paint.net 4.0 alpha build 5034

[Rick Brewster]

The first alpha for paint.net 4.0 is now available! You can download it here: http://www.getpaint.net/files/zip/preview/paint.net.4.0.5034.2167.install.zip

 

You may need to disable your antivirus (e.g. Trend Micro) to install.

 

Please note that this is an alpha! It is mostly complete but there are bugs, both known and unknown. DO NOT install this if you depend on Paint.NET for your livelihood, for instance, as it might crash at seemingly random times or even corrupt your data (that’s actually very unlikely but, still, use caution). After alpha comes beta, and then final (general availability) or "RTW" (release to web) (also sometimes called RTM).

 

NOTE: The alpha is not available via the updater in v3.5.11, even if you have “Also check for pre-release (beta) versions” enabled. The beta for 4.0, however, will be made available through that update channel (from v3.5.11, I mean). I’m deliberately doing this in order to keep the audience size smaller for now so that my inbox doesn’t get flooded (I’m also not advertising it on the paint.net website just yet). Newer 4.0 alpha builds will, of course, be automatically offered to you once you have any 4.0 alpha installed.

 

Here is a list of the most prominent changes between v3.5.11 and 4.0:

• System requirements
  • Windows 7 SP1 or newer is now required.
  • Windows XP and Windows Vista are no longer supported (paint.net will not install).
  • .NET Framework 4.5 is now required, and will be installed if needed.
  • A dual-core (or more!) CPU is highly recommended. (I no longer test on single core systems, btw.)
• A brand new, asynchronous, fully multithreaded rendering engine
  • Performance scales very well with respect to the number of CPU cores, whether you have 2, 4, 6, or even 16 of them.
  • Performance scales much better with large, or even huge, images. Rendering will slow down and you will see tiles “trickling” in as they are completed, but the UI will still be responsive to your changes and clicks.
  • The canvas now uses hardware acceleration via Direct2D, which also improves performance.
  • Memory usage is lower.
• Selections have been improved in many ways
  • Antialiased selections. You may turn this on/off at any time from the toolbar.
  • Selection outlines are now rendered with the “dancing ants” animation.
  • Performance of selection rendering and manipulation (Move Selection tool) have been fantastically improved.
• General UI
  • The functionality previously provided by the Utilities, Window, and Help menus has been simplified, consolidated, and moved to the top-right corner of the main window.
  • A brand new Settings dialog makes it much easier to configure all the tool and toolbar defaults, among other things.
  • The zoom slider and units selector have been moved from the toolbar to the bottom right corner of the window (into the status bar).
  • The image thumbnail list is now left-aligned and does not move around when you switch between certain tools.
  • The image thumbnail list can now be reordered with drag-and-drop.
  • Updated theming to a white, blue, flat motif.
• Tools
  • Tools may now draw directly with a blending mode, configurable from the toolbar. All of the layer blending modes are supported, as well as “Overwrite.”
  • Drawing tools (Pencil, Paintbrush, Eraser, Clone Stamp, Recolor) now have much smoother mouse input handling via GetMouseMovePointsEx.
  • Brush tools (Paintbrush, Eraser, Clone Stamp, Recolor) now have soft brushes support via a “Hardness” setting in the toolbar.
  • The Move tools (Move Selected Pixels, Move Selection) have a much better UI for scaling, moving, and (especially) rotation.
  • Color Picker has a configurable sampling radius, and can sample from either the current layer or the whole image.
  • Gradient tool now supports a new “Spiral” gradient type, and allows configuration of the repeat mode (none, repeat, wrapped).
  • Magic Wand and Paint Bucket now allow live adjustment of Tolerance and the Origin (click location) after clicking (press Enter to commit/finish).
  • Magic Wand and Paint Bucket can now sample from either the current layer or the whole image.
  • The Paint Bucket now supports anti-aliasing.
  • The Recolor tool can now use the color of the pixel where you click as the color to be replaced. Or, as usual, it can use the secondary color.
  • The new Shapes tool replaces the Line/Curve, Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, and Freeform shape tools. 29 shapes are currently available. You may move, resize, and rotate a shape, as well as reconfigure any other properties from the toolbar (color, outline size, etc.) before committing it to the layer.
• Miscellaneous
  • Layers can now be reordered with drag-and-drop
  • Edit –> Copy Merged
  • Shift+Backspace will now fill the selection with the secondary color (Backspace fills with primary color, as usual)
  • Ctrl+Click on the Move Layer Up/Down buttons will now move a layer to the top/bottom
  • New exception/error dialog
  • Improved battery life impact due to fixing the way the floating windows manage their transparency
  • paint.net now shows up in the “Default Programs” control panel so you can configure its file type associations
  • Improved performance of saving .PDN images
  • Image->Resize has improved super sampling quality

