Color Reduction

[Anagoge]

Paint.NET is a nice program with a good UI.

I know others have asked for this in the past, but I would like to choose the bit depth when saving GIF, PNG, and BMP files, so I can control the final file size better.

Pressing ESC to cancel a selction (select none) would also be intuitive for some people.

[Rick Brewster]

We're planning on the bit depth selection in a future release. GIF images, btw, can only be saved as 8-bit -- so you won't see us providing a choice on that one ... we do provide configuration for how the dithering and alpha channel are handled.

I thought we had ESC to deselect, but that only applies when one of the Move tools is selected. It makes sense to add this to the general tool repoirte as well; looks like a simple oversight. (in fact, I just implemented this -- you'll see it in next week's release)

[Anagoge]

Thanks for your reply. It is good to see esc will be added to unselect stuff.

I was wanting to force-save images with less than 256 colors in the GIF format. I believe this produces a smaller GIF color table (2-128 entries rather than the full 256). That said, the file size difference is minor compared to the size difference of 32-bit and 8-bit BMP files, so it isn't really as big an issue for me, and I know there are lots of batch GIF optimization utilities out there I can use if I do need this.

I remember Photoshop had a very nice "Perceptual" color reduction tool. I'm not sure what algorithm it used, but it produced very nice color reductions with minimal visual changes, at least to the human eye.

Thanks for your time and good luck!

[Alph Tech / STUART]

See this. See this run. Run, this, run.