postimage would restore the old names. If not, I hope there's some automated way all the links on the PDN site can be updated. Not only is editing all one's own links a huge hassle, but in quite a few cases it's not possible. The comp section's Archived threads are locked, and the posts can't be edited, and the Galleria images are not under the control of the original creator.

Quadrilateral Correction may do what you want.

If you're referring to the shape of "Riverside," one way to do it is to use Paste Warp+. I gave an example of how to do something similar in a recent thread. Unfortunately, the images in my comment are currently unavailable from PostImage.com.

I very recently mentioned the desired functionality on another thread:

You might try the ShapeMaker plugin. (And grovelling for upvotes is unbecoming.) I'll add that I wish the line/curve tool had a mode allowing lines and curves to be chained end-to-end, so that the last point in one line/curve becomes the first point in the next. As far as adding more control points, each curve produced by the line/curve tool is a cubic polynomial, so four control points is an intrinsic limitation for that type of curve, since four points determine a cubic polynomial, just as two points determine a line segment.

Assuming you're referring to BoltBait's Paste Alpha plugin, it should do what you want. Are you using it correctly? The alpha mask needs to be in the clipboard. It can be either a grey-scale mask, where black is transparent and white is opaque, or a mask of the actual alpha values to use. Which one is determined by the plugin's alpha-source control.