Using paint.NET to create plugins

[The26]

PDN, also known as paint.net, is a free software used for graphics on Windows. You can use it to create plugins. I highly recommend that you use PDN to create plugins, as it isn't hard to learn how to use and contains a bunch of very handy tools which will help with plugin making.
As many people have complained that they don't understand how this works, I have created this tutorial to save myself from the irritation of arguing with people over which graphics app is better when they don't know how to use PDN.

There are various different features that this program offers, however, I will not document them all and list out the more important features.

Layout

PDN's layout contains many different areas you can interact with, marked with numbers from 1 to 7, canvas and a few other areas.
1. contains buttons with file management, clipboard actions, undo/redo and a grid and ruler tool.

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The buttons are as follows:
New File, Open File, Save File | Print | Cut, Copy, Paste, Crop to Selection, Deselect | Undo, Redo | Toggle Grid, Toggle Ruler

2. contains current tool options.

This is the options bar for the brush tool. It has many settings for the brush tool. There are different settings for tools such as the select tools or gradients.

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The buttons are as follows:
Tool (select tool)
Brush Width (control your brush width by pressing the + or - buttons, selecting brush width from the dropdown menu by clicking on the down arrow, typing in the brush width or scrolling with the middle mouse button on the number)
Hardness (if anti-aliasing is turned on, it will determine how much it will "smudge")
Fill (it's like brush "textures", you can control what texture would the brush have, such as plaid texture, 50% fill, etc.)
Toggle Anti-Aliasing (anti-aliasing determines if your brush will be "soft" and leave transparent pixels; if it's on, transparent pixels will appear, if it's off, there will be no transparent pixels and it will all be a solid color)
Blending Mode (you can choose between different blending modes, for example, normal will just paint over other pixels normally; multiply will blend the pixels you are painting over with your selected color by "multiplying" the hex codes, I don't really understand how it works)
Selection Clipping Mode (I don't use it so I do not know what it does)

The settings change for each tool, so I encourage you explore some of it yourself! Sometimes multiple tools can have the same shared setting between them.

3. contains togglable buttons for tools.

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The first button contains the toolbar, marked with the number 4.
The second button contains the action history.
The third button contains the layer manager, marked with the number 6.
The fourth button contains the color manager, marked with the number 5.

4. is the toolbar, where you can quickly select what tool you want to use.

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I will not bother explaining what each button does, as they are pretty self-explanatory.
The buttons include a variety of selection tools, fill tools, gradient tools, brush tools, text, shapes, lines, etc.

5. is the color manager, where you can select what color you want to fill or draw something.

The color manager contains a huge selection of colors. If you don't like the preset colors, you can go to the "More" menu, which you can see here.

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You can choose from a wide specter of colors. You can also control the RGB or HSV values yourself, or even enter the hex code yourself! You can also control the opacity if you want what you draw to be transparent, such as shadows.
There are primary and secondary colors. You draw with the primary color by drawing with the left mouse button, and the secondary color with the right one. You can also control the colors of gradients with the primary and secondary colors.
Remember that if you expand your canvas, the background color of the expanded areas will be the secondary color!

6. is the layer manager, where you can control layers.

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You can toggle layer visibility with the checkmarks.
The buttons on the bottom are as follows:
Add Layer, Remove Layer, Duplicate Layer, Merge Layers, Move Layer Up, Move Layer Down, Layer Properties (you can rename layers and change their opacity)

7. contains more options and tools.

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File includes further file management.
Edit includes extra selection and clipboard tools.
View includes more display features, such as zoom (you can zoom in/out with CTRL+scroll wheel too!).
Image contains tools to make your image or canvas larger and also provides ways to skew with rotation.
Layers has more layer options.
Adjustments contains ways to make adjustments in hue, saturation, brightness of the image.
Effects contains many image effects, such as ink sketches, noise, gaussian blur, etc.


What you need to know to make plugins
This section contains tips and tricks regarding well... what you need to know to make plugins.
The layer tool is your best friend. Layers help with a bunch of stuff, like drawing over templates without interfering with them, making guidelines, etc.
Always disable anti-aliasing. Anti-aliasing makes it so that the stuff that you draw appears with a blur. Disabling anti-aliasing will remove that blur, as shown in the comparison.

New canvas space (added by using the "Canvas Size" tool) will always be colored in your secondary color.
Automatic noise in PDN. It can be found in Effects > Noise > Add Noise...

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As you can see, the chosen noise settings make it so that the drawing is littered with many colorful spots. Ugly! :P

You can control intensity, color saturation and coverage.
You cannot apply any effect outside of selected area. Any areas that you haven't selected are untouchable unless you haven't selected any areas.

For now, this is all I have for you. I hope this clears up some confusion you might have with the program. Once again, I encourage you to explore the program for yourself and find out many cool and interesting features it has, I'd say it's definitely worth your time! I might come back and update this post, and feel free to post any other tips and tricks that you have!
Cya!