MJW

You're most welcome. Happy I could help.

I'm not quite sure what you're trying to do, but you could try my Color Clearer plugin. It does take transparency into account.

It may be too late to propose a rule modification for this topic, and perhaps it's not a good idea, but I think it would be better if for this subject the rules be changed to allow a simple background, such as a solid color or a gradient. I don't think snowflakes are displayed to their best advantage against a white background. Most images I've seen of actual snowflakes are against a gradient, and I think there's a good reason for that: it highlights the details. I realize there have already been some fine entries shown against white backgrounds, but I believe many would be improved by having more contrast with the background. (Also, one of the entries already has a gradient background. It would be made street-legal.)

Normally I might be more sympathetic, but Ctrl+Shift+C, Ctrl+Shift+V is so easy. Hold down Ctrl+Shift, then hit C followed by V. C and V are even next to each other. (If such a feature were added, perhaps it could use Ctrl+Alt+D. I don't think that combination is used, and it parallels Ctrl+Shift+D for Duplicate Layer.)

Congratulations welshblue, Pixey, and lynxster4! Though there were only three entries, they were all very deserving winners. They were both imaginative and well-executed. I think the lack of entries is because this is a busy time of year for many people, and because "Christmas Garland" is a complex theme, requiring a lot of separate elements. Also, I suspect the high quality of the first three entries was a bit intimidating.

Congratulations to welshblue, Pixey, and lynxster4 for their excellent entries! Welshblue's was especially amazing. I was particularly impressed by the satiny golden bow, and the subtle wrinkle-texturing of the wrapping. Thanks to our host, toe_head2001!

If you can provide a few examples of what you're trying to achieve, you'll have a considerably better chance of getting a useful reply. Obviously I mean examples done by other people, not you. You might be able to find some using a Google (or other search engine) image search. As it is, I'm probably not alone in having no clue about what you hope to do.

Poltusi, I think that people are trying to tell you that you need to change the file's extension by renaming the file (in Windows, not Paint.NET). If you save a file in PDN, but give it an extension that doesn't match the format, you won' be able to open it. Right-click on the file. Select Rename from the dropdown list. Rename it to have the correct extension (ignore the Windows warning message). You should now be able to open it.

In the upper-right corner of the main window, in the menu bar, there are a series of small icons: a hammer, a clock, a stack of rectangles, a color wheel, a gear, and a question mark. Each will being up a menu. Click on the stack of rectangles to bring up the Layers menu

I think you overcorrected the perspective. The center building gets slightly wider as it goes up. It helps to draw a grid on an upper layer as a guide. Use some contrasting color on a transparent background for the grid. Once you readjust the distortion by moving the lower-right nub a bit left, try moving the lower-left nub a little upward. You should be able to decrease the distortion of the other buildings while keeping the center building square.

Quadrilateral Correction always crops to the quadrilateral. I think that's often undesirable. When doing perspective correction, the typical approach would be to select some perspective-transformed rectangle in the scene, and put the nubs at its four corners. The purpose is not to isolate that particular region, but to provide the inverse-perspective information. I think Quadrilateral Correction would be more useful if the entire scene, outside the quadrilateral, could be displayed. That would probably require the ability to offset, scale, and modify the XY proportions of the transformed image. Also, as with any plugin of this sort, it should have the option of antialiasing.

Thanks, Rick. I actually had looked at the code with ILSpy, but I wasn't sure what it was trying to achieve. I was hoping to learn the guiding principle behind it. In particular, I wondered whether the fading out of the last pixel in each row and column is intended or a bug. Your comment reminded me that once the left, right, top, and bottom interpolation colors are determined, the actual interpolation can be performed with BlendColors4W16IP. So if GetBilinearSample doesn't serve my needs, it isn't difficult to write my own version.

I suspect one reason for the limit is that large values can greatly slow the effect. I don't know what algorithm Trail uses, but I wouldn't be surprised if it basically amounts to searching opposite to the trail direction until an opaque pixel is encountered. For a long trail, that can result in a lot of per-pixel operations. If the high-quality option is implemented by multisampling, then that multiplies the number of operations by the number of subsamples per pixel. For large canvases (where long trails would be most common) the effect may be very slow. There is, of course, the argument that slow is better than unable-to-do-it. Provided Trail can properly abort the current rendering operations when the settings are changed, so that a user can reduce the trail-length if the effect is taking too long, the problem might not be too bad.