[mastan]

Crashes on selection, even on empty default document.
Open Paint.Net, press S, press left mouse button, move mouse - crashes. If lmb is pressed and released without moving, does not crash.
 

Crashlog: pdncrash.1.zip

English translation of the exception is "Input string was not in a correct format"

 

Windows 8 Pro x64, Russian, fully updated.

[Rick Brewster]

Ok. Looks like a translation bug. Try switching the language to English from the Settings dialog. I'll file a bug, of course. Thanks!

[laxeraend]

Is subpixel aa (cleartype) in the chrome possible?

 

currently:

 

Antialias mode: Grayscale

Rendering mode: ClearTypeNaturalSymmetric

[midora]

Is there a way to install the 4.0 in parallel to the 3.5.11?

[mastan]

Ok. Looks like a translation bug. Try switching the language to English from the Settings dialog. I'll file a bug, of course. Thanks!

 

Yes, with English language it works.

[Rick Brewster]

Is subpixel aa (cleartype) in the chrome possible?

 

currently:

 

Antialias mode: Grayscale

Rendering mode: ClearTypeNaturalSymmetric

 

Yes, but I'm waiting to see how much demand there is for configuration of that.

[laxeraend]

Yes, but I'm waiting to see how much demand there is for configuration of that.

 

Is it difficult to do?  Do you not think yourself that subpixel/cleartype is better that grayscale?

[Rick Brewster]

The recent trend in Windows UI is actually to use grayscale antialiasing via DirectWrite. It's rather subjective, honestly.

[laxeraend]

The recent trend in Windows UI is actually to use grayscale antialiasing via DirectWrite. It's rather subjective, honestly.

 

[DrewDale]

The keyboard arrows (up / down / left / right) - don't work when trying to move a selection. Is this one of the known bugs that you are aware of ? 

[odalet]

Here is another tiny bug related to translations:

- Just installed PDN4 on a French Windows7 box (btw, the installer was set by default in English)

- First run: the UI is in French, but if I go to Settings > Language, English appears selected in the combo.

- I change to french. Pdn restarts, the UI is in french and french appears as the selected language.

- Then I can change back to English (because I always prefered using Pdn in English) in the Language combo, restart and this time, the UI appears in English.

 

There must be some initialization check failing right after installation, Pdn thinks it is running in English, but instead it uses CurrentCulture/CurrentUICulture... I don't know where you store the user's settings (seems you don't use app.config user settings), but I suspect the rules you use to determine the current language are not consistent throughout the application when no culture is specified in the config.

 

And another little disprecancy: during the setup phase, I checked "also check for pre-release", but when in Settings > Updates, the equivalent check box was not checked.

[odalet]

Just a last note to say thanks: I've just witnessed that my WSQ filter plugin worked seamlessly with Pdn4 

 

[DeathKiller]

Could you add option to switch UI to old (Windows 7) theme, like on these screenshots, please? http://blog.getpaint.net/2012/04/08/new-features-for-paint-net-4-0/

Because it doesn't look good on WIndows 7 with Aero. Old font rendering for UI looked better too.

Thanks for your hard work.

[jerry533482]

I think I might just start using PDN again because of this update.

[nitenurse79]

Works pretty well indeed. There is some plugin load errors (In the settings > plugin errors dialog)

chop up and save - curtis black common dll - cut out effect - ed harvey effects archive fragment - gradient dll - measure selection - photo flood fill plugin - pointwarp - psychedelic.dll - radial blur deluxe V0.1 - shadow effect - sparkle-glitter - stenography - tile fill from clipboard - unsharp mask - zoom blur deluxe.

 

Also not mentioned in the load errors is Colour Flip rotate, using this plugin gives me the prompt to restart paint.net (System.TypeLoadException: Could not load type)

 

Only a handful of plugin load errors considering I have close to 420 installed, that is very impressive. 

