Transparent Color

[bbrewder]

As a developer, I really enjoy using Paint.Net. It has most of the features I need for the few graphics tasks that I do.

The major exception to this is the ability to set a transparency color. One of the most common things I need to be able to do with an image is to set a color as transparent. Using the erasor is not very efficient.

It would be really cool if "transparent" was a color that could be selected just like any of the other colors. This would allow me to use the paint can to fill in an area with transparency. I don't know how Adobe or other mainstream graphics programs do this, so they might have a better solution.

It would be nice to at least have a layer property for the transparent color. I've read a few places on the Internet where people have discussed using other tools to get around this limitation.

What is the likelyhood of this making it into v3? If not, is this feature just not being requested (it seems like many people are running into this issue)? Or is this more difficult than it sounds?

Overall I think Paint.Net is a great tool. Keep up the great work!

[Rick Brewster]

You can turn off alpha blending, it's in the toolbar. Then, if you were to use the pencil to draw with, say, BGRA={0,0,0,0}, you would set those pixels to that value instead of blending 0,0,0,0 with the color that was already there (an effective no-op).

Is that what you meant? Paint.NET does not support a transparency color key, however. It's not out of the question, the rendering pipeline and framework wouldn't really need much reworking to support it, but was never planned for in the 3.0 timeframe.

[RaveN]

Well you can select a partially transparent color and color with it, I've done it before....If you need help erasing, and it is hard for you, take the pencil, and carefully outline the object, then on the outside with a large brush, paint it all the same color, make it stand out, like green. Then magic wand the green and hit delete. Sometimes take the lasso around the edges and blur a little bit so it doesn't look so jagged.

[bbrewder]

Yes, I didn't realize you could do that. I'm not exactly a graphic designer and never really understood what that was for (I guess I still don't understand it, but it seems to do what I want ). Thanks!

You can turn off alpha blending, it's in the toolbar. Then, if you were to use the pencil to draw with, say, BGRA={0,0,0,0}, you would set those pixels to that value instead of blending 0,0,0,0 with the color that was already there (an effective no-op).

Is that what you meant? Paint.NET does not support a transparency color key, however. It's not out of the question, the rendering pipeline and framework wouldn't really need much reworking to support it, but was never planned for in the 3.0 timeframe.