A list of persistent and possibly dangerous bugs

[Sednaiur]

Hello

 

Hereon I like to list some bugs, that I know of since a long time (some of them being persistent since at least 2010) and that I hope can and or will be fixed, as - in my opinion - would make Pant.net way more confortable and safer to use. I don't know if they are reported yet, or if they are known but just not fixed for some reason, but I could not find anything about it in the bugs subforum. Please note that I use the latest version (version 4.0.21 at the time of this post) of Paint.net and that I do not use any plugins, so it is just the raw application. So, here I go:

 

1)

First, a bug (and a very dangerous one, when it comes to destroying the quality of your designed graphics) that has to do with the pipette-tool to pick any color from the graphic.

Lets say you have a color with HSV values of 40, 40, 90 on the picture and now you pick that color with the pipette. Now, Paint.net will change these parameters to a value of 39, 40, 89 for some reason. When you now draw with this color and, later, pick that new color that you just drew on the picture, Paint.net may or may not (I really don't know on what it depends if Paint.net does it or not) change the HSV values again, in this case to either

39, 40, 88

38, 40, 89

39, 39, 89

or anything like that. This bug leads to bugged pallettes after some time (which is very bad, especially when you design 16 bit graphics) and I had it countless times in the past.

The only way to prevent that from happening, is to manually reset the HSV values of the picked color to the original ones (making a 39, 40, 89 to a 40, 40, 90 again).

I first thought that this could have anything to do with the hexadecimal system, but no other image editor I know of, does this. This bug is present since I started to use Paint.net in august of 2010.

 

2)

The second bug is in regard to saving images as either .png or .gif, what can cause some color-wise gibberish at some spots on the picture. When saving said type of images, sometimes Paint.net takes random pixels of the picture and changes it's colors to something else, like changing their color to a color from adjacent pixels. Please note that not all the pixels of a color get replaced like that, just an amount depending on the size of the picture. I took into consideration that .gifs may have a limited amount of possible colors on them, but the mentioned bug happened on a picture with around 260 colors, aswell as on a picture with 150 colors and a picture with just 50 colors. I may manually edit the grapical bugs out, but it may take a long time and also Paint.net may cause the bug to happen again, just in other spots and with different colors.

 

3)

Sometimes, while having multiple images open in Paint.net (not layers, just image files), when you copy a section of one of the images, paste it onto another one of the images, save it, and then close it,  Paint.net refuses to respont to any hotkeys whatsoever (not prompting indows to play any sounds when pushing keys). This also happens at random, when you recolor one of the images, save it and then close it.

 

4)

When picking a color from an image with the pipette-tool, editing its values, filling in any section with the fill-tool (0% tolerance in my case) and erasing any number from the hue-value with the backspace-key, may randomly cause Paint.net to fill either the whole image or a selected part of it with the selected color, for some reason. This bug happens to me on occasion since the last few updates came out.

 

5)

This may or may not be a bug, but rather a "feature" but just in case I list it anyways.

When adjusting any parameters in the HSV-panel while using keys to alter the values, Paint.net refuses to accept any hotkeys for some reason (in this case always promting Windows to play the "impossible action-sound" with each pushed key). If this is intended, I highly suggest to just allow hotkeys to be used, as it just makes the program slower the way it is now, but as far as I can see, is meant to allow fast editing of many files at once.

 

These are all the ones I can think of at the moment, but I know there were at least 2 to 3 more that are present since quite some time now. I think especially the 1st and second bugs need a desperate fix, as they cause heavy damage on any images they occur on, so I really hope I could be of any help with this report.

[BoltBait]

3 hours ago, Sednaiur said:

 

Lets say you have a color with HSV values of 40, 40, 90

 

Paint.NET works in the RGB color space. There is not a perfect 1:1 conversion from HSV to RGB. The conversion is provided as a  convenience.

