Problem with opacity

[artscoop]

Hello,

I think there is a real problem with opacity in Paint .NET (or maybe I have not looked for an existing feature, yet) :

When you use a pencil or brush (not paintbrush), and you set its opacity to less than 100%, it should not add it's opacity to the same stroke : in photoshop, when you push the left button down, the stroke is applied at desired opacity, until you release the button. If you want to add opacity to the existing colour, you have to declick then reclick. I think it's a normal behaviour for a painting program.

However I think Paint .NET is barely useable only because of this problem.

I think that from the moment when you push the button to the moment you release it, painting should be done in a buffer :

When you push the button, an (transparent) image buffer is created, and as you doodle with the mouse this buffer is filled with full opacity color.

When you release the mouse the buffer is pasted onto the drawing buffer, using the tool opacity.

I'm not sure I was clear, but I think it would be a really important feature for Paint.NET

Cheers,

artscoop

[Hellfire010]

I think I know what you mean, so I'm going to respond to what I THINK you're talking about:

I agree and disagree with this matter. First of all, you can just click once to get a single pixel of the selected opacity. Though, your way would seem more logical in this case.

[Joey]

The current behaviour is slightly airbrushy, though not really, actually.

The sampled points are joined by a straight line which has the problem that the actual points are drawn twice. I don't think this is actually near from being intentional, but rather something that has to be cleaned up and was just something to make it work, as a better solution would be a bit more complex.

You can, however use subsequent layers and draw in full opacity upon them and then adjust layer opacity, merging down to create only one. Cumbersome but works.

One might argue that by changing the behaviour you lose temporal information of the strokes but I think they might be expressed better than by color

[Rick Brewster]

The current brush system has just outgrown the userbase. It was originally written over 2 years ago when nobody had any plan for the program or any idea it even existed. The way it works wasn't really 'designed' to work that way, that's just an artifact of what we did write. I knew at the time it wasn't very useful with a non-255 alpha value, but I also knew that the fix was very involved and couldn't be done in the short time that was available.

It will be improved in a future release. I have done some prototyping and a lot of thinking about how this needs to work.

[Joey]

Hmm, naïve solution I'd come up with would be to 'record' a stroke to a separate surface the way it's done at the moment and then blend it with the correct alpha value with the rest of the image. Might actually work, though maybe memory and computation overhead makes this unfeasible.

[artscoop]

Hello,

Thanks for all your replies

Thank you Rick for your reply. Actually, I didn't know if the current brush behaviour was intentional or not until now.

However I have some knowledge in graphics code and stuff too so if you have questions, ideas, plans, just tell me, I would be glad to help.

Cheers,

artscoop

[aapezzuto]

The default behavior in most programs is to have a single action applied to a sperate layer, have the alpha set on that layer, then blend layers together as the action is ended. normaly the action is a mouse click from down to up. I use a tablet almost exclusivly, so for me its pressure from 5% untill it is less than 5%.

The alpha feature is the only thing preventing me from changing my graphics classes from photoshop to this wonderful program. It is an intro class, and i have allready changed to inkscape from illistrator.

please send me a PM if this feature is in a test version, or if code diagraming would be helpful (its been so long sence i have programed anything real my self, being surrounded by eager programers that want exp... i am getting lazy)

[BoltBait]

Hmm, naïve solution I'd come up with would be to 'record' a stroke to a separate surface the way it's done at the moment and then blend it with the correct alpha value with the rest of the image. Might actually work, though maybe memory and computation overhead makes this unfeasible.

If it was done this way, you could add the layer blending modes to brushes for interesting effects. 8)

[kirby145]

Until then you will have to go through the difficult task of painting at 100% in a new layer and setting that layer to the opacity level you wanted. Which takes more time but...

[Rick Brewster]

aapezzuto, Read the rules. Do not resurrect old threads.

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