Request: Magic wand smoothing

[kowach]

It would be wonderful if Paint.net had smoothing feature in Magic wand tool.

 

You can do powerful things with tolerance/smoothing parameters (I had abuse it lot, long ago in Paint shop pro ).

[Cc4FuzzyHuggles]

Smoothing? Like making the edges of a cut-out object smoother?
If you are wanting to smooth edges, have you tried plugins?
 
You might like these plugins :
-- Feather Plugin
-- Selection Plugins, which includes Feather Selection
-- AA's Assistant is part of dpy's Plugin Pack.
-- Basic Antialias
-- Alpha Blur 

Tip :

AA's Assistant tends to be the favorite plugin for others when smoothing edges, however depending on what you are trying to do, you might like a different plugin or a combo of plugins.

I often run Feather first, then I run AA's Assistant twice for best smoothing results.

 

(Don't know how to install plugins? See how here : http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/1708-how-to-install-pluginsgeneral-plugin-troubleshooting-thread/)

[Ego Eram Reputo]

There's a new feature in the PDN4 toolset that enables/disables the aliasing on selection edges.  Find it in the Tool Bar with the Magic Wand active (and other tools).  The Tool Bar icon looks like a small circle with four tiny circles on it. 

 

Edit:  As Rick pointed out - Magic Wand doesn't support anti-aliased selections.  My mistake.

[Rick Brewster]

EER, the Magic Wand doesn't create selections that can be antialiased. If it did, it'd have the antialiasing toggle in the toolbar. MW either fully includes a pixel, or doesn't.

[Ego Eram Reputo]

Oops.    My mistake.  I've been seeing so many tool options lately I'm starting to dream them.

[Rick Brewster]

No worries I get things mixed up all the time. And I'm a klutz.

 

The Magic Wand doesn't have antialiasing (or rather, it doesn't have feathering) because ... it just didn't work out. I spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out a good way to do it, and I even have the first half of the algorithm mostly in place because of the work I put into adding feathering to the Paint Bucket. However, translating all of this from a per-pixel alpha model (ala Paint Bucket) into a geometric model (selections are always based on geometry!) proved to be too complicated to work out at the time I was doing it. I didn't want to delay things by another month or so, so I decided to cut it.

 

Another practical reason I can claim that this isn't in place is that the performance would quite possibly be abhorrent. Selections created by the Magic Wand are already pretty CPU intensive, and adding an extra pass of geometry processing could make things several times worse. Maybe I'll be able to switch from GPC ( http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/gpc/ ) over to Boost Geometry ( http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_55_0/libs/geometry/doc/html/index.html ) which apparently has way better performance, but I don't have a time frame for that.