Transparency Color question

[DeScruff]

Hey everybody, I wanna say Ive been using Paint.net for years (I love it!)
But there is one thing that lately that Ive been noticing as Ive had to use other programs and it relates to "100% transparency" and how Paint.Net does it vs some others.
Basically: If you have a blank transparent canvas, and use the color picker tool on the blank canvas you'll notice the color is actually Pure White with an alpha of 0 (sometimes referred to as 'Transparent White'), meanwhile some other programs seem to have Pure Black with an alpha of 0 (referred as 'Transparent Black').

Im just curious why this is. Has there ever been a established 'Standard' on which to use?
And why is one used over the other?

Its mostly only problematic when you work on something between two programs, and you expect the magic wand to select more then it has
... Well that as it seems a lot of the programs that use 'Transparent Black' don't seem to recognize 'Transparent White' when you Copy/Paste an image from Paint.net and will just make all transparent sections White with 100% alpha... - Happily Paint.net seems to not care (as it shouldn't because 0 Alpha is 0 Alpha so it gets brownie points

[MJW]

I don't know why some programs use transparent white and others use transparent black. I'd guess that in Microsoft, Color.Transparent is defined as transparent white, and that's why it's transparent white in Paint.Net. If you ask me, transparent black makes more sense. I wrote a very simple plugin called Transparent to Transparent Black which will convert all transparent colors to transparent black.

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Neither Transparent White (ARGB #00FFFFFF) or Transparent Black (ARGB #00000000) is more 'mathematically' correct.  So no, there has never been a 'standard'. Different applications use one or the other at the discretion of the programmer.

 

Early versions of paint.net 4 did have a few issues where the setting of transparent areas was not consistent with 3.5. The inconsistency was treated as a bug and quickly fixed.

[DeScruff]

13 hours ago, MJW said:

I don't know why some programs use transparent white and others use transparent black. I'd guess that in Microsoft, Color.Transparent is defined as transparent white, and that's why it's transparent white in Paint.Net. If you ask me, transparent black makes more sense. I wrote a very simple plugin called Transparent to Transparent Black which will convert all transparent colors to transparent black.

Ooo! Thank you! I'll agree it does make more sense in a 'Everything = 0' way, or if you think transparent should be 100% the opposite of the 'default opaque canvas'
 

11 hours ago, Ego Eram Reputo said:

Early versions of paint.net 4 did have a few issues where the setting of transparent areas was not consistent with 3.5. The inconsistency was treated as a bug and quickly fixed.

Interesting. I think I remember that. - And looking at the change log you made me realize Ive been using this program for nearly 10 years, Dang.