Because of a discussion of Morph [Interactive] came up on Paint.NET forum, it has come to my attention that there needs to be a workaround support for Paint.NET as it doesn’t support outputting multiple layer. It can however output into a folder from the g’mic-qt gui interface. So, for paint.net users, I would like to see this filter have a workaround.
See examples of my filter that includes Paint.NET workarounds. Especially on Tiled Form.
I’m definitely not a big fan of the idea of doing this on a filter-by-filter basis:
Practically, that would mean adding a new option to the filter parameters to allow saving the output layers as separate image files, instead of output regular layers.
This is possible, of course, but more broadly, this also means:
If we do that for that particular filter, we should also do that for any filter that produces multiple output. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure someday someone will ask the same feature for another filter.
This would make these filter interfaces more cumbersome, for the only reason one the Paint.NET plug-in doesn’t manage multiple output.
Clearly, if the Paint.NET plug-in cannot easily manage multiple output layers, then it has to provide an alternative solution, that is global, and that can be applied on all filters that produce multiple output. Maybe Nicholas Hayes has a suggestion about this, but in case of multiple output, maybe it could open a file dialog where the user can chose where the output layers are saved. But this has to be a global solution, not a filter-by-filter hack.
EDIT: In any case, only Nicholas can do something about it, as he has developed the Paint.NET interface to G’MIC-Qt.
I guess I will invite @PDN_GMIC AKA Nicholas Hayes in to see what can be done with this issue. For every filter except sample picture filters, if it outputs 2 or more output layer, then open a new window with checkmark options and folder export option. If 1 picture is selected, then output into the same layer unless it is a different dimension. That’s not a light task to do at all.
I agree, allowing the user to select which images to export/keep would be a ton of work for little gain.
But your suggestion does bring up another issue with how the plugin currently handles images that are larger than the paint.net canvas, I should probably place the full size image on the clipboard in addition to rendering the cropped image to the paint.net canvas.
My current plan for handling multiple output image is asking the user to select an output folder and saving all of the images into it.