Suggested Improvements to Paint

Published by jojois74 on May 20th 2016.

So I've been using RW Paint A LOT recently and over the past few years, and what bugs me is sometimes certain pixels don't appear as they really are in the image.

This is a series of small improvements that I think would go a long way. Think of them as a series of easy fixes that I think just might be extremely great.

This is especially impactful when drawing pixel art as you are very close to the canvas.
One thing I don't like is how transparent pixels are shown the way they are. I know the checkerboard pattern is a popular thing in paint editors, but when each pixel counts it is irritating. I think it would be great if instead of showing it as a checkerboard, a solid white color was used, and each pixel that is transparent has on its four corners a quarter of a tiny black circle. This means that if four transparent pixels are bordering each other, a full black circle (more like a dot) is shown where they touch. Maybe this should be implemented as a "sketch mode" instead of as a replacement to the way it's done. The reason I think this is important is because the grey checkerboard pattern masks the appearance of semi-transparent pixels. A full black pixel has a STARK contrast to one that is slightly transparent, which is very similar looking to the more transparent pixels on the spectrum. This is because, rather than being drawn over a solid white color pixel, semi-transparents are drawn over two different shades of gray. This odd arrangement of pixels masks the true transparency AND COLOR of these pixels.

Another thing is the border/drop shadow around the canvas. It adds a small black outline to everything you draw which makes it look like the outside of your image has a thicker outline than it really does. This is especially annoying when your image already has a black outline around the border as well as in the middle of the image, because even if your outlines have the same width the border one looks wide because it melds with the border around the canvas.

Another thing. There is an operation for automatic zoom which I can bind to a mouse gesture. I would love if there was an 100% zoom that can be bound to a mouse gesture so you can see what your image would really look like. This probably exists already but I do not know too much about how operations work so if there is one I don't know how o do it.

Lastly, and I think this would be the hardest change because it;s a new feature... The grid system is zoom-independant, meaning that when I zoom in or out the grid squares border a different amount of pixels. This is often useful, but I would love to also be able to set a custom grid (width px, height px, starting x offset px, starting y offset px) But this is the least important thing out of the 4 things I have brought up, I think.

Thanks for reading, anybody who did. RW Paint is really great.

Recent comments

Vlasta site administrator on May 27th 2016

I have made some changes to the "latest" build of RWPaint (downloadable from its homepage) including an alternate look for the canvas. If you right-click the canvas and go to the "Window painting" popup menu, you can switch between the 2 styles. The styles are remembered separately for raster and vector layers.

The "classic" look provides most information, but it can be hard to look at. Maybe there will be a 3rd option one day.

I'll see what can be done about the 100% zoom. It should not be too difficult.

Some kind of grid would be nice, but I have to work out all the details first.

jojois74 registered user on May 27th 2016

Oh thanks! I didn't know.

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