[BoltBait]

4 hours ago, Sednaiur said:

When saving said type of images, sometimes Paint.net takes random pixels of the picture and changes it's colors to something else,

 

When saving an image, be sure to select a color depth that has enough colors for the image. If you select a smaller palette size, Paint.NET runs your image through an algorithm to reduce the colors before saving. This is done to save the highest quality image for the limited palette. 

[BoltBait]

4 hours ago, Sednaiur said:

Paint.net refuses to respont to any hotkeys

 

Be sure your mouse is floating over the image (and not over a docker window or toolbar) when using hotkeys. 

[NinthDesertDude]

I can't reproduce issue #4 on pdn 4.0.21.

 

Issue #5 is actually a feature request. Textboxes consume keyboard input when they have focus, so you'd have to bubble up to application-level commands if Ctrl is held or something. But as with most requests, since there's only one programmer available to handle them, they have to be useful to a large number of people to go on the features backlist. Actually, I would agree that it would be useful because my workflow involves selecting a color, then clicking the toolbar so I can switch tools.

[Rick Brewster]

I'll need better repro steps than "sometimes this happens ..."

 

If it's really important to you, then please make a list of super easy ("idiot proof" ) steps to clearly recreate each issue. A video often helps when there's any kind of ambiguity, which there usually is.

[Sednaiur]

6 hours ago, BoltBait said:

 

Paint.NET works in the RGB color space. There is not a perfect 1:1 conversion from HSV to RGB. The conversion is provided as a  convenience.

Okay, this clears it up then.

5 hours ago, BoltBait said:

 

When saving an image, be sure to select a color depth that has enough colors for the image. If you select a smaller palette size, Paint.NET runs your image through an algorithm to reduce the colors before saving. This is done to save the highest quality image for the limited palette. 

I think I save them in 24bit color depth. I do not remember how to change this setting, though.

5 hours ago, BoltBait said:

 

Be sure your mouse is floating over the image (and not over a docker window or toolbar) when using hotkeys. 

I always have Paint.net maximized and the cursoer over the image/ Paint.net. The hotkeys even work when over the Paint.net toolbar.

But I just could reproduce the bug several times. It goes like this:

I use rectangle selection to select an area of image 1 (I had 6 images open)

Then I copy to clipboard (by hotkey)

Then I select another image

Then I paste from clipboard (hotkey again)

Then I resize the pasted image

Then I save (using hotkey)

Close saved image, so Paint.net goes back to the previously selected image

No hotkeys are working

5 hours ago, Joshua Lamusga said:

I can't reproduce issue #4 on pdn 4.0.21.

 

Issue #5 is actually a feature request. Textboxes consume keyboard input when they have focus, so you'd have to bubble up to application-level commands if Ctrl is held or something. But as with most requests, since there's only one programmer available to handle them, they have to be useful to a large number of people to go on the features backlist. Actually, I would agree that it would be useful because my workflow involves selecting a color, then clicking the toolbar so I can switch tools.

I have to wait until it happens again on me, since I also could not reproduce the bug while I typed the message. It sure happens to me on a daily basis, tough and it seem to depend on certain conditions.

3 hours ago, Rick Brewster said:

I'll need better repro steps than "sometimes this happens ..."

 

If it's really important to you, then please make a list of super easy ("idiot proof" ) steps to clearly recreate each issue. A video often helps when there's any kind of ambiguity, which there usually is.

I can imagine. I will not be able to post any videos but I may clearly describe what I did, to reproduce the bug, once I pinpoint down what I did to cause the bug to appear (see for bug 3 above in this post). And yes, this is very important to me since one by one, the bugs may not be too probelematic, but combined they cause real headaches for me, making me think that Paint.net is a troll playing the needle game on me.

 

I will occasionally reply and talk more in-depth about the mentioned bugs, once I got more information about them.

[Anise]

#3

 

I was working with transparent pngs and noticed that on saving paint net was injecting random black pixesl in / around where I had cut unwanted graphic away.

 

In the paint edit window the glitches did not exist but they existed and persisted on my output file throughout every save, to get around this issue I added a layer below the alpha png, merged down, saved and seem to fix the issue as a sort of work around, annoying though.