Author Topic: RealWorld Paint 2011.1 finally complete (Read 33,488 times)

vlastimil · « **on:** October 09, 2011, 10:02 PM »

Hi all,

first of all, I would like to thank all donationcoders, who helped with testing (http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=27867.0) and with picking the right name (http://www.donationcoder.com/forum/index.php?topic=28144.0). After a long I hesitation, I decided to keep the RealWorld Paint name as many of you have recommended.

RWPaint is a free image and animation editor focused on bloggers and other people who work with pictures and animations online. Notable features include:

Support of layers with styles.
Import and export of .psd, .xcf, .pdn formats with layers and in case of Photoshop also with some styles (is there any other non-Adobe image editor that imports layer styles?).
Many drawing tools (pencil, image brush, rectangle, ellipse, lasso, polygon, flood fill), and photo-retouching tools (red eye remover, clone, shape-shifter (liquify-like) tool).
All basic image effects (shadow, fill, outline, bevel, glow, exposure adjustments, content-aware resizing, colorize, shift hue) and some less usual ones like displace or environment mapping. Plus a javascript interface for custom filter creation.
Decent gif optimizer.
Animation <-> filmstrip conversions.
And a cute splash:

[attach]

mouser · « **Reply #1 on:** October 09, 2011, 10:15 PM »

Wow, that is impressive.

nudone · « **Reply #2 on:** October 10, 2011, 08:33 AM »

Very impressive. If I didn't own Photoshop and needed an editor I think RW Paint would be my first choice to try.

I've not had chance to try it properly but after watching the video clips I can see you've introduced some nice improvements to what normally is on offer, e.g. I think the clone location indicator on the Clone Tool is very nice; providing good information without getting in the way.

Layer Styles are also a very powerful feature that puts RWP above lots of other editors. I like the simple tile creator too (as seen in another video clip).

I see that you've also got pen pressure capabities.

There's a lot going on here with just a "free" app. I hope the donation method provides enough reward for all your efforts.

vlastimil · « **Reply #3 on:** October 10, 2011, 08:45 AM »

Thanks for the kind words, I focused on features in the past and I hope I managed to implement all the fundamental ones. I feel I should switch my focus to the user interface now as there is a lot of space for improvement.

BTW for Photoshop owners, RWP can act as a portable backup sitting on an USB drive, ready to be used in an internet cafe or at work or school.

JoTo · « **Reply #4 on:** October 10, 2011, 09:49 AM »

Hi Vlastimil,

NICE!!!

My problem with Photoshop is the visual impaired unfriendly GUI. That problem is not with RWP, great. Well some seeing problem i have with RWP, but most can be workarounded by waiting for the tooltip and whatever. So whenever i need to manipulate a PSD, i gladly fire up RWP now.

I also love the easy way to install plugins (as easy as installing a FireFox plugin) and the really nice done tutorial videos.

Another big plus is the portability. RWP will have its reserved space from now on on my "Utility-Allways-in-my-pocket-Thumbrdrive".

Thanks for the generous offer to give it out as free/donationware. Some bucks (Donationcredits) are on the way.

Greetings
JoTo

IainB · « **Reply #5 on:** October 10, 2011, 03:56 PM »

@vlastimil: Thanks. Have just downloaded the proggy. Will place some feedback when I have had time to give it a trial.

kilele · « **Reply #6 on:** November 18, 2012, 05:32 PM »

Hi sir, I'm searching for some program to create animations for old-school games,
I've just watched your tutorial about animations and your program looks spectacular

The animate function seems very practical and easy to use, I wonder if your program allows to make animations of any size.
It would be nice to add some features like:
- restricting number of colors to work with retro color palettes (8bit,16bit,msx,snes..)
- a function to make/organize spritesheets out of the animation frames like these ones.
- navigation between frames with arrow keys
- some special drawing tools used in pixel-art

vlastimil · « **Reply #7 on:** November 18, 2012, 06:09 PM »

Glad you liked it. There is no explicit limit for the size of an animation, but because all is kept in memory, there is an indirect limiting factor - the bigger the image size, the less frames may be added.

