Paint.NET 3.0 Now Available

Paint.NET started life as undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft intended to merely produce a free modern replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with Windows. The feature set has expanded. While it isn't ready to replace Photoshop, it has become a simple but powerful tool for photo and image editing.

Paint.NET 3.0 was released yesterday. This is a major update to Paint.NET with the following new features (from the Paint.NET web site):

* 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

There are two drawbacks to Paint.NET 3.0. First, it requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 which adds 45 megs to the download if you don't already have it on your system. If you have .NET Framework 2.0, Paint.NET 3.0 is only a five meg download. Second, it now only runs on Windows XP SP2 or better. Windows 2000 is no longer supported.

This new version of Paint.NET adds a couple of highly request features (e.g. multi-document editing and gradients. If you are looking for a good, free image editor, Paint.NET is among the best available. When you install it, use the custom install if you don't want the program to take over file associations for common image files like .jpg) as the custom install options allow you to tell the installer to leave your file associations alone.

Rating: 4.5
Operating System: Windows XP SP 2 or better, .NET Framework 2.0 required
License: Freeware
Price: Free
Version: 3.0
Web Site: http://www.getpaint.net/

[tags]Windows XP, Paint.NET, Freeware, Image editor, Photo editor[/tags]