 

I do assume the above mentioned plugins will work as newer releases become available?

[Zagna]

My translation works quite fine, so far 3 untranslated strings found I have hmmmmm. And a couple more...

 

Edit: Okay... shapes has lot of stuff... ResxCheck found a huge bunch...

Edited October 14, 2013 by Zagna

[BetaUser]

Hello,

 

Works perfectly on my PC (win7x64/en/i5/8GBDDR3).

 

I use this small and intuitive photo editor for more than 3 years (more than 10 times per day - i have an hd wallpapers blog and need for small adjusment and use it for my own photos to edit with the plugins help) and i'm aboslutely delightful for how it works.

 

I installed today 4.0 alpha and until now NO crash or bug.

 

One thing that i see is that don't remember what tool you use before closing. I think it would be nice to remember the last tool used when you reopen the program. (always start with "paintbrush")

 

Keep up the good work!

 

Thank you for it's free.

 

 

PS: Don't try to change it in something complex, keep it easy and VERY QUICK! (foxit reader was my favorite PDF reader but step by step seems to be like Adobe Reader - lots of functions that i NEVER use .... wtf it's a PDF reader not an operating system )

 

 

=======================

OK... i've got a crush

 

I tried to use "Optimized PNG" (optipng.exe) and crushed.

Edited October 14, 2013 by BetaUser

[BoltBait]

My translation works quite fine, so far 3 untranslated strings found I have hmmmmm. And a couple more...

 

Edit: Okay... shapes has lot of stuff... ResxCheck found a huge bunch...

Remember that this has not been sent out for translation yet.

So, any new strings will still show English.

 

... a handful of plugin load errors...

Can you check to be sure you're using the latest versions of the plugins that are failing to load? Report back once you've updated your DLL files. Thanks!

But, please understand that not every plugin will be compatible with 4.0. Rick has already put in a bunch of code to enable MOST plugins. However, it will simply not be possible to provide workarounds for every plugin out there. It will be up to the individual plugin authors to provide updated plugins that work with 4.0 once we hit the beta stage.

One of the reasons that Rick released this alpha build early is so that plugin authors can start playing with it and get their plugins ready for the beta wide release.

[gege]

First things first: big thanks for this! I've been anxiously waiting to play with it for years...

 

This thing is pretty stable for an alpha release. After a couple hours playing with it, including use of lots of plugins, it hasn't crashed a single time. Where's the fun?

 

 

Now, seriously. As I said, no bugs found so far, but I'd like to point some usability issues that have bothered me:

 

- Rotation handles are too intrusive: they are inside and outside the selection rectangle. I ended up rotating selections, when in fact I just wanted to move them. Maybe those handles should appear only outside the selection corners. This way the Move handle would be unnecessary, as any space inside the selection rectangle, plus outside space not around the corners would be a possible anchor for this.

 

- Dancing ants are too nervous. I mean, they move way too fast. This is specially proeminent on small and irregular selections, like those made with Magic Wand. I just compared them with that other big well known image editor and its ants are much more slower than ours :-)

 

- 'Tools' section of Settings dialog is visually confusing. Probably due to flatness of that page design, it is really difficult to figure out each setting on first sight.

 

- Settings dialog takes too long to open, showing '(Not reponding)' on titlebar. Fake edit: in fact, this occurred the first two or three times I opened it. Now, it opens relatively fast.

 

- Automatic translation is often funny (and yes, I have read your blog comment on this). You will seriously need some human help here and I can land a hand on this for Brazilian Portuguese, as I have a lot of experience* with volunteer translation. 

 

*For example, I have made contributions to OpenOffice in the past and also, for several years now, I'm the sole translator of MediaMonkey player into pt-br.

Edited October 14, 2013 by gege

[Zagna]

Remember that this has not been sent out for translation yet.

So, any new strings will still show English.

 

Muahah... I already decompiled the .resources and started updating my .resx... I'm unstoppable!

[nitenurse79]

@ BoltBait.

Yes they are all recent versions of the plugins, I even re-downloaded the Ed Harvey effects (for colour flip rotate) and still the crash.

I do understand that some may not be compatible, but as you mention, this alpha will give the plugin authors the chance to tweak their packs

[midora]

I like the improved error message on FileType plugins.

 

Still I would prefer that OperationCancelException would be ignored.