Regarding the suggestions, some of them may be possible in the current version, because you can create your own JavaScript-ed operations (except regular plug-ins). Perhaps you can also find some Photoshop's .8bf plug-ins that would do what you need.

Changing active frame with arrow keys may also be possible via a pair of JavsScript-ed operations, but that may interfere with some drawing tools (because when you for example draw an ellipse, you can use the arrow keys to move it).

kilele · « **Reply #8 on:** November 19, 2012, 12:04 AM »

Thanks for the response, I'll try to find some 8bf plugin to work with RW.
I've made a search and seems that aha-soft iconxp has some of the features I mentioned above.

vlastimil · « **Reply #9 on:** November 19, 2012, 08:49 AM »

Now that you have added the link to the examples for what you meant by spritesheet creation, I understand better what you meant by that. The function to place animation frames on one canvas is already there. Open an animation and go to Animation->Create filmstrip and then select the maximum number of columns.

kilele · « **Reply #10 on:** November 19, 2012, 11:56 AM »

Quote from: vlastimil on November 19, 2012, 08:49 AM

Open an animation and go to Animation->Create filmstrip and then select the maximum number of columns.

- "Animation->Create filmstrip" That's it!!

- Also your program is able to create an animation opening spritesheets (filmstrips) by splitting their frames.

- And I see your program already allowed "navigation between frames with arrow keys" to see the flip effect by hand

- My other request to restrict colors would be fullfilled if you added more options on the "create image page", something similar to what iconxp presents:

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #11 on:** November 19, 2012, 02:25 PM »

I'll try to remember to look at this. I end up doing a little fast and dirty stuff to simple pics and I vaguely recall shuffling between different graphics programs (though at the moment I can't recall precisely why. Something to do with one killer feature in one program and another one in another.)

vlastimil · « **Reply #12 on:** November 19, 2012, 04:22 PM »

kilele, if I understand you correctly, you would like to have a function that reduces the number of different colors in an image. Something like this is already there, but it is not directly accessible. It is only used when you save to an image format that only supports limited number of colors - for example GIF or some flavors of BMP. I guess it would not be too difficult to make that function available in the main menu with making the number of colors configurable. And thanks for the donation.

TaoPhoenix, if you remember what was the problem, I'd love to know

... and BTW, a public beta of the next version is available on my blog. There is some exciting new stuff, mainly redesigned color/fill-style pickers and support for vector layers.

kilele · « **Reply #13 on:** November 19, 2012, 06:03 PM »

My explanation was really bad

I was referring to start a new image with a predefined color palette by means of some additional option on RWP's 'create' button,
please see the above screenshot of the program aha-soft iconxp starting a new project:
different pallete toolbars are enabled according to the initial options chosen by the user on the radiobutton gui 'color'.
Another of my requests would be a grid of pixels to work with the mouse pointer glued to every square, sort of a pixel-art editor, maybe that's already possible?
Checking out the new features!

vlastimil · « **Reply #14 on:** November 19, 2012, 08:52 PM »

I see, so you basically want to have a custom color palette and use it for example with the Pencil tool to modify pixels one by one. There is the "Swatches" panel in the current version, where you can turn off the default color and then add your own color (clicking empty space adds the currently selected color). Alternatively, if you have already drawn something, you can hold down the CTRL key and click on a pixel (while having one of the tools that draw something active), to select the color of the clicked pixel. There is also a list of recently used color to help you.

Though I would not get used to the color swatches too much as I plan to remove that panel from the future version and eventually replace it with something else.

