MJW

Another problem is the proportions. The legs are way too short. An average person's waist is above the center line. In the sprite, it's well below. I don't necessarily expect a cartoon-like character to have realistic proportions, but this doesn't look like a stylistic choice; it just looks crude and amateurish.

Is there a reason the zipped version is preferred? I always thought it was because the forum wouldn't accept raw DLLs, but apparently that's not so. I'd just as soon save a step when posting plugins and skip the zipping (not that it's a big deal).

A plugin I'm sure I could have used quite a number of times. Like Red ochre, I encourage you to move it to the already-existing "Text Formations" submenu, to prevent a proliferation of similar submenus.

Congratulations to Woodsy for another excellent entry. Congratulations to Pixey and Iron67, too. Thanks to toe_head2001 for hosting.

Strange. I don't seem to have the same effect. If you have hardware acceleration enabled, you might try disabling it to see whether that changes anything.

The highlight color in the tutorial is wrong, though. Highlights on colored metal are (approximately) the color of the metal, not white. Using white highlights makes the result look like colored plastic rather than gold. That could be easily corrected by using a gradient color map that goes to a fully-saturated golden color instead of white. (Of course, in the case of the current thread, that doesn't matter, since the letters aren't colored much).

BTW, I haven't forgotten about this. So far, though, the few experiments I've tried haven't produced satisfactory results.

When you save an image as PNG, just before it's actually saved, Paint.NET brings up a window titled "Save Configuration." The window lets you choose the PNG Bit-Depth with a radio-button list. The choices are, Auto-Detect, 32-Bit, 24-Bit, and 8-Bit. Choose Auto-Detect before clicking "OK." As I mentioned, the setting is persistent: if it's 8-Bit, it will remain 8-Bit until you change it; and once you change it to Auto-Detect, it will remain as Auto-Detect.

This is my version of fiery text. The basic idea is to use Clouds, Dents, Red ochre's Furblur, and my Hot Metal Glow. It also uses BoltBait's Paste Alpha. The exact order and settings can be changed to get various effects. For this example: Create a new image. Use Adjustments>Invert Color to make the background black. Add a new (transparent) layer. Make sure it's the top layer. Change the Primary Color to White by switching the Primary and Secondary Colors. Type the text into the new layer. Run Blurs>Furblur with the following settings changed from default: Repetitions: 30 Main Length: 30 Angle Variation: Main Angle Only, Curl Clockwise. Angle variation: Double S-Shape Run Blurs>Motion Blur with the following settings: Angle: 60 Distance: 5 Run Distort>Dents with the following settings: Scale: 12 Refraction: 30 Roughness: 14 Tension: 5 Quality: 3 Add a new Layer. On the new layer, run Render>Clouds with the following setting: Scale: 46 Copy the text layer to the clipboard and make the layer invisible. Make the Cloud layer the active layer. Run Object>Paste Alpha with the following setting: Alpha source: Clipboard alpha Run Color>Hot Metal Glow with the following settings: Incandescence Threshold Temperature: 150 Red temperature: 880 Yellow temperature: 1260 White Temperature: 1400 Red to Orange Shift: 0.544 EDIT: In place of Hot Metal Glow, you can use pyrochild's very flexible Adjustments>Gradient Mapping plugin with the Hot gradient.

Not only would it require a lot of effort to port it, the support required would also greatly increase. Rick Brewster has his hands full, as it is.

I believe reason is that Paint.PDN is intimately tied to the Windows operating system.

Make a square canvas, and create a single square that fills the entire canvas. Then run Layers>Rotate/Zoom with Tiling checked. Reduce the Zoom to some integer fraction (like 0.25 for 4, 0.125 for 8). For better results, use Red ochre's Distort>Aardvark plugin, which has antialiasing. Aardvark also has the advantage that it will by default divide the canvas into an integer number of repetitions. (You might want to set Tiling options to Repeat.) Create the original pattern so the lines run horizontally and vertically. Later on, you can rotate the pattern by 45 degrees to get the final format. To produce a pattern like the one shown, first create a 3x3 version, then make the modifications for the different patterns, then rerun Aardvark (or Rotate/Zoom) to increase the number of repetitions. Since you want to make a 3x3 version, you will probably want a canvas size that's divisible by 3. Other plugins that may prove useful are pyrochild's Borders N' Shapes and Chris Vandermotten's Object Align. These plugins will work inside a selection, so you can, for example, use Object Align to center a filled circle shape inside a selection, provided the background is transparent. (If I were trying to create the design shown, I'd probably first make the square with the border and circle. I then turn it to a 3x3 version and erase (or fill with white) the squares without the patterns. That might be easier than adding the borders and patterns later.)

