In praise of paint.net auto levels function

[stuartb]

I have been doing a lot of testing over the last few days. It seems that the one-click auto-levels function in paint.net is significantly superior to photoshop elements, picasa, acdsee pro2 and, most importantly to me, better even than DCE autoenhance, which I currently use in conjunction with Picasa. I have a lot of images with a blue colour cast which paint.net sorts out in one-click. I cannot get comparable results in any other app (yes I know I am very fussy).

So now I am desperately keen to see some sort of 'picasa-like' thumbnail browser which works hand in hand with paint.net. Maybe call it browse.net.

Plus the ability to apply the auto-levels to multile images at once. I know I can open many images in paint.net but I then need to save them out one by one.

Paint.net seems pretty brilliant in many ways . . . . fingers crossed 4.0 isnt far away!

Regards

[Braiden]

Maybe once i finish the Paint.Net Plugin Manager, i could work on that.

Also, i think that 4.0 is quite a way away, as its a total rewrite ( or so i hear )

most plugins will probably need appending to!

You should get into the plugin making scene, also, there are several reasons why PDN auto levels are better, they are made by a number of people ,all appending improvements to the code, by our great mathematical wizzy's! Also, other programs are made by generally one or two people, so their thoughts are streamlined, and the other alternatives are usually Expensive, so are based on Quantity over quality, where as we are the opposite!

[willgoss]

I too like Auto levels.......

I find that PDN can benefit from a Browser.....especially for initial review of new pictures and deleting some....but they already exist and work as well as built in's such as on Paint Shop Pro..

I use the freeware FastStone which does have some editing capabilities, a good screen capture, and allows you to launch any picture into PDN or other graphics program, resize files, e-mail,......the main limitation is it will not view .pdn files but will view a .psd or .tif....

I open FastStone, select a picture, launch PDN or Gimp or whatever....at any time you can open FastStone from the toolbar to review or launch or drag and drop another picture....

I especially like the ability to Edit-Enhance Colors (and retain the slider settings) for use on other photos....this works on one screen, fullscreen....You can save as ,jpg or.tif (to minimize losses) and open or drag to PDN.

I use this as my interface for all my graphics work and did delete Picasa......I also use it to Print from which gives me a single point to print from...

[stuartb]

Interesting you mention FastStone. I have been using that also for many years . .in fact it is my default app for images, and for printing, and for scanning. I particularly like the multi-page file builder and the contact sheet generator (although I wish they would add iptc to the captions printing options).

I use Picasa as well though, mainly as I have 10,000 office and personal images to manage and it is just SO fast at searching. PLUS it can batch-edit all selected images and give you the choice to undo those edits or save them. AND it has a one=click upload to Smugmug. I have been using Picasa since the days when you had to pay for it! bit I see very little evolution in its basic abilities since google took charge.

Now and then I find I need to clone-out stuff or repair images so I was searching for a lightweight app which I could launch from Picasa on the occassions I need to clone. Thats how I found paint.net (via Paint Star and Artweaver). I still fire up photoshop now and then and get stuck into some serious image manipulation but its maybe only once a month.

I can launch paint.net from picasa with a right-click. So right now for my daily use I need FastStone, Picasa AND paint.net for my image management. It would be nice if there was a single app that would do it all so quickly. There may just be a golden ooportunity for paint.net here . . . as some of the bigger players are making a real bloatware mess of things.