Paint.NET is yet another free alternative to Photoshop. It lets you do basic operations like drawing, has effects/filters, and it is free. I’ve heard it mentioned from time to time - but until recently I never installed it. For the heck of it I decided to give a go. Here’s my thoughts on it:
Paint.NET is similar to GIMP in several ways. However, unlike GIMP the interface is actually good, it doesn’t have a stupid name, it launches nearly instantly on my 3 year old PC, and it runs great.
On the bad side certain effects, like Gaussian blur, take forever. On Photoshop those sorts of things are usually pretty quick - but there is a noticeable delay in Paint.NET. In addition the interface isn’t quite as good as Photoshop - for example the zoom box is on the top tool box by default - unlike on PS where it is on the bottom. I suppose the only other major negatives I have about it are a lack of folders for the layers, and it doesn’t optimize for the web as well as PS, but it still does a pretty darn good job. I’m sure as I use it I’ll find other problems as well.
Needless to say I think I will be giving icky old GIMP the boot and I’ll start using Paint.NET on my Windows box more often. I think GIMP has more to offer, but the interface absolutely sucks and seriously - who the hell thought of the name “GNU Image Manipulation Program”? With lame names like that it isn’t a surprise so many non tech-savvy people don’t use open source programs.
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April 12th, 2008 at 3:00 pm
I’ll stick to my Photoshop CS3. But if I didn’t have the full Adobe CS3 Package, that might be an alternative.
April 12th, 2008 at 10:48 pm
I’ve tried Paint.net since its first offering (when you had to download the developer version of .Net 2.0 to use it), but haven’t for about 8 months. Is there something new that I don’t know about? From what I could tell when I used it before, it was no better than Paintshop Pro. I think that I’ve spent too much time with the Gimp to be able to handle other programs, perhaps.
April 13th, 2008 at 12:26 am
Paint.net is one of those things that has a long way to go before the features are at GIMP and photoshop levels - but it is going pretty strong so far. I think I just like it because it lets me do what I need to do quickly and easily.
It definitely isn’t a full replacement for PS or GIMP - but it is a good alternative that would probably work for 75% of the GIMP and PS users out there.
I’m not sure what the first version of it was like - but the current one has quite a few features like filters, layer opacity, cloning, etc.
Thanks for your thoughts guys
April 13th, 2008 at 3:13 pm
Thanks for pointing this piece of software out, I’m going to download it and give it a try, the screenshots and your review looks good. Up until now my tool for graphics was good old microsoft paint
April 13th, 2008 at 5:56 pm
Paint? Eeek!!!! Now that is a scary program
April 13th, 2008 at 6:14 pm
Yeah paint! (lol). I installed paint.net, installation was nice and the program looks fairly easy to use, my main usage for sucha program is resizing images and converting them to different image formats.
Claudio Izzi
System Admin
http://www.learningshells.com
April 13th, 2008 at 6:25 pm
Glad to hear paint.net will work for ya. It’s a nice little program, and it’ll be interesting to see what it becomes in the future. There’s still a few features its missing though, maybe when I get some extra time I’ll try to add them in .
July 8th, 2008 at 7:12 am
The latest versions have been optimized. To make it more efficient, reduce the number of layers displayed or merge these…