I am sorry I do not understand what you mean by the last sentence.

kilele · « **Reply #15 on:** November 19, 2012, 11:31 PM »

Thanks for the info, i'll keep my eyes peeled for new features: subscribed to your blog rss!
My very last sentence? I was referring to the new beta ^^

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #16 on:** November 20, 2012, 12:38 AM »

Quote from: vlastimil on November 19, 2012, 04:22 PM

TaoPhoenix, if you remember what was the problem, I'd love to know

Hi Vlastimil,

Buy the way I find I often use a few particular features out of a sometimes much larger subset, with the signature example being Mouser's Screenshot Captor. I like knowing the big program has 450 horsepower even if I drive it like the semi-senile man I am. (kidding!)

My powers of concentration are rather erratic, but it's good to know you can add a couple of features so the next time I go on a rampage I'll make notes. Very vaguely there's something that I keep opening MS Paint for instead of the much fancier/stronger Paint.net if I can remember why.

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #17 on:** December 01, 2012, 09:42 PM »

Quote from: vlastimil on November 19, 2012, 04:22 PM

TaoPhoenix, if you remember what was the problem, I'd love to know

I worked on this today. Here's most of the rundown of the problem:

- Microsoft Paint
Transparent Select Freeform
Transparent Select Square
Copy & Paste
Copy & Open New File & Paste &Save-As a new file
Flip Horozontal & Vertical
Stretch X % Horozontal and Vertical

- Windows Picture Viewer
Quickly Flip through pic libraries "next - next"
Set as Desktop Background

- Paint.net
Effects/Artistic/Pencil Sketch
Adjustments/Hue & Saturation
Adjustments/Brightness & Contrast
Couple of occasional other things

vlastimil · « **Reply #18 on:** December 02, 2012, 10:16 AM »

Thanks for the feedback. RWPaint is not a image viewer/manager (at least not yet), so comfortable browsing of pictures is a problem.

The selection and copy/pasting of images should be possible in the current version, perhaps the commands have unexpected names or are in unexpected locations (selection tools are in the "Magic wand" tool group - the first icon above the canvas; freeform is called "Lasso selection" and there will be "Shape selection" in the future version that would be similar to selecting with Bezier curves in Photoshop). Also, the selected region is represented differently than in other editors (non-selected parts are greyed out).

Flipping and stretching ("Resize (resample)") are in the Image menu. Color adjustments in the Adjust menu and on main toolbar (the half-black, half-white icon).

Artistic effects are indeed missing. There are mainly technical(?) effects like bevel, shadow, outline or glow, but no real artistic effects like crystallize or pointillism.

I am aware that explaining to users how something could be done, if they did not figure it out themselves, is pointless and a sign of a failure of the software. I hope to get better at designing things in the future. Thanks once again for the information about the first impression of the software, it is very important to me.

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #19 on:** December 02, 2012, 01:54 PM »

Quote from: vlastimil on December 02, 2012, 10:16 AM

I am aware that explaining to users how something could be done, if they did not figure it out themselves, is pointless and a sign of a failure of the software. I hope to get better at designing things in the future. Thanks once again for the information about the first impression of the software, it is very important to me.

No no no!

Being the incredible developer you are, my job now is to cheer you up!

I ran into the same thing with Mouser on Screenshot Captor. It's a thing where some powerful program does a lot of stuff, only to happen to miss what at least in my case was THE only use case of some smaller program. And where I am happy to have donated here, is to sometimes get a misc little feature grafted on top of that program so that all that horsepower is there for one day when I need it, but I can do my low-level hack editing on the daily basis. For me the trick to low level tools is like grabbing a blue ball point pen and a pencil and a notebook. I have done some of my best creative work with those - so then questions arise like "why can't you do precisely that on a computer?" Theoretically one day if I had my very own pet developer, you could - I'd devise a program that would *almost* mimic the kinds of tricks I use in notebooks. But until then, and grudgingly admitting that developers are people and not awesome toys, that shall wait for another day!

So let's see... if you're on a dead heat with Paint.net, except you're here and that guy is "just a random dev", then I'd like it if it is possible to graft on the few low level things I do in MS Paint, so then like S.C., your program can be my all-in-one tool. It's Not an image viewer. So far, fair enough, so that's that. Let's see what else.

