Image Formatting Guide

This is a general guide to image formatting and creation for Tech Stop related projects.

As of current, image templates are rendered in XCF (eXperimental Computing Facility) format, via GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program).

You can download GIMP here: https://www.gimp.org/downloads/

or install it on Debian-based GNU/Linux distributions by running this code in terminal: sudo apt-get install gimp

Previously Paint.NET and PDN format images were used for templates.

I can not stress this enough, do not use Paint.NET image templates!
PDN files can only be read by Paint.NET and are thusly, not cross-platform.

Moving From Paint.NET

Paint.NET can be made to read XCF files with the correct plugins, however, GIMP and most other image editors can not and will not read PDN files.

As of now, there is really only one cross-platform image editor with the capability to read PDN files, LazPaint.

You can download LazPaint here: https://lazpaint.github.io/

Note that LazPaint is not recommended for anything other than the conversion of PDN files to PNG renders or XCF files.

LazPaint opening an old PDN

The process is a tad bit tedious, but worth the cross-platform and cross-application support.

1. Open the PDN file in LazPaint
2. Save the PDN as an OpenRaster file
3. (Optional) Open the OpenRaster file in GIMP
4. (Optional) Save the OpenRaster file as an XCF

This process will preserve all the layers in the image, including metadata.