My problems with Paint.NET

[Flowgun]

Hello everyone,
I love Paint.NET mainly because it's lightweight.
My biggest problems with it are:
- lack of customizable hotkeys. this is somehow easily fixable with Autohotkey.
- the settings are universal instead of being linked to the tool in use (opacity, size, hardness,...). I tried fixing this with Autohotkey, but it slows down things and not very reliable.
- the colorpicker picking the opacity. LIKE NOOOOO. how am I supposed to paint? there should be a checkmark to disable this "option". Painting requires setting a low opacity, then picking colors from both sides to make a smooth transition. if each time the opacity resets to 255, then the software becomes useless for this purpose. I also tried to fix this with AHK, but it's a pain.

That's basically it... these 3 fixes would make the software thousands of times more usable.

Edited January 31, 2023 by Flowgun

[BlastOfBN]

I’ve seen these requests go around a lot lately, and considering the circumstances, and the way I’ve seen people on here do things (including me), I don’t think that customizable hotkeys are such a bad idea.
 

In similar fashion to how in some other software, CTRL + Y, or even CTRL + U is the hotkey for the undo button. Although I’m much more used to CTRL + Z as the undo hotkey, so I changed it for those software if possible (because they also often have customizable hotkeys).

 

In short, I’m all for extra customization, which is something we need more of in Paint.NET.

[Ego Eram Reputo]

14 hours ago, Flowgun said:

- the colorpicker picking the opacity. LIKE NOOOOO. how am I supposed to paint?

 

The Color Picker accurately reflects the color you click on, opacity included.

 

If you don't like this behavior, enlarge the Colors window and set the Opacity slider to maximum (after you've Color-Picked the correct color).

[Flowgun]

4 hours ago, Ego Eram Reputo said:

 

The Color Picker accurately reflects the color you click on, opacity included.

 

If you don't like this behavior, enlarge the Colors window and set the Opacity slider to maximum (after you've Color-Picked the correct color).

  

To blend colors between each other, digital artists need a low opacity brush, plus painting over, picking the new color, painting again, then picking again... This means picking up the color while preserving the brush's lower opacity multiple times per second. Having the colorpicker pick opacity simply makes this (very common/essential) workflow impossible.

Here's a video of Dave Greco demonstrating a similar workflow: https://youtu.be/-oPp6NE4WL8?t=125

A checkmark to disable picking the opacity would make the software a lot more attractive. It is the main bottleneck for digital artists.
With Autohotkey, I was able to map the color picker to Alt key. When it's pressed, it reads the opacity of the current tool and switches to the color picker. When it's released, it gets back to the previous tool and sets the opacity back to the read value. The experience is not as smooth as I want it to be though.