Could it be that when the image was saved as PNG, it was saved with an 8-Bit Depth setting? Given that when you sample the beige tone in the non-speckled version you get a variety of colors, but when you sample it in the speckled version you only get one, that seems likely to me. The PNG setting is persistent, so I wouldn't be surprised if SuperSensual has it set to 8-Bit. Solution: Save an image and change it to Auto-Detect.

Or you could make one for yourself. Asking for information is encouraged. Asking others to do work for you is forbidden. EDIT: You are allowed to request that someone write a plugin to do what you want, since writing plugins isn't considered to be a skill that everyone possesses. I doubt that anyone will take the time to write a plugin to imitate old computer displays. It's not something that's commonly used, and it can be done reasonably easily with the already-existing effects and plugins.

For the lettering, I think you could do a pretty good job by using a dot-matrix style font (some examples) and perhaps using the Distort>Dents effect at a low distortion to jitter it a bit. Maybe copy it to a lower layer and apply a bit of blur to give a phosphor-glow look.

At least on my Windows 10 system, all icons from Medium Icons and above show up as thumbnail images, both for PNG and PDN files.

I was contemplating choosing one of my entries (probably the dirty version) and dropping the other, since they're so similar. I didn't realize the poll would begin so soon. I don't have much intuitive feeling for different timezones. I might have kept them both, anyway.

I wish those who posted non-compliant entries would have modified their entries to make them eligible. There were some good entries that weren't allowed.

a few innings later....

Perhaps you could explain what, exactly, Procreate can do. I doubt I'm the only one who has never heard of Procreate, or has no idea what it does. Taking a guess at what you might be after, there's a plugin by pyrochild called ScriptLab that lets you record a series of effect actions. No plugin can record things like selections, layer activation, image resizing, etc. It's impossible for plugins to do that.

That's a reflective text effect. You might take a look at the Clipwarp Shiny Text tutorial by barbieq25 and the Glossy Metallic Text tutorial by welshblue. Another way to do that is with my Texture Shader plugin, using one of the reflection modes on a height map produced by blurring white-on-black text. (When doing that kind of effect, it's almost always advisable to work at at least twice the final size then resize, since most methods are prone to ugly aliasing artifacts.) (If no one provides more practical advice in a few days, I'll try to come up with a suggestion on how to achieve a similar effect.)

This is probably the wrong place to ask your question. This section of the forum is devoted to questions and discussions about writing plugins. Unless you're asking how to import an image into a plugin you want to write (which might be what you mean by "whether or not it is even possible to do through code"), your question belongs in Paint.NET Discussions and Questions. I think you need to explain what you are trying to do in more detail. Err on the side of over-explaining.

I considered changing the background to a sky, but the downward view angle of the photo makes that difficult. Or at least I couldn't figure out how to make it look right.

Here's my attempt. You can use it if you wish, but I hope you try to replicate the steps or do your own variation. The steps I used: Copy the original image into PDN. To add the halo -- Add a new (transparent) layer. Set the Primary Color to white and the Secondary Color to black (by clicking the switch colors arrow in the Color Menu.) Select the Shape Tool, and set the Shape to an ellipse. The Brush Width should be 2. Draw an ellipse for the halo. Adjust it till the position looks right. It wil need to be moved around and tilted. [You should now have a white halo. Now to add a glow.] Run the Object>Edge Expander plugin with the following values: Maximum Distance: 26 Fade Rate; 2.0 (maximum value) Opacity Threshold: 255 (default) [You could draw the ellipse with a wider brush and only use a Gaussian Blur, but I think the Edge Expander glow looks better.] Run Blurs>Gaussian Blur Radius:2 (default) [ You should now have a glowing halo. Now to make it fade toward the back.] Select the Gradient Tool with the (default) Linear Gradient. Change the mode from Color Mode to Transparency Mode. Holding down the left button, start with the cursor at the front of the halo and move it to the back till the fading looks correct. It may take a few un-dos and retries. If the halo is a bit too bright, adjust the layer Opacity. In my example, I set the Opacity to 230. [You should now have a glowing, fading-toward-the back halo. Now to adjust the lighting on the dog. This is largely a matter of taste.] Make the dog layer active. Run Photo>Vignette. Start with the Density all the way up so you can easily see the highlighted region. Adjust the Center and Radius to highlight the front/top of the dog's head. When the right region is selected, adjust the Density as desired. I used: X Center: 0.25 Y Center: -0.14 Radius: 0.21 Density: 0.60 Run Photo>Glow. I used: Radius: 6 Brightness: 10 Contrast: 10 If the halo doesn't seem like it's in the best position, use the Move Selected Pixels tool to adjust its location, size, tilt, etc. The image is now complete. You may want to tweak the Brightness and Contrast, or the Hue and Saturation to get the best look.You should probably save the layered version before flattening to produce the final result. There's nothing special about the exact values I used. I did it by eye, then went back to check the values.