1bit, 4bit, 8bit, 24bit color depth, grayscale, and quality

[pn_user]

When saving a file, it would be nice to have more options.

Both the TIF and PNG formats support a wide range of color depths and grayscale. For each of these, it would be nice to have options when saving files for different color depths and gray scale.

Many pictures and images I work on are intended for the web, and thus size can be a significant factor. The fact that Paint.NET saves everything in 24 bit (except GIF which is 8 bit by default and TGA for which you allow options of 24 bit and 32 bit) doesn't make it useful for some images.

For these same images, it would be nice to be able to reduce the color depth, or adjust to grayscale, within the program too, so that one can see the resulting image before saving.

My current work around is to use IrfanView (an image viewer, but not an editor), as this free program works great with just about any image format and supports different color depths and coverting between formats. If you could marriage some of the format capabilities of IrfanView with Paint.NET, I think you'd expand the programs applicability significantly.

[Nick Hanson]

I'm curious, I don't have any mult-page Tiff files handy but if I recall correctly my old fax software used to recieve faxes as tiffs and all the pages were in a single tiff. Does anyone know if Paint.Net supports multi-page tiffs (perhaps each page as a layer) or does it just load the first page?

[RejZoR]

Also decreasing colors to only those actually used could nicely reduce final filesize.

[pn_user]

I'm curious, I don't have any mult-page Tiff files handy but if I recall correctly my old fax software used to recieve faxes as tiffs and all the pages were in a single tiff. Does anyone know if Paint.Net supports multi-page tiffs (perhaps each page as a layer) or does it just load the first page?

Don't believe this works in Paint.NET. IrfanView supports multipage TIFFs (I use them all the time). So, you could have IrfanView extract the individual pages for use in Paint.NET.

[Rick Brewster]

Also decreasing colors to only those actually used could nicely reduce final filesize.

If your image uses less than 256 colors, this happens naturally during the quantization process.

We have the code in place for quantization to 8-bit from the 32-bit image, but we just didn't have time in the v2.5 timeframe to get it in place for BMP and PNG. Since v2.6 is a release with a very narrow scope, it is also not going to make it into this release. We do still have the bugs in our database though ("add 8-bit option for ___ file type"), so we haven't forgotten about it.

[Alph Tech / STUART]

So if I save a grayscale image it'll automatically save it as a grayscale image that can be used as a HL1 spray?

[Rick Brewster]

We don't save as greyscale. If you desaturate with the Black&White adjustment, we still save as an RGB image.

[Alph Tech / STUART]

I'm talking with the theoretical change here.

[Rick Brewster]

If we're adding 8-bit to the file types, adding greyscale wouldn't be too much of a stretch I believe.