refar32

Well, maybe you know better than me what I'm actually looking for than myself, but I'm pretty sure the Gimp feature works different and much better than that plugin. I'm not trying to put any blame on the author of that plugin or complain about it, it did what he needed and he stopped working on it, that's fine. Obviously not, thanks for pointing out the ... err ... obivous. This is probably a language barrier thing - as you probably noticed, english is not my primary language and thus my in-mind translation thought: That's the plugin you need. Well, I found out it's not, and once again, that's fine, my bad. I guess this almost does what I want, but you can't control the length of the "shadow", appearently? Also, pretty fiddly, I guess. Still, maybe I can use the plugin for something else eventually, thanks for pointing it out. Where does the bolded part say something about creating a selection? What I've been doing to get it to do something useful at all was moving the part that I want to drop a shadow to a completely new picture, move the shadow-dropper all the way to the bottom of the image and then apply the plugin. And, yes, under these circumstances, I guess it kinda does what I want, except the operations neccessary are more work than doing the detour to Gimp. If there's a way to get the shadow to appear whithout moving what should drop it all the way to the bottom of the image, please tell, because then I've indeed been unable to figure out how. Thanks for trying to help guys, guess I'll have to keep resorting to Gimp. -Refar

Ah well, sorry BoltBait, I forgot to mention that I actually tried the plugin you linked to and another one called "Drop Shadow". The linked plugin seems horribly inefficient, is extremely fiddly to use and still doesn't produce quite the results I'm after. Drop Shadow, despite - judging by the name - sounding like EXACTLY what I need doesn't seem to be able to drop shadows at all, just produce a blurry, shadowy background graphic. Maybe my google-fu wasn't failing me after all? Hard to believe noone ever bothered to bring this feature to PDN, but maybe that's actually the case. Is there a feature wishlist somewhere? In case anyone can point me to something helpful after all, please do. Oh, and BoltBait, thanks for replying. -Refar

Well, I think the topic title gave it all away - I have to process a number of images each of which needs to have a perspective shadow generated. Sadly, I've been unable to locate a plugin that offers this functionality in Paint.NET - is my google-fu just failing me or is there really no such plugin? I found GIMP comes with this functionality included, but I loathe Gimp's UI and constantly fall into PDN shortcuts, so I couldn't be happier to find a way to do this step in PDN. In case there's any doubt what the functionality actually does: It takes a basic image like this and adds a shadow in a configurable angle, like this: Someone got a hint for me? Thank you very much in advance. -Refar

Ok, once again a not STRICTLY plugin related question, but you guys helped me tremendously once, so I'm going to try again. I want to perform a series of very simple transformations on a given image, and currently I fail to even take the first step properly. This first step is resizing the base image, mostly reducing it's size to about 50% (but that can differ). I thought performing such mundane task should be easy enough in the .NET framework, but I was proven wrong. I found several different ways of doing this utilizing different methods from various namespaces, but they all bring the same problem to the table: whenever the job finishes, I end up with a (usually somewhat blurry) resized picture ... but it has a frame of semi-transparent pixels around it which disqualifies the image for the next step I would like to take. I tried to google a solution, and found several things, but none of them actually solved the problem. The best one managed to get rid of those pixels to the top and to the left, but not on the bottom and to the right. (It involved setting some sort of FlipXY property). Appearently there's a glich in the DrawImage routine that causes it to think pixels outside of the resized image's boundaries are white, but I'm not sure. Anyway, surely there must be a way to do a simple resize without getting such artifacts. Can anyone provide a code snippet that'll do the trick? Thank you very much in advance. -Refar

I'm honored to receive a reply from the master of Paint.NET in person, thank you very much Rick. I tried to recreate that snippet how I understood it as best I could ... and it ALMOST does what I want it to do - except it doesn't work correctly on ALL pixels. Probably some wee little error someplace ... but I can't find it. Here's what I made of the code you provided: private int scaleMult(int a, int { return ((a) * ( + 0x80); } private int scaleDiv(int r) { return ((((r) >> 8) + (r)) >> 8); } private int scale(int a, int { int r = scaleMult((a), (); r = scaleDiv(r); return r; } private int blend(int a, int { int retVal; if (a < 128) { retVal = scale(2 * a, ; } else { // This was the line with the error //retVal = scale(255 - a, 255 - ; retVal = scale(2*(255 - a), 255 - ; retVal = 255 - retVal; } return retVal; } What's my OBVIOUS mistake? Thank you very much in advance. Edit: Proof to the idea that sometimes just writing down your problem brings you closer to the solution. Simple error, I forgot to add the 2* multiplier before one calculation. Doh! Now it works perfectly, thank you SO much for your help Rick. I corrected the snippet so it works, should anyone else ever stumble across this, he'll have a working code to copy/paste. -Refar

I'm not planning on developing a full-fledged Paint.NET effect, so I hope it's ok to ask this here anyway. Otherwise I apologize and ask for the thread to be moved where it belongs. I'm currently in the process of developing a little tool in C#. It's really only a small utility to merge pictures of fixed sizes in a specific way. Nothing fancy at all. I have very little experience in picture processing, so I'm no expert nor do I aim to get one anytime soon. The tool I've written already works as intended, but I'd like to add a functionality to it that's supposed to work like the overlay layer mode, but I have no idea how that exactly works. I know how to process images in principle, and obviously I'll have to do something with each overlaid pixel. Could anyone, in simple terms, explain what it does? Such as, takes the highest Green value from both pictures, or adds half the Red value from picture A to that of picture B ... obviously these examples are nonsense in this context, but I'd like to know what I need to do in a similar manner. Otherwise, I downloaded an older version of Paint.NET - maybe someone can point out in which of the source files the blending takes place, then I could look it up there. Thank you very much in advance. -Refar