Idea: alpha-blending in paint.NET?

[The_GTA]

Dear paint.NET community,

I am trying to find a workflow using paint.NET which comfortably suits my interests. During the editing of my company logo I have stumbled upon the desire to colorate the custom-drawn text over translucent background with a lighting-like shade. I did find this coloration-tool:

 

 

But this tool does not really do what I need. In the description it says that it performs color blending only on brushed pixels that match the first-clicked-on alpha channel (ALPHA_CMP_SAME) or it ignores alpha altogether (ALPHA_CMP_IGNORE). Look at what it did to my logo:

 

 

Can you see the gray line? This happens because the alpha channel is being interpolated between target and source color using a color-distance function, along with the color channels of course. In some strange way it does also mess with the color! I think this is ugly and I would like to propose a different alpha-based colorization method that has been proposed more than 7 years ago. While I applaud the devs for creating this cool colorization brush, listen me out. The reason I am bringing this up is because I genuinely believe the method to be better (for my case) and after such a long time maybe we can get some new-found consensus.

 

How about introducing an alpha-blend mode in addition to the color-blend modes that exist in paint.NET? The idea is to extend both the layer blending modes that get applied in layer-order as well as the regular brush that can be assigned normal, multiply, etc. The suggestion was already phrased in this topic in a mathematical way:

 

https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/28386-transparency-in-blend-modes/

 

The person did suggest the ALPHA_BLEND_MULTIPLY alpha-blend mode. paint.NET does perform ALPHA_BLEND_OVERWRITE where dst-alpha = src-alpha for the regular brush. If I had ALPHA_BLEND_MULTIPLY then I swear to you that the gray line in the company logo excerpt I posted above will never happen. It is just a strange artifact of the weird but beautiful colorization algorithm that the devs implemented. I think the algorithm is cool, but just not when the alpha channel are involved!

 

There is no option to replace paint.NET because the community does embrace this wonderful tool and it would be a hassle. Why not work together to improve this world of free software? Please try to be forthcoming.

Edited September 13, 2021 by The_GTA