Tracking Down Great Software For You!
Paint.NET is an photo and image editor that is about as feature intensive as you can get while still keeping it a fast (and light) application. When you start Photoshop you have to wait 10 to 30 seconds before you can start using it, but Paint.net is ready to go almost instantly…which is why this is one of my favorite image editors. Most of the time I am looking to do something quick, and Paint.NET can do 95% of the tasks that I need to do, which primarily consists of cropping or rearranging an image.
The new Paint.NET 3.0 just made things a lot better with my two favorite additions being the “tabbed” interface and a new gradient tool:
- Simple and intuitive tab-based multi-document user interface.
- Now available in 8 languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish.
- Interactive Gradient Tool that makes it very easy to draw and then fine-tune placement and coloring of a gradient.
- User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel).
- New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen.
- More intuitive and more powerful toolbar.
- Generally improved and cleaner user interface.
- History files are now compressed to save disk space, reduce disk activity, and improve performance.
- “Merge Down” layer command.
The only thing that I would like to see now is a right-click menu for a lot of the various options. For example, when managing layers I would like to be able to right-click on one of them and select “Delete” to remove that layer. I find myself right-clicking expecting a menu to popup in Paint.NET since I have become so accustomed to Photoshop’s right-click menus. Maybe they’ll work on that for the next release. 
Overall though, I would hate not having this application installed on my PC now. I haven’t looked into being able to put this program on a USB drive and take it with me, but it would be really nice to have it wherever I go so I might try that out to see what happens.
Congrats to the Paint.NET team for making such a great application…I think this should be included with Windows. 
Download Paint.NET 3.0
News Source: CyberNet Forum [thanks javasharp]
It looks to be a pretty cool program from what you have posted. It would be great if Microsoft would bundle a better paint program with Windows.
As for me, I have used Paint Shop Pro since Version 1.0, and I will continue to do so. I currently am using Version 10.
I still have versions 3, 6, 7, 8 & 9. I do not know what I ended up doing with the other version. It would be nice to have them again, just to say that I have them.
Does it open PSDs?
I have an extracted version of the program on a USB drive and it works on other computers. .NET 2.0 must of course be installed on any computer that you run it on. I hear it also leaves registry tracks. all the computers I use have .NET installed so it is not a problem for me. Thought you like to know.
I installed this yesterday and am very impressed so far. No more Photoshop or Elements for me…
Try filling/cutting a selection…horrible jagged edges, no option to set antialiasing as far as i know. Not exactly what you’d expect from a photo retouching program.
I know it’s a small application, but there’s no reason why they couldn’t fix that
Thanks for the review. Been a fan of your site for a while now but have yet to say how cool it is. Keep it up!
No, unfortunately it does not open PSDs.
Thanks for the info…I figured it left some traces in the registry which is what I was afraid of. I guess that’s not too big of a deal since all it probably stores is settings, but it would be nice if all of the options were locally stored in the installation folder.
Ever since they have released the gradient tool I think I’ve only used Photoshop once or twice.
Most of the work I do with retouching doesn’t really matter if the edges are a little jagged, but I definitely agree that antialiasing should be an option. Maybe I’ll ask them if they have any plans to integrate that.
Thanks!
It’s always nice to hear that people find our site useful.