history preservation metadata

[jerry533482]

I've recently been trying to create more new techniques with PDN, but if I'm working with a bunch of layers, & the effect requires changing blending modes & transparency over & over, & flattening frequently, it's almost impossible to recreate the effect unless you pay VERY close attention to what you did the first time around. Now, I was wondering, is it possible to implement a "save as..." feature that would look like: "save with history as..." that would preserve the entire history bar as metadata, including plugins used, & the settings used. Perhaps it could be a new feature for the .PDN format, or sort of a plugin. Or perhaps an entirely new format based on .PDN. However, I don't think this could really be implemented with flattened formats (e.g.:PNG, JPG, BMP, etc) while maintaining compatibility with other programs. Perhaps the history could be saved as a TXT file?

Anyway, Is this a possible feature? PDN already stores this data in memory, so why not be able to preserve that with the layers in the final save? It might save a lot of people from confusion.

Edited April 9, 2010 by jerry533482

[Axle]

i really dont think that this is possible, or atleast not easy to make and i bet that Rick will come here and tell you that too

[Urnemanden]

Even though it might not be possible, I'll vote for that idea. Usually when I am doing something in Paint.NET, I always end up experimenting with everything. When I then in the end has got a result that satisfy me, I save it in a numbered folder inside Pictures\Paint.NET\. It could be nice if I at later observance also could see How I actually did.

I'm not thinking that Paint.NET should save all used settings for every single plugin, basically just a list that looks quite the same as in "History". XML would be nice, but simple TXT's would be less hard to implement. Right now a Screenshot of the history window is alright, but unfortunately my history log is too long - I can't have it all on a 1280x1024 screen.

For an example, I created this button

out of this photo (16%),

and I still have no idea how I did, kinda. I even forgot to save it as .pdn, because all the history was flattened after I accidentally saved it as .gif for upload and afterwards did a Ctrl+A.

Edited April 9, 2010 by Urnemanden