Paint.NET is image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins. It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.
Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. In order to handle multipleimages easily, Paint.NET uses a tabbed document interface. The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description. This makes navigation very simple and fast.
Layers Usually only found on expensive or complicated professional software, layers form the basis for a rich image composition experience. You may think of them as a stack of transparency slides that, when viewed together at the same time, form one image.
Active Online Community Paint.NET has an online forum with a friendly, passionate, and ever-expanding community. Be sure to check out the constantly growing list of tutorials and plugins!
Frequently Updated Updates usually come about every 4 to 6 weeks, and contain new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. Upgrading to the latest version is very simple, requiring only two clicks of the mouse.
Special Effects Many special effects are included for enhancing and perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing are included. Also included is our unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.
Adjustments are also included which help you tweak an image's brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.
Powerful Tools Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing shapes, including an easy-to-use curve tool for drawing splines or Bezier curves. The Gradient tool, new for 3.0, has been cited as an innovative improvement over similar tools provided by other software. The facilities for creating and working with selections is powerful, yet still simple enough to be picked up quickly. Other powerful tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color, and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.
This well-designed image editor offers a wide array of tools and options you would only expect to find in large graphic suites. Paint.NET lets you work on several images simultaneously, has support for layers, keeps a history of all the changes you've made to your images so you can easily undo them, and includes a variety of drawing tools (brushes and geometrical shapes, for example). You'll also find many special filters and effects that can turn your image into an oil painting or a pencil drawing in just one click.
Wide range of features Paint.NET is a great free image editing suite, with a bunch of useful tools for photo optimization and retouching. Due to its simplicity but also its wide range of features, the program is perfect for both casual users and those who need to carry out some more complex editing.
Special effects tools include: blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise and embossing. 3D Rotate/Zoom effects make it very easy to add perspective and tilting. Image manipulation tools include: brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia. In order to navigate multiple images easily, Paint.NET uses a tabbed document interface. The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description. Paint.NET uses a layers system to form the basis for rich image composition. Layers are likened to a stack of transparency slides.
