Paint - Graphics Editor

Here is a graphics editor I created which I have called Paint for lack of a better name. I created it because most of the graphics editors I found either cost too much or were for photo editing. As someone who programs a lot, I'm more interested in sprite creation not photos. So that's the urge that brought about this.

Please note that I have never really have had time to polish it as much as I would have liked, but it is still quite useable in it's current form. Heck, that's probably the reason I gave up working on it since it works so well. Just save often cause the undo can be kinda screwy sometimes.

This requires the FreeImage.dll version 2.5.2 or greater (do a search on the web to find it, or look in the comments). Before you ask, I would have included it, but that violates guidlines (imagine a Nelson "hahaaa" here). Anyway, the freeimage dll allows you to read lots of types of images, however I never worked on outputing them through the freeimage library. So this app will just spit out bmps. If anyone has the patience and time to implement saving in different formats, please send me a copy!

I can't offer much support for this as I don't have the time. Hopefully everything will be self-explainatory. Anyhoo, you'll have the code so you'll know just as much about it as I do ;)

Anyway, on to the application.

Here's a screenshot of the app in action.

Holy crap... that is sweet! :D The only problem I could see is that I couldn't
seem to get it to open any files; it kept giving me "Unsupported file type
error -1", even on Bitmaps and GIFs.

That's what a couple people said in the graphics forum, but they never respond to me with any specifics on it :( Do you get the error when you drag and drop to file into the app or only when using the file - open menu? My initial guess is there is something with the freeimage.dll, but i'd like to confirm.

Oh.. and thanks for the compliment ;)

It seems to happen when I use File/Open; not totally sure about dragging,
as I haven't tried it. I'll do that tomorrow.

Holy crap... that is sweet! :D The only problem I could see is that I couldn't
seem to get it to open any files; it kept giving me "Unsupported file type
error -1", even on Bitmaps and GIFs.
I got the same error when running the app from the VB IDE but once I compiled I was able to open the files just fine.

I also get error -1 no matter which file I try to open and it happens with File, Open and drag and drop.
It happens both in the IDE and compiled.

I just tried running it in debug, and guess what it gave me the -1 error :) Anyway, I copied the freeimage.dll to C:\Windows\System32 directory and it ran fine in debug mode. Please try that and let me know if it fixes things for you.

FYI - The error occurs when the first API call is made to the dll.

Here is a link to the SourceForge entry for FreeImage.dll for those interested in it. The project was discontinued last year, but it might help someone out. I think the source code is there for downloading.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/freeimage

I have taken out all the stuff for the FreeImage.dll in the project and reverted the frmPicture.Create back to the "old way of doing it", plus limited the types of files it can open to these: "BMP", "RLE", "GIF", "JPG", "ICO", "WMF", "EMF" and all seems to be smooth sailing right now.

The way I have it now suits my needs extremely well. You did an awesome job with it!

Thank You for sharing it with us.
Orbity

Sure take all of the fun out of it ;)

The dll is not even included in the download...

Any chance you might share your modified version, Orbity?

Sure if it is ok with Termor.I have PM'd Termor about it

I PM'd orbity back, I was going to work on something tonight where a person could pick (via an option dialog) if they wanted to use the dll or not. But if I don't get to it tonight, orbity is certainly free to post an improvements.

Orbity - Thanks for working on this. It's nice to know I contributed something that people found useful, even if they had to play around with it a little ;)

Robot - I didn't include the dll as it's against forum policy. Unless an admin says it's ok to do in which case I'll include it.

Termor: OK... I just don't understand though. How was it supposed to work then?

Here is the latest with the option to either use the dll or not. Let me know if you have any problems.

I'll try to work on it more later tonight. Any suggestions?

Robot - In one of the files it lists where to get the dll and I provided a link above. So it requires some work on the users side if they want to use the dll ;) It's a pretty handy component, so it would probably help people out in other ways if they got it. For instance, you can use it to load png files into your game instead of using bitmaps, ect.

Works great Termor, very nice!

OK, it works fine now. Just one thing, the only format to save in is BMP.

By the way, I never actually said how cool this program is...it's cool :D

Thanks :) When I get time I'm going to look into saving the image in different formats. The standard picturebox is wierd about that, so I'll probably need to either write custom save code or put the image back in the freeimage dll and save it through that.

Up till now, I've just been editing the images in this and saving them with photoshop if I need a different format. Since I use this mostly for sprites for games, I usually want the images in bitmap format anyway.

Right ok, I was just noting that. I use IrfanView to convert between jpg, bmp etc..

No problem, it's defenitely a good idea for improvement.