Paint.NET

The top-to-bottom grayscale gradient on the desktop area of Paint .NET (3.30 in my specific case) can cause serious toning misjudgments. I didn't fully appreciate this until a colleague pointed out how much it was throwing him off, i.e. printed results didn't seem to match on-screen results due to improper relative corrections applied to the top and bottom areas of images, say sky vs. ground. It seems that the plain uniform gray background in Photoshop is actually pretty important.

I don't know whether this should be considered a discussion topic or a bug. From a design perspective it does seem to be a bug. It would certainly be easy enough to change or provide an option to allow it to be changed. Maybe there is a already a way to change it that I am foolishly overlooking?

There's not a way to change it. Sorry.

Hmm, interesting, makes sense ... I've filed a bug to track this.

Not having PS on my computer currently, Does it use a 50% gray? A screenshot + the Color Picker would provide the answer.

Yes and no! It depends on what you mean by 50%. Photoshop 5.5 uses 7F7F7F which matches one definition of 50%. But given the 2.2 gamma of an sRGB display, in actual light output this corresponds to (127/255) ^ 2.2 = 21.6% of full intensity in photons.

(un?)Fortunately human eye's don't actually measure photon intensity as such.. the same intensity isn't even always perceived as the same (depends on surrounding intensity and the intensity your eyes adjusted themselves to etc which is exactly what the problem is with the gradient behind the image)
And of course it's not actually possible to divide FF by 2 and store the answer in a normally interpreted byte, which is an obvious result of the carry that occurs when shifting FF to the right by 1 bit (so 80 and 7F are both off by a half)
Conclusion: 50% grey doesn't even exist

Photoshop CS3 uses #808080.

In CS3, Shift+Paint Bucket lets you change the canvas color...

.NET defines LightGray as #d3d3d3. Here is a quick test I did that replaces the gradient with a solid color:

This is very close to the generally accepted perceptual 'mid-gray' (Ansel Adams used 18% gray as his reference for judging exposure)

I agree. The background should be a solid gray. I don't care if it's configurable or not, but gray (50%-ish) should be the default and it should not be based on a windows theme color.

The latest version of Paint.NET (3.35) now has a solid grey canvas background, no gradient in sight. It is also based on the Windows theme. I suggest you update, KrisVDM .

EDIT:
As was brought up in PM, KrisVDM is fully aware of the new canvas background and was offering opinion towards this move. I misinterpreted KrisVDM's response as one of unknowing, and not one of awareness to the feature. I am dearly sorry for my misjudgement.

I ask that KrisVDM's comment is taken as valid, further discussion on the matter, not dismissed unduly as was done by myself.

It seems odd to me that the colour is CBC8B8 though - why not real gray?