Paint.NET 3.5 beta 1

Paint.NET is free 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.

Whats New:

• Now uses and requires .NET 3.5 SP1, which has many built-in performance improvements.
• New effect: Blurs -> Surface Blur, by Ed Harvey
• New effect: Distort -> Dents, by Ed Harvey
• New effect: Distort -> Crystalize, by Ed Harvey
• Effect dialog responsiveness has been greatly improved.
• Images open much faster, especially on single CPU systems.
• Selection outline is no longer animated. Instead of "dancing ants", an antialiased and stippled "XOR" outline is drawn.
• Startup performance on most systems will be better by about 20%.
• Memory usage has been greatly reduced when more than one image is open.
• The font system for the Text tool has been completely rewritten, and problems with missing fonts and crashes should be a thing of the past.
• On Windows XP and Vista, the Text tool has improved text rendering quality (it uses GDI instead of GDI+).
• On Windows 7, the Text tool will use DirectWrite (instead of GDI) which gives even better performance and quality.
• The toolbar font list has improved usability, rendering quality, and significantly improved performance.
• The toolbar font list no longer requires an application restart to recognize newly installed fonts.
• When many fonts are installed, both memory usage and startup performance have been greatly improved.
• Installation prerequisites are now installed automatically, such as .NET Framework and Windows Installer.
• Updates can now be downloaded in the background, and installed automatically once you exit the application.
• General rendering quality has been improved when zoomed in.
• Added a "Utilities" menu. Updates, Languages, and Plugin Errors have been moved here.
• Added a "Manage Fonts" command to the Utilities menu.
• Clicking the middle mouse button on an image thumbnail will now close the image.
• Improved the Unfocus effect.
• The DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) file type now allows you to select the resampling algorithm for auto-generated mip-maps.
• A processor that supports SSE is now required (almost all CPUs purchased this decade satisfy this).
• Fixed an issue with Gaussian Blur and its treatment of alpha values.
• Fixed a crash with the "Units" selector in the toolbar.
• When zoomed in, it is now much easier to resize a very small selection.
• Now includes a Russian translation.