New version of Paint.NET and a handy tip for using it
2nd March 2006
Version 2.6 of Paint.NET was released a few days ago. It’s not a replacement for Photoshop — nor is it meant to be — but it’s a quick little tool, it’s free, and it’s written in managed code and the full source is available.
When I embed screenshots on a page, I like to surround them with a black border to make them look a bit better. I’ll often do that just with CSS, but many of the RSS readers don’t display the full style info. So that means I need to put the border in the picture itself.
Here’s how to do that in Paint.NET.
We’ll start with figure 1, pulled from the Paint.NET user interface itself.
Figure 1: Starting example
I deliberately captured a bit of the background of the Paint.NET window and included the cursor. Unfortunately, Paint.NET puts its own black border around the picture so it already looks pretty good. So here it as it would appear in the page without a border:
Figure 2: Example with no border
And here it is with a border:
Figure 3: Example with border
Much nicer, hmm?
To do this, you need to set the background color to black and then expand the canvas size by one pixel on each side.
Paint.NET uses a tool palette very similar to that used for years in Adobe’s products. At the bottom is the color selector, with the overlapping rectangles for the foreground and the background colors, and the little arrow that swaps the colors. Make sure the colors are set to the default black and white (by clicking the mini-overlapping-rectangles icon) and then swapping colors using the double-arrowed tool. I’ve circled it in red in figure 4 below.
Figure 4: Tool palette
Next, from the Image menu, choose Canvas Size… You can also use the keyboard shortcut Shift-Ctrl-R.
Figure 5: Image menu
By default, the Canvas Size menu will look like figure 6.
Figure 6: Canvas size dialog with default settings
We’re going to add a pixel on each side, so that means increasing the width and the height by two pixels. But that’s not quite it. Notice the Anchor section in the bottom of the window? That says where to put the existing canvas relative to the changes. If it’s in the top left, then any size increases will only appear on the right and the bottom — not what we want. Here’s the dialog box after making the changes:
Figure 7: Canvas size dialog after changes
And here’s what it will look like in Paint.NET after the change:
Figure 8: Example after adding the border
It looks thick inside Paint.NET, but remember that it already applies its own 1-pixel black border.
Save your changes, and you’re done.
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