Extracting GIF's

[JuneBelle]

Hi, I'm a long time Paint.net user; but this is the first time that I have com onto the forums.

I have come here because I would like to make a suggestion for either inclusion in the next Paint.net version or as a plugin, if someone could be so kind.

I am originally a traditional artist; but I have started in the digital realm and have become interested in pixel art. (What can I say? The simplicity of it reminds me of traditional art. )

I have gone through multiple free art programs. (Yes, I know. I'm cheap. Ha ha! ) But through all of them, Paint.net is the one that I ultimately settled on as my program of choice, mainly for it's color wheel, which is oddly absent in most paint programs, and also for it's dedicated pencil tool and it's Line/Curves tool (I have difficulty transitioning from pencil and paper to trackstick, which is what my laptop uses...). The fact that I can now save color palettes and turn off anti-aliasing (You have no idea how much trouble I had with erasing pixels until that came along.) has gotten me fully hooked on Paint.net!

Most of the time, I save my creations as PNG's. But, in the cases when I wish to make animated pixel art, I like to save them to GIF and use something like Jasc Animation Shop and Benton GIF Animator (Benton acts strangely for me for some reason. I can create GIF's with it; but I can't re-import them without destroying the animation once I have saved the animation and closed the window. I would use Jasc exclusively if it wasn't for the fact that Jasc seems to have issues with recognizing and saving transparency unless I bring it into Benton first......).

Now for my problem. Later, if I wish to edit a GIF animation, I cannot import the GIF into Paint.net for editing without flattening the animation. That means that I have to keep my old Paint.net file that I originally worked on; and...well...., those have a tendency to be rather cluttered and confusing with excess layers due to how I work.... Heh...

So I was wondering if the ability to open GIF files by placing the frames in separate layers could be included in the next version of Paint.net or if someone could create a plugin for this.

I searched the plugins and found this: viewtopic.php?f=16&t=24313&hilit=gif which I plan on downloading and implementing as it will save me a lot of work saving my layers one at a time! But there is no plugin for importing GIF's without flattening them.

Thanks!

[Simon Brown]

There is a free program that can decompile GIFs: http://www.photo-freeware.net/gifsplitter.php

Hope this helps

[JuneBelle]

Thanks for the link!

That will definitely help a lot. It would be even nicer if someone could create a plugin that directly imports it; but this will be a good alternative if no one takes up the suggestion or until someone does. So I will download this now. Thanks.

[Curmudgeon]

The one I usually use can be found at www.GIFWorks.com

It's an online tool instead, so you don't have to download anything.

But it has it's downfall that the .gif animation can't be too large of a file size (I think it's about 300K max)

You simply upload the .gif file, then under the 'Optimize' tab, is an option to split into frames.

Just another option to choose from. I had never heard of the one SABrown mentioned, but I will check that one out also.