shumoo

Yup it's on it's own layer. I like the result of your suggestion. It's more of an additive effect however, and does not produce the same effect since there is no color removed from the bottom layer. It's entirely possible my environment hasn't been updated in over a year. Today I updated to the latest version of paint.net and had to update a number of plugins. As best I can describe it, I think what I did before was similar to smudging a 0 alpha color over a 255 alpha color, effectively only subtracting from the original color.

Just curious, but has there been any behavioral changes to the smudge plugin? I went back to update a project I used it on and I can not replicate the work I had done with it before. More specifically, when taking a stroke across an area where no color is present, I used to be able to smudge the absense of the color across a colored area. This produced a really nice smoke-like effect when used with the right colors. I've included a sample of the problem I'm having here. The top portion is the desired effect on text, the lower portion shows the "T" smudged with the new plugin. I have tried different starting positions for each stroke, further from and closer to the areas with color with no avail. Just scratching my head now. http://img59.imageshack.us/img59/3521/shu333temp.png Any suggestions are greatly appreciated.