Software  When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission. Here’s how it works.

Paint.NET 4.2

Paint.NET

Paint.NET is an image and photo manipulation application. Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. In order to handle multiple images 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.

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.

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.

Paint.NET 4.2 changelog:

  • New: Support for loading and saving HEIC images (Windows 10 v1809+ and codec installationis required). Please note that the "Quality" slider when saving is limited to a value of 90 (out of 100) while Microsoft investigates and fixes a crash in their codec.
  • New: Keyboard shortcuts for changing the current layer. You can see these in the Layers menu with the "Go to …" commands. Alt+PgUp/PgDown will go to the layer above/below, and Ctrl+Alt+PgUp/PgDown will go to the top/bottom layer.
  • Fixed: Optimized rendering engine to remove huge lag spikes (30+ seconds) when zooming or panning very large images (e.g. 32K x 32K pixels).
  • Improved: BMP now supports saving in 32-bit (with alpha!) and 8-bit indexed.
  • Improved: Added DIB and RLE file extensions to the BMP file type.
  • Improved: PNG, JPEG, and TIFF now support loading and saving of much larger images.
  • New: PNGs can now be saved as "interlaced".
  • Improved: JPEG now has configuration for the chroma subsampling mode (4:4:4, 4:2:2, and 4:2:0). The default is now 4:2:2 instead of the unconfigurable 4:2:0 of older versions. This may result in larger file sizes, but higher quality, as compared to previous versions.
  • Improved: TIFF now supports saving at 24-bit and 8-bit color depths.
  • Improved performance of saving for file types where "Auto" bit-depth is supported but is not the current choice.
  • Improved temporary memory usage when saving images at 8-bit color depth.
  • Improved: TGA images now load about 4x faster (thanks @null54!)
  • Fixed: 8-bit TGA images should now load correctly (thanks @null54 for the fix!)
  • Fixed: Some 32-bit TGA images were showing up as completely transparent due to their use of an obscure alpha channel type (thanks @null54 for the fix!)
  • Improved: Added error reporting to the Save Configuration dialog. Instead of just saying "Preview: (error)", you’ll also get the standard error dialog that includes the exception which can used for troubleshooting.
  • Fixed a number of performance issues in the Save Configuration dialog. Especially with large images, it should now be much faster to change options and to click OK/Cancel.
  • Fixed flickering in the Save Configuration dialog when changing options.
  • Fixed: Windows Explorer thumbnails for some image types (PDN, DDS, TGA) were not rendering their alpha (transparency) correctly, resulting in color skew. You may not see the effect of this fix for a particular image until that image is resaved or you clear Explorer’s thumbnail cache.
  • Fixed: Mouse cursors now scale appropriately for non-integer UI scales (e.g. 125% or 175%)
  • Fixed: AltGr should now work correctly with the Text tool. It will not trigger shortcuts like File -> Save All, or Edit -> Paste into New Image. (thanks @Bruce Bowyer-Smyth for the fix!)
  • Changed: Image->Resize supports Super Sampling again, and favors this over Fant when using Best Quality. Fant is still available, but is no longer chosen automatically.
  • Changed: Holding Ctrl when starting to move a selection with the Move Selected Pixels tool will no longer leave behind a copy of the selected area
  • Fixed: Bicubic resampling in the Move Selected Pixels tool was not correctly handling the alpha channel in some cases. This fix has required a reduction in performance.
  • Improved: When using Edit->Copy, a 32-bit BGRA bitmap in the DIBV5 format is now placed onto the clipboard so that other apps can read the alpha channel.
  • Improved: When using Edit->Paste, DIBV5’s are now supported if they have an alpha channel. If they don’t, then the regular DIB loader is used which has some heuristics for detecting an incorrectly defined alpha channel and correcting for it.
  • Improved: When using Edit->Paste, PNG is now the highest priority format. This maximizes the ability to maintain alpha/transparency, but it does mean that images coming from Microsoft Office apps will appear larger than they used to. This is either a bug or a feature of Microsoft Office. For some reason it places PNGs on the clipboard that are 25%+ larger than the DIB/DIBV5 bitmap that it also places on the clipboard (but which don’t have alpha/transparency).
  • Fixed: DIBV5 bitmaps should now work with Edit->Paste, which improves alpha channel handling. (thanks @null54 for the fix!)
  • Fixed: Top-down DIBs should now work correctly with Edit->Paste. (thanks @null54 for the fix!)
  • Improved CPU usage for thumbnail updates (layers and image tabs) in many cases.
  • Improved: Slightly increased the size of the Settings dialog to reduce the need for scrolling in a few important situations
  • Fixed: Simple message boxes can now be closed with the ESC key
  • Fixed: Magic Wand now works on very large images (e.g. 65535 x 65535 pixels) without an error.
  • New: Plugins that use IndirectUI can now use a UriProperty with a LinkLabel control (thanks @null54!)
  • New: Effect plugins can now more easily make use of the clipboard via the IClipboardService. It will handle all of the tricky clipboard issues such as threading, native data marshaling, and avoiding security vulnerabilities that exist in the standard WinForms and WPF clipboard APIs.
  • New: FileType plugins can now specify separate lists of extensions for loading and saving.
  • Blocked the WebP FileType v1.1.0.0 plugin due to instability. An update is already available.
  • Blocked the ImAgif FileType v0.12.0.1084 plugin due to incompatibility. An update will hopefully soon be available.

Download: Paint.NET 4.2 | 8.7 MB (Freeware)
Links: Paint.NET Website | Release Announcement

Get alerted to all of our Software updates on Twitter at @NeowinSoftware

Report a problem with article
Next Article

uTorrent 3.5.5 Build 45291

Previous Article

Mp3tag 2.97