Version 4.1.6 What I did not like

[andymix]

Version 4.1.6.

 

What I did not like ...

 

- Magic Wand - I can not remove the background for transparent.

 

- Color Letters - When changing the color of a black letter to a letter of color through the fill gets a black pixel outline.

 

- Select and delete can not execute with this version.

 

- The movement of layers layers could be simpler, type word. It was easier to click on the text and edit right away.

 

I unsubscribed this version and came back to version V.4.0.12. 🙁

 

Developers check this out and make Paint.net more intuitive.

 

Thank you

Edited April 24, 2019 by andymix

[Rick Brewster]

Your feedback is very vague and confusing (I'm guessing English is not your first language though). We might be able to help you out with these if you engage us in dialogue and don't just revert to the old version. Can't fix things if you won't work with us.

[IHaveNoName]

The colouring of black text using fill (Paint Bucket?) complaint sounds like a tolerance and/or anti-alias (AA) settings matter. If AA is disabled filling black text with another colour using the Paint Bucket does just what has been described on v4.1.5 and I'd suspect all recent versions.

 

Is there any chance that with v4.1.6 the default setting for AA has been changed to off? That might explain things.

 

You never get as clean a result filling in text, particularly if it has serifs or other twiddly bits, as re-doing it using the desired colour. Hence the advice often given here to add text in separate transparent layer or layers.

 

The Color plugin Recolour Choice often does a better job than fill too.

[HyReZ]

When I work with text on a transparent layer I always make sure that AA is disabled. This makes Fill recoloring precise. After recoloring is done you can simulate AA by using Feathering or Edge Blur set to 1 and apply it to the text layer.

@andymix
There should be no background on the transparent layer. Maybe you are incorrectly thinking that the checkerboard pattern of the transparent area is a background that the Wand Tool cannot remove!? It has been like that for years.

Edited April 26, 2019 by HyReZ

[IHaveNoName]

Strange but my results are the exact opposite. If you turn off AA and recolour black text by Paint Bucket in a transparent layer that leaves a black outline at the edge. It is further exaggerated if you reduce the tolerance setting to 0% from the default 50%.

 

But turn on AA and do the same thing you get a cleaner fill as the sharp border between the new colour and the background black is softened by overlapping. Less of the underlying black is seen.  

[HyReZ]

When Anti-Aliasing is enabled it alters pixels and hue values of surrounding pixels to give the illusion that 'jaggies' have been 'smoothed'.

This makes it difficult to fill an area that is no longer uniform in color as it is when Anti-Aliasing has not been applied.
Anti-Aliasing is applied to a raster image to diminish the effect of pixellization.
BTW:
When working with solid color text and Anti-Aliasing has been disabled; you can often have the Tolerance set to 1% and get a perfect fill. That is not possible when AA is enabled and applied to a text character.

 

Edited April 26, 2019 by HyReZ
inserting additional information

[IHaveNoName]

The question is what looks better in practice and what the OP describes I think I've pretty much nailed in the examples I've just done:-

 

Black text recoloured to primary red.

 

Top: AA disabled and tolerance set to 0%

Middle: AA enabled and tolerance set to 50% (default PDN settings)

Bottom: AA enabled recoloured using Recolour Choice detection tolerance set to 50%.

 

Clearly the top one with AA disabled for the fill produces the black outline described by the andymix. The middle one with AA enabled for the fill is the cleanest fill and despite the slight softening of the text's outline. IMHO it looks better than even the Recolour Choice example which despite playing around with the tolerance detection setting still left some black pixels visible at the edges..

 

However what I realised, thanks partly to HyReZ's post, is that you do get a cleaner fill when the text itself is also written with AA disabled ie. not just when using the Paint Bucket for the fill. This is exactly what you would expect as there are no partially transparent pixels created by AA to mess up the recolouring. So you get the original black text recoloured 100% too primary red.

 

That is great or would be if the AA disabled text did not look so horrible with this sort of serif font. I certainly could not use the jagged example below for the sort of purposes I most often use text in an image: 128x128, 256x256 and 512x512 icons despite the fill to red being better than any of the other examples.   

 

 

AA disabled for both original black text and fill (reproduced bigger to show the effect on the rendering of the text)

 

 

 

Edited April 26, 2019 by IHaveNoName

[HyReZ]

I never get a black outline when I disable AA. In fact I get the black outline that you illustrated only when AA is enabled. You must not have turned Rasterization off!
I disable AA in my setup under Raterization before I even start my project. I enter my text on a transparent background

I stated above that after I make my text fill color changes, I add an edge blur by using the Featering plugin set to 1 to simulate AA after I am done recoloring my text.

I would suggest that you zoom into to your black text before you add any fill to see it its outline is pixelated (jagged with out any anti-aliased pixels),

if it isn't; rasterization of that layer has not been removed! This can can further be tested by using the Line / Cure Tool and draw a 1 pixel diagonal line

on your layer and zoom in to see if it is pure black and jagged or is it alter by surronding it with gray-scale pixels. You can toggle AA off and on during this test
by selecting the Rasterization Icon to see the differences in the line quality.

[IHaveNoName]

It must be that feathering which cleans it up for you because in those examples I was using the PDN rasterization options: Antialiasing Enabled and Antialiasing Disabled.

 

As said, In my first two images the original black text was written with antialiasing enabled. I only enabled/disabled antialiasing, from the PDN tool bar, during the colour fill. 

