kcushing

Duh. I just realized. Switch to the magic wand. Hold down Alt to subtract and click somewhere transparent. Thanks for making me think it through.

Old habits die hard. I haven't used Photoshop in maybe 14 or 15 years, but I still sometimes forget I'm not using it but am using Paint.net. That being said, is there a way to have the selection snap to pixels and stop selecting anything transparent? For some reason when I go to move a selection I still expect this to happen automatically. If not, is there an add-on to accomplish this?

Thank you. The Feather is exactly what I needed. I will use that in the future.

It looks like AA's Assistance plugging does what I'm looking for.

I sort of found a way. After selecting a circle, I inverted the selection and then hit delete. I then selected a little smaller circle, inverted and did a zoom blur. That gave me the effect I was looking for.

When I make a selection and hit delete, is there a way to select how many pixels into the select the deletion will be dithered in?

That makes sense. I guess I just expected it to be editable because I opened a Photoshop file where the text layer was editable. It's cool that it can still import an editable photoshop text layer even though you can't edit it within Paint.net.