Tag: paint.net

What is your favourite image editing program?

Luke Johnson

Some of you may be surprised to know that Windows Photo Viewer and Office Picture Manager are not the only ways to view and edit image files 🙂  Here are three of my favourites:

1)  Irfanview has been updated to version 4.35.  You can download from CNET here.  This is a superfast image viewing and editing program.  I love it for its highly adjustable batch image processing ability.

You can download all the current plugins from here.  This includes a new plugin that will allow Irfanview to open DXF files, as per this list.  The DXF plugin is provided by BabaCAD – they also provide free CAD software for download at http://www.babacad.com/index.html

2)  Paint.NET – quick and easy

3)  Photoshop – awesome filters and effects, and great at enhancing still photos of your buildings

4) GIMP – Andy Milburn reminded me about this in the comments.  I haven’t used it for a long while, but it is essentially a free replacement for Photoshop.

5) pixlr – another great tip from the comments.  RicardoCC referred me to this online image editor that was actually purchased by Autodesk.  Have you tried it yet?

Find the Average RGB Color of a material sample and get the RGB values with free tool

Luke Johnson

In Revit, we often have to input RGB values for various color properties, such as shaded view colors for a particular material, or if you want a specific Paint color for a rendered material.  To do this, you can use Paint.NET and the Color Picker tool – the resultant properties include the RGB values you need.

However, you may obtain a sample image of a material, but the color is irregular.  For example, you scan in a paint sample and there is a color variation in the scanned image.  Or perhaps you simply want to take a detailed pattern sample image and find out the average color of a particular part of that image.

Here’s how you do it:

  1. Download Paint.NET
  2. Download Average Color plugin
  3. Copy the DLL file from the extracted Average Color ZIP you downloaded into the ‘Effects’ folder, which is in you Paint.NET installation directory (for example: C:Program FilesPaint.NETEffects)
  4. Open Paint.NET
  5. Open the image you want to find an average color from.
  6. Make a rectangular selection.
  7. Click on the Effects menu – Average Color
  8. Now click on the Color Picker tool (looks like an Eyedropper)
  9. On the ‘Colors’ palette, click the More>> button
  10. The RGB values for your selected color are shown.
  11. In Revit, input those RGB values for the desired color or material

Average Color of Selection forum thread
Plugin to Average Color of Selection – Paint.NET Forum
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Add a Logo Watermark to Walkthrough before uploading to Youtube

Luke Johnson

In order to protect your intellectual property, it may be wise to add a watermark to any animations you upload to Youtube.

One method using VirtualDubMod is described at the link below:
Put a custom watermark on your video

I used Paint.NET to delete the background from our company logo image and save as a TGA file. This was then used in the logo filter of VirtualDubMod.

Here are some animations we have produced here at Dimond Architects: