wheany

How so? And how is it different from, say, any browser extension?

I'd like it if Paint.net's plugin folders were under the user profile, inside AppData. Currently, the default method of trying new plugins is a bit of a pain, since every time you copy or delete the plugins, you have to go throug UAC. Personally, I have made a symlink from under Paint.net's folder to my profile, but this only works on single-user machines. If anyone else wanted to do the same, they could not. Additionally, every time I update Paint.net, I have to remake the symlink because the updater replaces it with a normal folder.

To answer my own question: You can set a scheduled task to run when a user logs in, and set that task to run at the highest privileges. Of course you can make the task run at certain times as well.

A bit more detailed answer: JPEG works by changing each 8x8 pixel block in the image into frequency domain (using discrete cosine transform, if you want to look it up). These frequencies have amplitudes. Before they are compressed, the JPEG compressor divides the amplitudes with a value and saves that value to the file. It's an integer division, so it loses information. Pretend there's a 2x2 pixel image. When converted to frequency domain, its amplitudes might be something like 37 36 30 21 If you divide all these values by 1 before compression, you have lossless compression, since when you decompress, you get the exact same values back. If you (integer) divide all these values by 2, they become 18 18 15 10 And when you decompress the file, by multiplying the saved values by 2, you get 36 36 30 20 These are not exactly the same values as were put in, so the compression becomes lossy. Divide by 10 and you get 3 3 3 2 Which becomes 30 30 30 20 upon decompression, which is already quite a significant difference to the original. On the other hand, the preprocessed data contains a lot of repetition (3, 3, 3, 2), which is easy to compress, so the file becomes smaller. That is what the JPEG quality option does on a technical level. Smaller quality values = bigger divider = more quality loss.

Is there a way to automatically copy plugins to paint.net/effects? I want to sync the plugins of two machines automatically (using Unity). One is an XP machine, other is a Windows 7 machine. On the XP machine things go smoothly, Unity runs and is able to copy all the dlls to and from the plugin directory, but on the Windows 7 machine, I get an "Access denied" even when I run the synchronization script as an Administrator. I understand that this is a security feature and I don't want to disable that, if possible. Do you know if, in the future, Paint.NET will have its plugin directory under the user's profile, since that is writable.