1. You already have both adjust saturation and hue, so that part is down.
2. Make a customizable "favorite actions" toolbar. (I got the idea from Office 2010, see my rants on ribbons elsewhere.) If a user really only does like 4 things over and over, it becomes amazingly fast if they're all there on a little toolbar in order. For me, all I really use are the Rectangle Select, Lasso Select, Flip Horozontal, and Stretch/Shrink. So if you had a feature like right-click an option and "add to custom toolbar" that makes life a win. : )

Now, for technical points.

1. Resample doesn't seem to have an effect I understand. My goal is to stretch or shrink the picture, but doing a resample looks like it leaves it there. Also, I'd like the choice of independent horozontal and vertical relative resizing like MS Paint does.
2. Flip Horozontal would be nice - just saves a step having to rotate twice, because the 90 degree cases don't do anything for me.
3. A "Clear All Tools" bit / button would be useful. I find it rather distracting to be locked into a "select" or other tool, and I'd really rather just go back to as if I'd opened the picture the first time and do something else.
4. A "pointer" tool that doesn't do anything might be nice. The idea is that with the selects, if your hand jiggles then you've yanked a piece of your picture apart and there's a small risk of damaging the picture if you somehow can't undo it such as blundering a close-save changes. A pointer is then like a "safety" so as you're just imagining things, sorta clicking around, you can't actually hurt anything. You could combine this with the "Clear All Tools" bit.

Whew! It's a lot of words, but should be a piece of cake to do after all that other stuff is in there!

Regards,

Tao

vlastimil · « **Reply #20 on:** December 02, 2012, 09:08 PM »

Thanks for the kind words Tao, I think I understand your position. There is a way to customize RWPaint, but it is not easy. I tried to prepare something for you to play with if you want to experiment a bit.

In RWPaint, go to Tools->Application options in main menu. Check the last option (Show menu commands for layout control) on the first tab (Main Window). This will add new entries to the Tools menu. Click on "Manage layouts" in the Tools menu. Download the file attached to this post and unzip it; then click on "Import layout" in the window that appeared and select the unzipped file. This will add a specialized layout to the application.

Now, open an image. In the upper right corner of the window, you'll see "Tao's image editor". Click that. The window will change and most of the controls will be gone, leaving only those you mentioned. You can always click the "Layered image editor" text to go back to the default layout.

The simplified layout has only the 2 selection tools plus I left Transformation and Crop there as well. Transformation tool is used when you paste something in. The Resize command now accepts % for each direction. The Flip and Mirror commands are on the toolbar, but only work with entire image ignoring selection.

Creating these modified layouts is not hard for me, but teaching it to anyone else would be quite hard. The person needs to know a lot about the architecture of the software. Maybe I'll one day figure out how to make this accessible without exposing the inner complexity.

---

I am thinking about the Pointer tool. It is true that other editors have such tools and they are sometimes used for panning. That can be done in RWPaint by holding the middle button (the mouse wheel), so I skipped that, but I will think about it. Sometimes being too efficient is contra-productive.

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #21 on:** December 02, 2012, 11:08 PM »

That's pretty close!

For a bit of silly fun testing it out, it seemed that your avatar is a bit serious in expression. That of course leads into the Joker from Batman: "Why So Serious?"

So here is Vlastimil, as the Joker from Batman, now with an uncanny valley smile!
[attach]

TaoPhoenix · « **Reply #22 on:** December 02, 2012, 11:12 PM »

Heh P.S. How do you remove entries from the File Menu recent lists? Some of the pictures I edit are ... uh... NSFW, so I'd really rather not have titles such as "Buxom Blond with Big Boobies" in my file list!

vlastimil · « **Reply #23 on:** December 03, 2012, 10:08 AM »

Yeah, getting a decent photo of me is tremendous job. I actually did a retouch of my own some time ago http://www.rw-designer.com/entry/154

To remove recent files, open a new window and click on the "Recent" icon near the left edge. Then right-click on a thumbnail and select "Remove from list".