Granted, I’m no graphics designer, so my graphic editing needs are pretty mundane. Still, I need to crop, resize, recolor, reformat, enhance, distort, and do all those other fun things to images from time to time. I also need to mock up web pages and graphics. I could buy Photoshop to do this, but I don’t have to, because I have Paint.NET — and it’s free!
Paint.NET is a free, open source image editing application for Windows. It has a fantastic feature set and is rock solid — I have never had it crash, become unresponsive, or otherwise trash anything on my system, and that’s after using it for months (and using it on my 4 1/2-year-old underpowered home PC to do some image editing for Christmas cards).
If Paint.NET can’t do what you want out-of-the-box, then you can extend it. It offers a plug-in architecture, and there’s a nice collection of community-written plugins available to download.
Hats off to Rick Brewster and others for this fantastic product. It’s so nice that I’m going to donate as part of my drive to donate $5 per month to a free software product. Since I’m two months behind, the Paint.NET team get ten samoleans. Well worth it, considering Photoshop costs just a bit more than that.
My donation history to date far is as follows.
- Paint.NET (November/December 2007)
- Launchy (September/October 2007)
- TortoiseSVN (August 2007)
- FileZilla (July 2007)
- OpenOffice (June 2007)
Chris G. says:
Paint.NET is the one program I miss on Macs. I use Paint.NET all the time on my work computer and I have never had an issue with it. Fast, simple to use, and reliable…can’t beat that. Oh and it is free.
Wayne says:
I am a fan of Paint.NET as well. However, I seem to be unable to find a way to set the selection tool to use a fixed size or ratio, and the autocorrect feature really jacks up photos.
Other than that, it’s a great (and free) tool!