Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. 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 MS Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple tool for photo and image editing.
Changes:
- New: Soften Portrait effect, by David Issel, https://www.BoltBait.com .
- New: Ink Sketch effect, by David Issel, https://www.BoltBait.com .
- New: DirectDraw Surface (DDS) file format support, by Dean Ashton, https://www.dmashton.co.uk/ . Improved from the original source code by optimizing the DXT compression library "Squish" to take advantage of multiple cores / processors.
- New: "Paint.NET Search", available from the Help menu (shortcut key is Ctrl+E), allows you to search for Paint.NET help, forum posts, tutorials, plugins, and other related material: https://searchpaint.net (Note: This feature is only available in English.)
- Improved: Visual fit-and-finish for the Layers window.
- Improved: Visual fit-and-finish for the close / "X" button on image thumbnails.
- Improved: Small (about 5-10%) performance improvements for some effects such as Oil Painting, Frosted Glass, and Gaussian Blur.
- Improved: Increased max brush size to 500, as per forum members request.
- Improved: Expanded list of available font sizes up through 288.
- Changed: The keyboard shortcut key for the Color Picker is now "k". This makes it so that the toolbar option, "After click: Switch to previous tool", is not useless for those using the keyboard shortcuts.
- Fixed: In some cases, undoing an action that removed a layer would result in the un-removed layer not showing up until you resized the Layers window "ghost layers".
- Fixed: Pressing F1 from the main window no longer launches the online help in two browser tabs.
- Fixed: Adding a new layer now adds it above the currently active layer, instead of at the very top of the layer list.
- Fixed: Merge Down now activates the merged layer instead of the one above it.
- Fixed: In Vista, clicking on a URL link from the installer will no longer launch the web browser with inherited, elevated privileges.
- Fixed: Pressing Ctrl+[ no longer cancels out of drawing a line/curve, but instead decreases the brush size by 5 as expected.
- Fixed: Ctrl+clicking on the brush size +/- buttons now changes the brush size in increments of 5.
- Fixed: Save Configuration dialog would "creep downward" from its last position every time it was opened again.
- Fixed: TGA codec now saves the # of alpha bits to the image descriptor byte. This was causing some other applications to load TGA files saved with Paint.NET as solid black images.
- Fixed: Clicking the "X" to close the Layer Properties dialog was not reverting changes made to the layer while the dialog was open.
- Fixed: Installation will not proceed unless Paint.NET is closed, and will also not allow Paint.NET to be opened until installation is completed. This helps to ensure a fully coherent and complete installation or update.
- Fixed: If a file failed to open, and there were no open images, and the user pressed either the Zoom In or Zoom Out toolbar buttons, then Paint.NET would crash.
- Fixed: In Vista, it was possible to crash the Save As dialog by typing a filename that was too long.
- Fixed: In Vista, it was possible to crash the updater if you let the UAC prompt time-out.
- Fixed: It was possible to crash Paint.NET on some systems by clicking on a tool in the Tools window while the "Save As" dialog was open.