 

andmix was talking about a black pixel outline when recolouring colouring black text. Clearly my first example matches that description.

 

The question is did he change the default PDN settings and unknowingly write the original black text: antialiasing enabled but the colour fill done with antialiasing disabled or with the tolerance changed. My guess is the latter as that is easier to do accidentally than turn the rasterisation on/off.

 

I do not think it likely that the default PDN v4.1.6 settings have been altered by RB so the 'problem' described must be a user issue.

 

In my third image both the original text and the colour fill were done with antialiasing disabled from the tool bar.

 

I've since tried applying the recommended feathering and, as long as the text is in a transparent layer of course, Boltbait's Feather Object (no more than the default setting or it looks worse) does indeed clean up the jagged edges reasonably effectively. But it is not perfect in this case. Old Feather which I also have tried is not so good whatever settings are applied. 

 

So whilst disabling AA will undoubtedly allow for a cleaner colour fill whether applying Feather Object to smooth out non-antialiased text, recoloured or not,  produces a better looking result than using AA from the toolbar is up for debate. However I do think such matters are very font design dependent and you may get better results disabling AA, with squarer, sans-serif ones rather than those with serifs and other fine lines or detailing like the Celtic Garamond example I used. 

 

In short the user needs to make those sort of decisions case by case.

[docnich]

I would like your thoughts on the plugin object2colour.  You can use it to do the initial color change, but you can also use it to get rid of any black that is left over if you used a different method originally.  If you have opaque and translucent set to color wheel, it will change the black to your preferred color at the same alpha along the edges.

[HyReZ]

5 hours ago, IHaveNoName said:

As said, In my first two images the original black text was written with antialiasing enabled. I only enabled/disabled antialiasing, from the PDN tool bar, during the colour fill. 

I have stated that AA should be disabled during the entire project. Each step, from begining to end, should be done with AA off.

Only after the text characters for the whole recoloring job has been done, should it have the edges blurred to simulate anit-aliasing.
BTW:
I usually begin my projects at a high pixel density. My cavases are usually about 5k x 5K pixels and resized to 1920 x 1920 pixels for web display such as Instagram.

Edited April 27, 2019 by HyReZ

[Reptillian]

Isn't it possible to edit text color in PDN by using color curves or other tool? Is there's a coloring tool that's missing? I could code one where all you need to do is move a slider, and you set the color if there's no such thing in PDN or G'MIC. Though, I believe for PDN, it's much more accessible as a separate plugin.

 

G'MIC example code for changing hue of a layer using RGB 0-255 colors

 

iw={w}
ih={h}

$iw,$ih,1,4,[RED,GREEN,BLUE,255] . blend[^2] hue,{0-1 input#1} blend luminance,{0-1 input#}

 

Simply replace RED,GREEN,BLUE with any range between 0-255, and replace {} (including bracket) with your desired factor between 0-1

 

I'd imagine this is easy to make as a plugin for PDN, and this code is easily understandable.

 

Another approach

 

iw={w}
ih={h}

split_opacity

$iw,$ih,1,3,[RED,GREEN,BLUE] blend[0,2] alpha,{input between 0-1} a c

This approach separates alpha and append them, but you can assign your own color on RED,GREEN,BLUE.

Edited April 27, 2019 by Reptillian

[HyReZ]

@Reptillian
My favorite plugin for doing a manual color change for an entire layer is inside the Zip archive of the following link and is called 'PdnManualColorFilter.dll' that will enable you to tint a file one color. (The link is not correctly working at the moment, but if you select and download it, you can add '.zip' to the filename code that downloads and extract the plugins until the link is repaired)
https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/18112-color-inpainting-v10/
BTW: Since Black, White, & Gray-Scale are not hues, trying to shift hues has no effect. Once Black, White, or Gray text is recolored with a hue the Hue/Saturation Adjustment plugins will work just fine.

Edited April 27, 2019 by HyReZ

[HyReZ]

Oops! Is there no way to delete  your own comments?

Edited April 27, 2019 by HyReZ

[HyReZ]

When I did this screen for a comment to another thread, I typed the word 'ORIGINAL'  onto a transparent layer with AA disabled.

I use the Color Picker and the Fill Bucket Tool to recolor each text character with a different color then duplicated the layer.

On one layer I deleted the 1st, 3rd, 5th, and 7th character; then on the other layer I deleted the 2nd, 4th, and 6th characters.

I adjusted the spacing of the characters on each layer until the overlapped like I wanted; then Adjusted the Transparency down to 50%

on both layers; merge them together and then increase the opacity of the merged layer to 100%.

(If I wanted to achieve AA I could have used an edge blur on each layer before Adjusting the Transparency and merging)

 

Edited April 30, 2019 by HyReZ

[MJW]

8 hours ago, docnich said:

I would like your thoughts on the plugin object2colour.  You can use it to do the initial color change, but you can also use it to get rid of any black that is left over if you used a different method originally.  If you have opaque and translucent set to color wheel, it will change the black to your preferred color at the same alpha along the edges.

 

I'd say that's a much better method for recoloring text or other objects than using the Magic Wand or Paint Bucket. I had it installed (no doubt as part of Red ochre's plugin pack), but had never used it. Though I think it's slightly confusing, I will use it from now on.

[BoltBait]

30 minutes ago, HyReZ said:

If wanted to achieve AA I could have used an edge blur on each layer before Adjusting the Transparency and merging

 

Another way to achieve that is to work at 3x your final size and scale it down at the end.