restoring alpha channel after the Heal transparency action

[darekjanik]

When we used the heal transparency we lost the alpha channel settings. We need to restore alpha channel after the heal selection is done. That's what this change is about.

It'd be cool to merge it, cause now It's needed to add alpha channel manually every single time after script is called.

[bootchk]

I could be mistaken, and its been awhile since I looked at the code, but I want to discuss this....

The original behavior seems logical to me. If you are healing transparent pixels, it doesn't leave any transparency, so why should it leave the alpha channel, since it would be empty? In other words, it changes the behaviour/semantics of the plugin? I suppose some users like yourself would go on to add transparency back to the image; would you give an example of your use case?

I am concerned that most existing users will expect the existing behavior, and will be surprised that they now have to manually delete the alpha channel.

I haven't looked at your patch, maybe whether to delete the alpha channel should be an option (checkbox) of the plugin? In your case, the default would be to delete the alpha channel, and you would need to choose the option, but the checkbox might still selected the next time you used the plugin (if you chose "reshow" plugin but not if you started the plugin anew.)

Again, thanks, and I am open, just not convinced yet.

[darekjanik]

Sometimes I use the plugin for retouching and my use case is following: I'm marking some points by the eraser tool and launching the plugin to see that partial result. Then I'm marking some other points and launching the plugin again. And so on. It's very fast for me, just a mouse click and ctrl+f to repeat last action.

I expected that the plugin only fills (currently) transparent areas without changing layer parameters like the alpha channel enabling. Somehow I missed that descriptions says that it removes the alpha channel.

You're absolutely right that we should keep the current behavior as default. I really like your solution with the checkbox and I've just done some adjustments in the code. What do you think?