Some plugin blur effects fail with 0 strength

[frio]

Some blur effects cause a misplaced, garbled 16 pixel tall slice of the image to appear overlapping the top area of the image when used with 0 strength, instead just leaving the unblurred image in place. Where the garbled pixels come from changes often between different preview renders and the final render. The effects have other meaningful uses even when used with 0 blur strength.

 

I think this may be a bug in PDN itself since it reproduces in effects by different authors from many years apart, maybe they call some kind of a built-in blur function? It did not happen before version 5.0. Plugins I've found to be affected are Gaussian Blur+ by BoltBait and Tweak Transparency v2 (and v1, which is apparently no longer available for download) by Red Ochre.

 

Steps to reproduce: make any image of any size with enough distinct areas, a diagonal gradiant is fine. Apply one of the above effects at strength 0.

 

Curtailed system info:

Quote

Application                                                paint.net 5.0.2 (Stable 5.2.8451.6614)
Build Date                                                 maanantai 20. helmikuuta 2023
Install type                                               Classic

Language:                                                  en-US
DPI                                                        120 (1.25x scale)
UI/Canvas GPU                                              True
Rendering GPU                                              🚀 Performance (NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080)
Remote session                                             False
Animations                                                 True
Translucent windows                                        True
Windows Ink                                                True

OS                                                         Windows 11 Home x64 (10.0.22621.0)
Runtime                                                    .NET 7.0.3 x64
Physical Memory                                            32 509 MB

CPU                                                        13th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-13700K
    Speed                                                  ~3417 MHz
    Cores / Threads                                        16 / 24
    Features                                               SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSSE3, SSE4_1, SSE4_2, AVX, AVX2

Video Card                                                 NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3080
    Hardware Acceleration                                  Supported
    Dedicated Video RAM                                    10 067 MB
    Dedicated System RAM                                   0 MB
    Shared System RAM                                      16 254 MB
    Vendor ID                                              0x10DE
    Device ID                                              0x2216
    Subsystem ID                                           0x88221043
    Revision                                               161
    LUID                                                   0x00010F7F
    Flags                                                  AcgCompatible, SupportMonitoredFences, KeyedMutexConformance
    Graphics Preemption                                    PixelBoundary
    Compute Preemption                                     DispatchBoundary
    Outputs                                                1
    Feature Level                                          Level_12_1
    Features                                               Doubles, ComputeShadersEtc
    DXGI Formats                                           A8_UNorm, B8G8R8A8_UNorm, R16G16B16A16_UNorm, R16G16B16A16_Float, R32G32B32A32_Float
    Buffer Precisions                                      UInt8Normalized, UInt8NormalizedSrgb, UInt16Normalized, Float16, Float32
    Maximum Bitmap Size                                    16384
 

 

[Rick Brewster]

Yeah I can reproduce this with Gaussian Blur+ very easily. I'll look into it. cc @BoltBait

[Rick Brewster]

Okay I figured out what was wrong and I fixed it. It'll be working again in the 5.0.3 update.

[Tactilis]

4 hours ago, frio said:

The effects have other meaningful uses even when used with 0 blur strength.

Interested to know what you are using the effects for at 0 strength?

[BoltBait]

1 hour ago, Tactilis said:

Interested to know what you are using the effects for at 0 strength?

That’s where the magic happens!

 

Or, sometimes in complex effects, you just don’t want to add a blur at the end.  See my Outline Object effect. 

[Rick Brewster]

Using 0 blur radius, even for the built-in blurs, is a convenient way to see how the image looks without the blurring.

[frio]

2 hours ago, Tactilis said:

Interested to know what you are using the effects for at 0 strength?

 

The Tweak Transprency plugin is a fairly bread&butter plugin for my uses, and using it with 0 blur but adjusting the min/max transprency values has very useful effects. I know I could achieve similar results with the Curves+ adjustment with alpha channel only, but you know, once you get used to a workflow and something seems amiss and happens in other places too...

[Red ochre]

Tweak transparency v2: Wow - I haven't used it myself for about 10 years!
(It is still available... there's a link right at the bottom of my plug-in pack first post).
I don't remember if there ever was a v1 published?🙄

 

For adjusting alpha I wrote 'alpha threshold' to replace it (in my pack)... that doesn't use the Gaussian blur at all.
('Object edges' was written to replace Tweak transparency's edge colouring effect... still using the in-built Gaussian blur).

[frio]

1 hour ago, Red ochre said:

Tweak transparency v2: Wow - I haven't used it myself for about 10 years!
(It is still available... there's a link right at the bottom of my plug-in pack first post).
I don't remember if there ever was a v1 published?🙄

I'm pretty sure I have both, since the effects have different names (one calls itself v2, the other doesn't) and doesn't have the extra color settings/stuff. I prefer the more simple presumedly-v1, and since I also use the blur (I don't use it at strength 0 at all times) it's more useful to me than just alpha thresholds.

 

Thanks to everyone involved with PDN and its plugins, in either case, it's been what, like 15 years now, and so, so many textures made.

Edited February 24, 2023 by frio