Insert of *.png with transparent background does not work

[LeviFiction]

Paste as transparent selection will use the background color as the color to make transparent

[migf1]

I don't know Levi. For example, when I try to directly copy & paste either the 1st or the last image from Paul's reply it doesn't work right, no matter what.

[LeviFiction]

Can you tell me your steps? Because it works for me just fine.

Here's what I did.
1) Open map image
2) Open Marker Image
3) Sample marker background to be background color in the materials palette
4) Copy marker
5) Select the map image
6) Edit -> Paste as Transparent Selection and click on Canvas to set it somewhere.
7) Defloat selection

Also here is the description of the Paste As Transparent Selection command from the help files

lets you remove a specific color from the selection you are pasting. Any pixels in the Clipboard data that exactly match the current background color become transparent. The Clipboard contents are then pasted as a floating selection above the current layer.

[migf1]

Oh, I am not talking about Peter's map and pins anymore.

I'm talking about the general transparency issues PSP has with palette-indexed images (hence my link to Paul's post, not Peter's).

[hartpaul]

I find the same thing when I copy the image displayed in the forum - the background shows as black not transparent.
Probably the simplest way of demonstrating what the OP wanted would be to
1. New document - transparent or solid, shoose a light pattern eg clouds and fill with that .
2. Choose the Picture tube tool and a tube eg the first one 3D Gold. Make sure the Create as New Raster layer is ticked.
3. Click on the clouds image and you get the gold image over the clouds and it can be moved just like the OP wants to move a push pin.

(Now if the OP could create a Push Pin as a Picture tube they could fill their map layer with pins with no problems)

Now another way would be to
4. Make a new transparent layer, choose the picture tube and Untick create on New Layer.
5. Click on that and you get a single layer with the gold 3D sphere.
6. Now you can drag the layer thumbnail over onto the cloud image as many times as you like to get the spheres on different layers and freely movable just like the push pins.

Finally you can merge all and get them all on the one layer without any surrounding white or other color - just what the OP was asking. You can also save the 3D gold sphere as a png File > Save As and choose the Save As type as .png. That can then be dragged into PSP at any time and used as the OP wants to use the pushpin.

No need to worry about paste as transparent selection, or to worry about palette-indexed png images which I think has been discussed elsewhere on this forum.

[LeviFiction]

Ah, I had misunderstood.

Yes, PSP does not support pasting in a DIBv5 from the clipboard. Once upon a time the only editor I could find that did support that format was Paint.NET. Gimp, photoshop, PSP, none of them supported it. Maybe it's time to bring it up again if their competitors are officially supporting it.

In the mean time, with a little time and programming it's possible to create our own "paste" function using scripts. First find out if PSP supports bitmap files with transparency, then either just convert the clipboard data to a regular bitmap file and load that in as a new layer, or convert it to a format like PNG. It'll be a little slower than if PSP were doing it itself, but I imagine it should work. I use a similar method for my copy layer styles script.

[migf1]

Ah, I had misunderstood.

Yes, PSP does not support pasting in a DIBv5 from the clipboard. Once upon a time the only editor I could find that did support that format was Paint.NET. Gimp, photoshop, PSP, none of them supported it. Maybe it's time to bring it up again if their competitors are officially supporting it.

I just did some direct copy & paste testing of the png images in Paul's post. Ps, Gimp, Inkscape and LibreWriter, they all worked. PSP, LibreDraw, LibreImpression, XNView MP and nomacs did not (btw, how bizzare is that LibreWrite does it right, but LibreDraw/Impression do not). If you have direct access to Corel it would be awesome to bring it up, yeah!

In the mean time, with a little time and programming it's possible to create our own "paste" function using scripts. First find out if PSP supports bitmap files with transparency, then either just convert the clipboard data to a regular bitmap file and load that in as a new layer, or convert it to a format like PNG. It'll be a little slower than if PSP were doing it itself, but I imagine it should work. I use a similar method for my copy layer styles script.

Oh I wish I could code (used to, but a long long long time ago). If you run into such a script (or find the time to write one) I'll be the 1st to grab it!

[LeviFiction]

So, this is kind of odd an entertaining. Not a solution by any means, but I think you might find it funny.

This script - https://forum.corel.com/viewtopic.php?f=104&t=66239

Is one I made that looks for a list of files on the clipboard, if it finds a list of files it then grabs those files and either opens as a new image or pastes the image as a new layer.

Firefox sometimes will download an image file to the Temp directory, as well as copying the image data to the clipboard. When it does, this it adds a file list to the clipboard as well. Allowing the script above to paste in that temporary file either as a new image or as a new layer. I have successfully copied and pasted both of hartpaul's images using this script.

I will look at trying to copy the bitmap data from the clipboard directly in a few weeks. No promises, but basic clipboard access is easy. So maybe this will be too. (famous last words)

[migf1]

That's a pretty cool script Levi, thanks! As for the bitmap, sure, no worries!

[LeviFiction]

I won't post here again, once I'm ready to test the script a bit more thoroughly I'll post in the scripting sub-forum. But, small update, I was bored last night so I did some preliminary work, I made a simple script to pull the data from the clipboard and save it to a file. And that all worked just fine. But it seems none of my applications can properly read this file, both Gimp and PSP bring it in having read the bits in the wrong order. Putting the alpha channel on the green channel, and leaving the green channel data out of the image altogether. It was weird. Also PSP brought the pixels in offset from their normal position like someone had used the offset command. Gimp read their locations properly.

So I'm going to need to rethink my process. Maybe only grabbing the alpha channel myself, pasting the regular image, and then adding the alpha back into the pasted image through a mask. It'll increase the processing time, but I don't see a way around it short of converting it into a PNG in script which will be slow on larger images. If only PSP let us use the Python Imaging Library, this would be very fast using that...............hmmmm............

So, yeah, last update here. Next one in the Scripting forum. Maybe later this weekend.

[migf1]

Sounds like a lot more work than planned initially Levi. If it is too much, maybe just don't worry about it? I mean we do have a workaround, by saving the image first then open it (instead of directly copy & paste it).

PS. Irrelevant, in the meantime, I'm converting to PSP some custom splash screens I made for Gimp a little while ago (I made them in PSP lol). I'll also make a new post when I'm ready (maybe later today, or tomorrow).