 

[KoalaBear]

Hmm. Took a while to create an account as I have no clue what city is in the middle of Seatle

 

And I don't know about the triangle question

 

This is the error I got when I connected to PC with RDP. Didn't do anything, just connected and this was displayed on the screen:

---

System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException (0x80070006): ..\Direct2D\D2DRenderTarget.cpp (272) : hr = m_pRenderTarget->EndDraw(&d2dTag1, &d2dTag2);

   at PaintDotNet.Interop.InteropErrorInfo.ThrowIfError() in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Base\Interop\InteropErrorInfo.cs:line 91

   at PaintDotNet.SystemLayer.Native.x64.NativeUtilities.ThrowOnErrorImpl(Int32 hr, SByte* szHr, IUnknown* pFxErrorInfo)

   at PaintDotNet.SystemLayer.Native.x64.Direct2D.D2DRenderTarget.EndDraw(Tag& tag1, Tag& tag2)

   at PaintDotNet.Direct2D.RenderTargetExtensions.EndDraw(IRenderTarget renderTarget) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Core\Direct2D\RenderTargetExtensions.cs:line 17

   at PaintDotNet.Disposable.ActionDisposable.Dispose(Boolean disposing) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Base\Disposable.cs:line 58

   at PaintDotNet.Disposable.Dispose() in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Base\Disposable.cs:line 218

   at PaintDotNet.ComponentModel.RefTrackedObject.DisposeCore(Boolean disposing) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Base\ComponentModel\RefTrackedObject.cs:line 410

   at PaintDotNet.ComponentModel.RefTrackedObject.ReleaseRef(Object refOwner, Boolean disposing) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Base\ComponentModel\RefTrackedObject.cs:line 547

   at PaintDotNet.ComponentModel.RefTrackedObject.Dispose() in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Base\ComponentModel\RefTrackedObject.cs:line 342

   at PaintDotNet.Controls.PdnPushButton.MeasureAndDraw(Graphics g, Boolean enableDrawing, PdnPushButtonState buttonState, Boolean drawFocusCues, Boolean drawKeyboardCues) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Framework\Controls\PdnPushButton.cs:line 223

   at PaintDotNet.Controls.PdnPushButton.OnLayout(LayoutEventArgs levent) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\Framework\Controls\PdnPushButton.cs:line 121

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.PerformLayout(LayoutEventArgs args)

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnResize(EventArgs e)

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.OnSizeChanged(EventArgs e)

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.UpdateBounds(Int32 x, Int32 y, Int32 width, Int32 height, Int32 clientWidth, Int32 clientHeight)

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.UpdateBounds(Int32 x, Int32 y, Int32 width, Int32 height)

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.SetBoundsCore(Int32 x, Int32 y, Int32 width, Int32 height, BoundsSpecified specified)

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.SetBounds(Int32 x, Int32 y, Int32 width, Int32 height, BoundsSpecified specified)

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.set_Size(Size value)

   at PaintDotNet.Dialogs.ExceptionDialog.OnLayout(LayoutEventArgs levent) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\PaintDotNet\Dialogs\ExceptionDialog.cs:line 440

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.PerformLayout(LayoutEventArgs args)

   at System.Windows.Forms.Control.PerformLayout()

   at PaintDotNet.Dialogs.ExceptionDialog..ctor() in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\PaintDotNet\Dialogs\ExceptionDialog.cs:line 296

   at PaintDotNet.Diagnostics.CrashManager.ShowCrashLogDialog(String crashLogPath) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\PaintDotNet\Diagnostics\CrashManager.cs:line 59

   at PaintDotNet.Startup.StartPart2(String mutexName, String[] remainingArgs) in D:\src\pdn\paintdotnet\src\PaintDotNet\Startup.cs:line 507

---

 

Thanks in advance. Without RDP I did not experience a problem of bug when resizing and cropped 20 pictures. The only thing I noticed is that when you do CTRL + SHIFT + X that it sometimes takes a while, like a second or so, to get the cropped part painting. But that's not a real issue

[Ego Eram Reputo]

I do understand that some may not be compatible, but as you mention, this alpha will give the plugin authors the chance to tweak their packs

 

When 4.0 is out for public release I'll update the Plugin Index to indicate plugins which do not work with it.  Hopefully they will be few!