Paint.NET - the Free Photoshop Alternative

Paint.NET is a free, fast, and powerful image editor for 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. Paint.NET is a giant leap above Microsoft Paint, and a serious alternative to bigger, bloated image editors like Photoshop or GIMP. Being mean and lean, Paint.NET doesn't do everything that its expensive competitors can do; yet, it's a great value for the price (zero).

Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, Paint.NET has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It handles most of the basics you'd expect from advanced image editors, and the latest version has added new effects (including new blurs and distortions), better performance, and a complete refresh of the user interface.

The latest version is Paint.NET 3.5 and is available in English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, and Spanish.

If you need to do the occasional image tweaking or heavy image editing but don't want to spend a lot of cash on Photoshop or dive into GIMP, Paint.NET is well worth the download. It may not be able to do everything Photoshop does, but it can do everything most users need. Paint.NET for Windows is a free application although the authors do accept donations. Paint.NET is available at http://www.getpaint.net.

Comments

[Larry Parker]

I use Paint.net a lot. I use only the more basic functions like pasting an image that I captured from my monitor by pressing the "PrtScn SysReq" button on my keyboard, rotating the image, cropping it, resizing it, adjusting the brightness and contrast, renaming it, and saving it on my computer.

I don't know how to combine two images togather, such as two halves of a large immigration ship's manifest, but I do that using Microsoft Paint.

I have seen a lot of documents posted online that were not level. Using Paint.net, I can rotate them as little as a fraction of a degree to square them up. But that can blur the image a little.

[Oxa]

For a well-rounded look at a variety of free image editors, see:
http://www.techsupportalert.com/best-free-digital-editor.htm

[Dae Powell]

Photoshop is a fine program, although like most Adobe products a bit pricey. I have used PaintShop Pro for years and find I'm still learning techniques to improve the graphic images I create. I even use it to "colourize" the classic sketches on my website. It is worth a look.

Happy Dae·
http://ShoeStringGenealogy.com

[Mark Tucker]

I have used Paint.NET for many years and have found it very useful. There are many plug-ins available to extend the features of the base program. Plug-ins can be found at: http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=30570&sid=15ed2239c9b4e421a1ea37a19ad2a0e8