Resizing the floating color palette

[Michael Moore]

I've been trying to get the hang of PDN for about a week now. I'm not an artist and I have no background in the "photoshop-world" lingo so it has been rough sledding a time or two but I'm starting to get some idea of how to get where I'd like to go. The Tutorials section has been useful. Thanks for making the program available!

Is there any way that I could make the full colors palette larger, or possibly to zoom in and out on it? I'm of an age where my visual acuity is not what it once was, and even with a 19" CRT set to 1024x768 I'm having a hard time differentiating between the subtle differences in some of the colors in the palette. If I could make it about half-again bigger it would be a big help.

I've made an ad hoc larger palette in a drawing by using the eyedropper to sample each of the squares in the palette but that's proving rather cumbersome to use, as is the Magnifier in the Windows Accessibility menu. It would be nice if I could grab a corner of the palette and resize/zoom it (I use two monitors so there is plenty of room on the second one to accomodate a larger palette).

thanks,

Michael

[Myrddin]

More>>?

If you have no idea why I said that, take a look at this page to see what I'm jibbering on about:

http://www.getpaint.net/doc/latest/en/ColorsWindow.html

As for resizing like you can for the History and Layers windows, you can't .

Does this help?

EDIT: I suggested the More>> command because of the higher degree of accuracy you have with the individual colours.

[BoltBait]

Michael, maybe you just need to set up a custom palette.

Here is one I set up: http://boltbait.googlepages.com/palette

Hope this helps.

[Michael Moore]

Myrddin, I'm already using the expanded version with all the HSV/RGB boxes. Resizing the history and layers windows just makes them cover more space. What I'd like is to magnify the palette window by about 1.5X so that everything in it is larger.

BoltBait, I've downloaded some of the effects from your website too. Your palette may be a little more to my liking on how the colors are grouped but it looks like whatever palette is used it has to fit into that small rectangle at the bottom of the window. I'll work with your version for a bit and see how it goes.

I may have to play more with the Magnifier in the Accessibility options and see if I can figure out how to keep it permanently focused on the palette. The options I found for it either made me seasick as it follows the cursor, or didn't allow me to get it to stick on the palette and show it the way I wanted it.

In any event, I appreciate the comments.

I think that allowing the palette to be magnified would be a worthwhile future addition as the native resolution on the new LCDs all seem to be going higher and higher, making things smaller and smaller, and I'm not the only person I know in their early/mid 50s who is finding that things are getting too small for comfort, and the 58" hang on the wall" monitors are not quite in my price range just yet. 1024x768 on a 19" monitor is about as small as I can deal with and have any degree of comfort. Even at that I've been finding that spending an afternoon trying to learn PDN leaves me with a mild case of eyestrain.

Have pity on us old folks.

cheers,

Michael

[Rick Brewster]

Michael Moore, Paint.NET does not provide magnification like you're asking for.

However, you can set the DPI of Windows itself if you want things to be larger. Paint.NET works correctly all the way up to at least 192 DPI (the default is 96 DPI -- so things would be 2x larger). However, this affects ALL programs, so if the Colors window is the only thing you want to magnify, this may not be a good solution.

[Michael Moore]

Hi Rick,

I'm afraid that running different resolutions on the two monitors would probably be less than ideal, as I'm finding that I'll have reference images (similar to what I'm working on) open on the second monitor along with the auxiliary windows for PDN.

Hopefully the developers will keep this suggestion in mind and if they find themselves with a "here's an easy way we could do what that fellow was asking for" moment whilst working on a future release maybe they'll feel inclined to add it.

In the meantime, I'll check into some sites devoted for aids for computer users with impaired sight (thankfully I would LIKE a bit of a boost in magnification but I don't HAVE to have it) and see if I can find some tweak for the Windows Magnifier that will let me get it to do what I'd like.

cheers,

Michael