I'm confused about how GetBilinearSample is supposed to behave on the last pixel in a row or column. The situation is complicated because pixels need to be numbered from the upper-left corners so that fetching a pixel using GetBilinearSample will return the exact pixel when the coordinates have integer values. Pixels with non-integer coordinates are interpolated from the four surrounding pixels. The question is: how are samples handled when X is between Width-1 and Width? There are no rightward pixels to interpolate from. The way I thought it worked, and the way I believe it used to work, is that the last pixel in a row was not interpolated in X; the last row was essentially clamped to provide the rightward pixels. (Which also means the corner pixels are not interpolated at all.) Now, based on what I've seen in some tiling code I wrote, it appears to me that the last row and column fade to transparency. So the rightward row is, in effect, transparent. I can live with either, provided I know what it does, but I think the way I thought it worked is the better of the imperfect options. I think that if an opaque surface has a width of 100, there should be 100 opaque pixels in each row. even when subsampled.

Thanks, Ego Eram Ruputo. And Merry Christmas!

The Planetoid controls are very well done. I'll give it some serious consideration. Not that it really matters much, but does Planeload use a separate DLL for the controls or are they all in one DLL? Does it use ILMerge in the build process? Also, are the controls added to the forms with programmer-written code, or are they done using the VS Designer?

Though a plugin instead of a tutorial, you may be referring to: Lens distortion correction updated(20130501)

The difficulty is that I'd want the controls to have all the features they have in IndirectUI. I've rarely seen non-IndirectUI interfaces whose controls I've been happy with. They almost always seem clunky to me. Often they are missing even the reset buttons. I certainly agree that the height of the Texture Shader UI makes it difficult to use. I'll give some thought to converting to a non-IndirectUI interface, but it seems like an intimidatingly large project.

Welshblue, that's a good suggestion. The problem is that it's a IndirectUI plugin, and there's no way for IndirectUI plugins to modify the control values. Converting the plugin to use non-IndirectUI controls would be difficult, and something I don't want to do. I'll see if I can come up with a solution. I certainly agree that restoring previous settings (since there are so many) would be very useful.

Invert the text that will be on the bottom before applying the circular text plugin. EDIT: I forgot that hanspeter almost certainly used the CirrcleText plugin that just applies text. I was thinking in terms of using the Polar Transformation plugin. Getting the positioning correct with Polar Transformation is quite tricky.

Too bad there weren't more entries. All three entries are wonderful. Maybe they were too good: a bit intimidating. I wish I'd had more time lately. This is the kind of SOTW theme that I really like.

Sorry I didn't get an entry in the Christmas-present OOTF competition. I actually completed one about 45 minutes before the contest closed, but when I went to upload it to postimage, the website said uploads were temporarily disabled for site maintenance. I think it was Fate's way of telling me my entry didn't cut the mustard. I have to agree with Fate on that one. There were aspects I liked, but overall my entry was disappointing. It certainly wasn't in the same league as weshblue's incredible red-and-gold entry. EDIT: I just tried to upload again, and they're still disabled. I sure hope postimage isn't secretly going PhotoBucket on us.

@LauraAnn, the colors that RMSTITANIC and welshblue gave you are the base colors for the metal. You can load the palettes, or cut-and-paste the RGB codes (such as EFFDFF) into the Color Menu. Those colors are the starting points to producing metallic effects. Coloring an object with them won't make the object look metallic; that's impossible. Metal objects look metallic because of the bright highlights from reflected light sources, and because of the reflections from their surroundings. Take a look at the Tutorials. There are a number of Text tutorials on producing metallic effects. Most of the techiques are applicable to any metal object, not just text. Also look at the gold jewelry tutorials.

I suppose if that's how it seems to you, it's pointless to say you're wrong to feel that way. Nevertheless, that makes no sense to me. Using Explorer, you have to locate the file. With "Open Recent" you just have to choose among a few files, with the last file you saved at or near the top of the list. Why that would be more difficult than running a plugin to reopen the last file eludes me.

The UI is very well done. I think you should release it. Just provide a link to Kris Vandermotten's alignment plugins, and explain that yours is an all-in-one version. One thing though: The version I have is in the top-level Effect menu. I think it should be in the Object Menu. I assume Kris Vandermotten's are in their own menu to keep them together, and because there are so many, to avoid cluttering the Object menu. Perhaps the name should be changed to "Align Object".