Software Gadgets

If you are looking for a powerful, free, paint program that is easier to use than the GIMP, you have pretty much been out of luck until now. Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows 2000, XP, Vista, or Server 2003. It supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. Paint.NET 2.5 features:

A Simple, Intuitive User Interface: Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. It is also designed to be immediately familiar to users of the original MS Paint software that comes with Windows.

Layers: 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.

Powerful Tools: Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing shapes, including an easy-to-user curve tool for drawing simple splines or Bezier curves. The facilities for creating and working with selections is powerful, yet still simple enough to be picked up quickly. Other powerful tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color, and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.

Unlimited History: Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody changes their mind. To accommodate this, every action you perform on an image is recorded in the History window and may be undone. Once you've undone an action, you can also redo it. The length of the history is only limited by available disk space.

Special Effects: Many special effects are including for perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, and embossing are included. Also included is our unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect (new for v2.5) 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, and levels.

Paint.NET is provided free-of-charge, and the source code (all 95,000 lines of it) is also available for free under generous licensing terms: the MIT License. Most of Paint.NET is written in C#, with only a small amount of code related to setup and shell-integration written in C++. This brings up the program's one major drawback: Microsoft's huge (more 35 megs) .NET Framework 1.1 has to be installed on your computer for Paint.NET to run. If you have the .NET Framework 1.1 installed on your computer, Paint.NET 2.5 is only a 3.4 meg download.If you don't have the .NET Framwork 1.1 installed, you can either install it from Microsoft's Windows Update site or you can download a version of Paint.NET 25 that includes the .NET Framework 1.1. This download is about 43 megs. (Future version will require the new .NET Framework 2.0.)

Rating: 5 Stars
Operating System: Windows 2000 or XP
License: Freeware (Open Source/MIT License)
Price: Free
Version Reviewed: 2.5
Web Site: http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/
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