Perfecting Effects on Paint.net - Similar on Photoshop as well

I'd be covering all the important effects that you're going to need to perfect Paint.net in this post. It's just going to be a series of different pictures showing you what each effect does. So, rather than wasting time let's begin:

Re-sizing images:

The first thing I did was opened a new tab and went to Pixabay.com and searched for a picture of a flame - Here's the link to the Picture.

However, I've not added the original picture below, instead I've re-sized it to fit the blog well and I've chosen to make them all squares which are 400X400.

Here's what you do:

Open Paint.net and go to File>Open (Pick out the file you wish to open).

OR

Right click on a image and say Open with > Paint.net

Now that you've got the image open, the next thing you would need to do is re-size the image.

Go to: Image > Resize

This is what you'd see:

I've made this small else it's going into the sidebar

Change the width and height to the desired value (Either Pixels or inches). For my blog posts as already mentioned I always use a 400 X 400 pixel image. This is how it looks:

Paint.Net - 400 X 400 pixels

Now Let's make some smoke! You can use this smoke on any of your images and if you use Photo Shop even create a brush using it.

Now that the image above is ready, let's go to Adjustments> Hue Saturation.  Play with the levels as you like until you've come up with something like this:

That's the color of Smoke!

But, that's not what we want in order to make the images look great later on right? So, let's get rid of the black and keep the smoke and nothing else.

Since you've got the Grim Reaper let's make use of it. Get rid of the Primary Color OR black - as both are the same in this case.

Go to: Effects > Color > Grim color reaper

I've set the color tolerance as 7.35 for the image below (Just modify the bar till you feel it's right).  The transparent alpha I left as 0 as I need the traces of black to remain as they enhance the smokey effect.

Now that's smoke!

On the next post I'd show you where and how I used the above image to create something interesting. Use pictures and just fiddle around with the various controls and you'd see some pretty impressive images on your screen. Not all would be good but most of them would be