Plugin for Paint.NET - remove double pixels

[Kweepa]

Hi.
Here is the first fruit of AGSketch.
It's a Paint.NET plugin that automatically removes double pixels from pixel line art.

Some examples:
->

->

Unzip this:
http://www.kweepa.com/step/tech/RemoveDoublePixels/PdN_RemoveDoublePixels.zip
into Paint.NET's Effects directory, then restart the program.
Then just make the primary colour the colour of the lines you want to clean up and go to Effects/ Stylize/ RemoveDoublePixels. The effect is limited to the current selection, if there is one. Repeat the effect with Ctrl-F.

You may need to posterize the image before running the filter to merge similar edge colours.

Enjoy!

(Thanks to tzachs for the pointers)

[tzachs]

Congrats  
Just fiddled with it for a bit and it seems to do the job nicely, I can see it being useful for pixel artists...

[Gilbert]

Well, I think most real pixel artists would prefer to do this manually by hand though.

I haven't tried this yet (as I don't use PAIN.NOT), but I think this can be useful in games with pixel art and scaled sprites (like adventure games made in AGS for example). When pixel art are scaled up unfiltered we will have double pixels (when they're scaled down there're other annoyance, but not fixable with this method, so I'll just ignore this case here), like the characters in DOTT for example, which definitely aren't pretty to look at (but if you use filtering you'll just get more ugly blurry sprites), so this routine may be useful for improving scaled-up sprites in such games (good thing is, this won't boost colour count like using filters, so such technique is applicable to all colour depths). I don't know how demanding this process is, so I'm not sure if it's suitable for real time usage. In adventure games though, normally you won't encounter many scaled sprites at a time, so it'd be a nice touch if this could be added to (the character scaling part, at least, of) AGS and anyway we could just have options to disable this feature for slower computers.

[Kweepa]

Well, I think most real pixel artists would prefer to do this manually by hand though.

I have a few backgrounds from Maya Con Dios that I just couldn't bring myself to work on any more because there were so many double pixels that needed removed. Using this filter as a first pass broke the hump, so hooray!
But you're right, clearly it's not as good as manually removing pixels, as my examples above show.

When pixel art are scaled up unfiltered we will have double pixels

Not exactly. The artifacts from nearest neighbour scaling up aren't double pixels in the sense that this plugin implies.
I wouldn't run this as an automatic process in any case as it is quite dumb and requires the user to select the border colour.

(when they're scaled down there're other annoyance, but not fixable with this method, so I'll just ignore this case here)

I was thinking about a method to scale down sprites while preserving borders - basically, do a nearest neighbour scale down, then for each border pixel in the original, map it to the closest pixel in the scaled down image. As a final pass, perhaps run the double pixel removal. Obviously this wouldn't work very well below about 50%.

[cat]

I have a few backgrounds from Maya Con Dios that I just couldn't bring myself to work on any more because there were so many double pixels that needed removed. Using this filter as a first pass broke the hump, so hooray!
But you're right, clearly it's not as good as manually removing pixels, as my examples above show.

Wow, so there is actually a chance that this game will be finished some day? I saw some screenshots in the "Screens from games that never were" thread and I was very inspired by them. I hope you will finish it!