Some suggestions and questions

[mishoboss]

Hi developers and users of PDN. I found this great product a week ago and I really think that PDN is more powerful and easy to work than many non-free products.

But I miss some functions I have used to see in other products.

1. Compression and options of saving of PNG and GIF formats. Options like interlaced, smooth and especially compression by colors. Because if you have a picture with 5 colors, you need to describe just theese 5 colors in the file, not the whole 255 color palette of the GIF's or the 16.7 millions of the PNG's.

2. I would like to see an easy to use tools of the common used operations like rotate and scale/resize in the Tools panel. Or better - in the options of the layer (on the top) to have a "percentage input", so you can specify the scale of the layer and a "degree input" to specify the rotation.

3. I would like to see a button to proportional scale (usually the icon is a magnet) when you scale a layer using the manipulators on the corners.

4. There would be great to add a right click menus.

And I have a question. When I have typed a text with the text tool and then I want to modify it (change the text, font, font size) how to do that? When I click on the text it acts like a normal layer only with the Quality option on the top.

Thanks in advance

[mishoboss]

OK, 5 mins. after posting my first post I started modify a picture. This was the first REAL work with PDN. I wanted to add some lines, texts and to apply some filters. With the filters and the effects I haven't any problems. But everyting else...

Every object I make is converting to a layer or something and I am unable to modify it's properties any more. I tought that I'm just stupid and can't handle with something different from Flash and Ulead PhotoImpact (these are the image editing softwares I use), so I opened the Help and started to read. I really got disappointed when I read this "While typing, you may press the Esc key to finish the text and render it to the layer. Once you have finished with text, it may not be modified except by undoing it and retyping the text. To be precise, after the text is rendered it no longer exists in the image as text, but only as pixels and that is why this limitation exists.". I think its the same with all other objects like line, rectangle and so on, not only the text.

So, is this going to change in the near future or this is the philosophy of Paint.NET?

I think it's far better to work with objects instead of just "rendered" layers. This mean that every line, ellipse, rectangle, text and picture is represented as object with parameters which are dependent on the king of the object. Every object will have properties like height, width, x, y, and the others will be object dependent. For example if the object is line, you will have properties like Brush width, Fill, Arrow... When the user types the parameters they are stored in the object (class instance) and then render it (it will flattern the image). Then when you click again on this line you will extract the values you have stored before and build the instance again.

I'm not a good programmer, neither a good artist, but I think that the object method I suggest is better that the rendered layer method.

I stopped trying to create the image I wanted in Paint.NET, because I had to delete and retype the text I wanted about 10 times just because to change the font or font size.

[BoltBait]

Please remember, Paint.NET is a bitmap editor, not a vector graphic editor.

[Rick Brewster]

What you're asking for would involve completely rewriting Paint.NET from scratch with an entirely different editing paradigm.

If that's what you want to do, then Paint.NET is just not well suited for your tasks.

[mishoboss]

OK, I know that these are big changes, but it's almost senseless to have text tool or rectangle tool when you can't modify it's properties. Every time I want to change even a simple thing I have to delete the object and create it again. Paint.NET is really a great free software, but only if you want to retouch or add effects. I tought it would be a good free substitute for Ulead PhotoImpact, that I used to use. Do you know a free software for my needs?

BoltBait, not only vector editors have this functionality. Softwares like PhotoImpact, PhotoShop and others work just like I have described. Yep, they cost money, especially PhotoShop, and I don't expect a free substitute for PhotoShop, just a normal work with text tool, line tool and so on.

Thanks anyway for all that work on this project and thank you that it's free.

[Skro]

Hi!

I just worked a little bit around with PdN, and I noticed that every selection, when you click outside the picture, unselects everything...

Every selection? No, a small village still resists to...² By the way, not a small village, but the Magic Tool Selection, and as I'm overusing it, I find annoying always to change tool or Ctrl+A every time I want to change my selection...

Hope it's not a big deal...

Regards,

Skro

²note: Oops, I mistook with something else

[Bob]

The Magic Wand works more like the color picker (pipette, sélecteur de couleurs [fr]), that's a normal behaviour.

To deselect try Ctrl + D.