Soft paint brushes, fg/bg color swap hotkey, etc...

[-Tj-]

I really love the program so far, but there are some things I'd like to request for future versions (if they're not already there and I just overlooked them):

-Hotkey for swapping foreground and background colors (like X in photoshop)

-Lock transparency in layers

-Soft paint brushes

-Pressure support for brush transparency

-Separate palette for fill styles (a little tedious to use as it is now)

-Hold Shift while drawing to restrict line to horizontal or vertical axis

-Ability to move canvas view beyond canvas boundaries

-Ability to merge selected layers

-Eraser detection for Tablet PC stylus (and regular tablets, if it works with those... haven't yet tried it on an one yet)

There are more that I had thought of, but those were the ones that I could remember at the moment. Though so far the program is great, it's still a little cumbersome for the kind of work I'd use it for, and the above would definetely help with ~90% of what I feel it's lacking at the moment.

I know Paint.net won't replace Photoshop anytime soon, but so far I do like what I see. It's a lot better than most of the free paint programs I've used in terms of feel and functionality, and if I can eventually use it in place of Photoshop, it'd certainly free up my budget .

Keep up the great work!

[dyland]

try gimp, search gimp on google, it has the hotkey for chging forground to background colors by pushing x, im not sure if you can lock the transparency but ive never tried that, instead of soft paint brushes you can use the tool airbrush, which has the options of pressure and rate, not hard to make lines although tricky, you must use the path tool then stroke it... but still easy. sorry but you cant merge selected layers on gimp, but you can copy the layer then delete it, then merge them all then paste the layer. thats all i know, im sure ill get banned for dissin paint.net, it rocks but not enough tools for me, peace out have fun!

[-Tj-]

Gimp was one of the programs I tried a while back. Not sure if it's changed much since then (it's been quite a while) but I wasn't too comfortable with it and decided not to use it. Paint.NET is one I actually really like using and would like to see improve.

None the less, I'll see about giving Gimp a second look, but Paint.NET's feel is going to be hard to beat.

[dyland]

yes, its much harder to use, and by the way you can merge selected layers, well not exactly, you can merge visisble layers,

[-Tj-]

Yup, I'm aware of the flatten feature, but it's difficult to manage layers when you can only merge them all at the same time. Typically I'm drawing outlines on one layer, then adding details on layers over that. When that's done, I merge layers that I want to be together.

Currently I'd have to hide all the layers I don't want visible (while leaving the ones I want merged visible), flatten the image, paste them into a new window, undo the flatten in the original, and do the same for each merge I want together. There are other ways, but for me this was the most efficient method.

[Rick Brewster]

Hotkey for swapping foreground and background colors (like X in photoshop)

We don't have this right now, but good idea.

-Lock transparency in layers

Not sure what you mean by this.

Soft paint brushes

Don't really have plans for this at this time.

Pressure support for brush transparency

No plans for this at this time.

-Separate palette for fill styles (a little tedious to use as it is now)

Not sure what you mean by this.

-Hold Shift while drawing to restrict line to horizontal or vertical axis

We've already got this. It constrains to a multiple-of-15 degree angle while using the Line/Curve Tool.

-Ability to move canvas view beyond canvas boundaries

Not sure what you mean by this.

-Ability to merge selected layers

Yeah our Layers window is pretty basic. Agreed on this one.

-Eraser detection for Tablet PC stylus (and regular tablets, if it works with those... haven't yet tried it on an one yet)

I think Tom was talking about this at one point, and we have a bug/work item filed for it, but not for the v2.6 release.

[-Tj-]

Some clarification on some of my more ambiguous requests

-Lock transparency in layers

Lock the alpha for a layer so that when you paint on it the transparency level stays the same while the color value changes. So if a pixel I'm painting on a layer with a locked transparency has a value of R:100, G:100, B:100, and an alpha value of 56%, and I go over it with a brush that has a color value of R:255, G:192, B:15, the alpha value stays the same but the color changes to the brush color.

-Separate palette for fill styles

Currently the fill styles are accessed via drop-down menu, but because you have to first click it, then scroll through it to find your desired fill style it takes at least 2 extra clicks to find the right one. If it were available on its own palette with as many swatches the window can show visible, it would be a 1 or 2 click job.

-Hold Shift while drawing to restrict line to horizontal or vertical axis

I'm not sure if MS Paint had this or not (don't think it did) but most every paint program other than that has the ability to restrict lines to the H or V axis while using the paint brushes. I didn't know this works with the Line/Curve tool, but it'd certainly be a plus if this were available for the brush and pencil as well.

-Ability to move canvas beyond canvas boundaries

This was an issue recently remedied in Photoshop (I believe in version CS2). Currently when an image has areas beyond the canvas boundaries visible, canvas movement is unavailable, and when the canvas goes beyond the limits of the screen size, the canvas can be moved up until the edge of the canvas meets the edge of the screen. Sometimes this makes it difficult to paint near that boundary. If the canvas could be moved when zoomed out instead of being constantly centered, and also be moved so that the canvas boundaries can be visible at the center of the screen when zoomed in, this would make painting much easier when using a stylus.

That last one is admittedly difficult to describe/understand... I'll see if I can come up with some pictures of what I mean for these.

[-Tj-]

Got the images:

-Separate palette for fill styles

Something like this:

-Ability to move canvas beyond canvas boundaries

Usually the canvas cannot move when zoomed out:

or the canvas cannot move beyond the paintable area when zoomed in (shown here as a red border):

My suggestion is to allow moving of the canvas when zoomed out:

and the same for when the canvas is zoomed in:

Hope that helps :wink:

[Rick Brewster]

The fill style palette is an interesting idea. It might look ugly, mostly because our current brush selection is rather ugly.

As for moving the canvas, I can't possibly see any utility in having that ability. I only see confusion and bug reports down that road.

[Alph Tech / STUART]

Fill styles? Brush selection?

Did I miss something?

[-Tj-]

Actually it's quite the opposite. There are two programs I use currently that have the moving canvas functionality: openCanvas and Photoshop CS2. I'm not certain, but I believe Painter has it, too.

Though it may sound useless, it's actually been one of the most useful additions to Photoshop. It really helps when you need to paint near the borders. In fact, I believe such functionality has been requested since Photoshop 6.

[nife bender]

moving the canvas is a great idea. maybe not even moving it but at least letting us move the screen past the last row of pixels. ive noticed that somtimes when zoomed in i cant use the pencil on the last row. the screen automaticly moves up, so i have to kinda pencil off the screen.

[Alph Tech / STUART]

Just de-maximize the window and move that when you hit the edges.

[-Tj-]

That doesn't help when the canvas is zoomed in and it's larger than the window. The main idea behind this, among others, is that you can start your paintstroke off the canvas and draw toward the canvas. It's extremely difficult to paint at the edges otherwise.

Of course, a valid solution to this would be to add some pixels to the edges of the image and crop it later, but adding more pixels means using more memory, and sometimes that's not a luxury to be had, especially when some images I work on are already huge.

[ShimmeryDaze]

Lock transparency in layers

I remember in Photoshop, there was an option to lock transparency for each layer. It meant that you could recolor any part of the image that wasn't transparent. That was lovely--what I do now instead is use the color replacement tool with 0 tolerance. Which works so well I don't even miss being able to lock the transparency.