Paint.NET v2.6 added an adjustment called Curves. A member of the forum, pyrochild, has recently released a new plugin called Curves+ that takes the source code for Curves and builds on it to add several cool new features. In fact, this is the first plugin I’ve seen that copies code from Paint.NET and uses it as the basis for a new plugin.

A number of new features have been added to this enhanced version of Curves:

• Histogram underlay in the transfer map (forgive the screenshot above – it doesn’t do this feature justice)
• HSV, CMYK, Alpha, and “Advanced” transfer map modes. The “advanced” mode lets you map any input channel to any output channel (virtual channels, such as hue and intensity, are included).
• Ability to save and load settings to XML files. This will be a boon for tutorials – instead of posting a screenshot and telling the user to “make it look like this,” you can just post the XML file and have them load it.
• Simple linear interpolation mode (“straight lines”) for the transfer map, in addition to the standard spline interpolation.

In the screenshot above I’m using the HSV mode. Notice how the line for Hue isn’t just monochromatic, and follows the full range of colors in the hue spectrum. Personally, I think that’s pretty cool and creative J

If you follow the pages in the forum post for the plugin, you’ll see that numerous features, tweaks, and performance enhancements have been made due to conversation and collaboration with other forum members. They seem to want this bundled in the next version of Paint.NET … but if you’ve been following my previous blog posts or have been paying attention on the forum, then you will know that my goal is to make discovery, installation, and updating of plugins like this much easier. Why bundle when you can delegate! J

All in all, this is a big upgrade for Curves and gives the user many new ways to manipulate images. The HSV mode in particular, while not necessarily intuitive, produces some very powerful results.