Free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows

Paint.NET

Paint.NET

  -  1.23 MB  -  Freeware
  • Latest Version

    Paint.NET 5.1.3 LATEST

  • Review by

    Sophia Jones

  • Operating System

    Windows 10 / Windows 11

  • User Rating

    Click to vote
  • Author / Product

    dotPDN LLC / External Link

  • Filename

    paint.net.5.1.3.install.anycpu.web.exe

  • MD5 Checksum

    cfffd829b2d559726be77619e02fc732

Paint.NET is a free image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

It started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft and is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that originally worked on it. Originally intended as a free replacement for the Microsoft Paint software that comes with Windows, it has grown into a powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool. It has been compared to other digital photo editings software packages such as Adobe® Photoshop®, Corel® Paint Shop Pro®, Microsoft Photo Editor, and GIMP.

Features and Highlights

Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface
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.

Performance
Extensive work has gone into making Paint.NET the fastest image editor available. Whether you have a netbook with a power-conscious Atom CPU or a Dual Intel Xeon workstation with 8 blazingly fast processing cores, you can expect the app to start up quickly and be responsive to every mouse click.

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.

Special Effects
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 the unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.

Powerful Tools
PaintNET includes simple tools for drawing shapes, including an easy-to-use curve tool for drawing splines or Bezier curves. The Gradient tool, new for 3.0, has been cited as an innovative improvement over similar tools provided by other software. The facilities for creating and working with selections is powerful, yet still simple enough to be picked up quickly.

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.

Note: Paint.NET also depends on the latest Microsoft's .NET Framework, which is automatically installed if it isn't already on the system.


  • Paint.NET 5.1.3 Screenshots

    The images below have been resized. Click on them to view the screenshots in full size.

    Paint.NET 5.1.3 Screenshot 1
  • Paint.NET 5.1.3 Screenshot 2
  • Paint.NET 5.1.3 Screenshot 3

What's new in this version:

New:
- HlslUnaryFunctionEffect (for GPU effect plugin developers) now has FrexpMantissaPortion, FrexpExponentPortion, ModfIntegerPortion, and ModfFractionalPortion. These provide access to the Frexp and Modf HLSL instructions
- Plugins may now implement custom DirectWrite IInlineObjects
- IEffectConfigForm.Close() is now public, and may be used by plugins that are hosting other effects via IEffectsService2
- Added an accelerator key for Image -> Rotate 90° Counter-clockwise
- Added accelerator keys to the View menu for the Inches, Centimeters, and Pixels choices

Changed:
- Improved frame rate, frame pacing, and responsiveness of the canvas when using CPU- or GPU-intensive tools such as Move Selected Pixels
- Improved: The Color properties for the Clouds effect now have Reset buttons, which will reset them to the current Primary and Secondary colors
- Substantially improved UI responsiveness when modifying a complex selection with a combine mode other than Replac
- Reduced the performance cost of the circle "preview cursor" that all of the brush tools use
- Changed to use the Windows thread pool instead of the .NET portable thread pool

Fixed:
- Fixed: Some PNG metadata from text chunks is now preserved (Author, Comment, Copyright, and Description)
- Fixed some issues with snapping tool windows when there are multiple monitors with different scaling levels. Sometimes the snapping boundaries would be calculated in the wrong coordinate space and cause snapping to happen at seemingly arbitrary (and weird) locations.
- Fixed an off-by-1 error in the Median Blur effect that was producing incorrect results, especially with radius=1
- Fixed a crash in the Levels adjustment's UI due to some improper value clamping
- Fixed the Red Eye Removal effect so it no longer crashes if the canvas zoom level does not show the whole image
- Fixed the Red Eye Removal effect so that it properly clips to the active selection
- Fixed: View -> Zoom to Selection no longer adjusts the zoom level slightly if used twice in a row
- Fixed: When opening an image with a CMYK color profile, it will be ignored and removed if the image is actually RGB
- Fixed some issues with the mouse cursor briefly being a generic arrow instead of the tool's requested cursor
- Fixed: The installer will no longer silently die on Windows 10 pre-v21H2. It will now correctly show an error message stating that Windows 10 v21H2 is required, and the exit code will be ERROR_OLD_WIN_VERSION
- Fixed: Tooltips now respect dark mode
- Fixed: The Text tool's "Sharp (Modern)" rendering mode has been reverted to use Natural Symmetric rendering instead of Natural Symmetric Downsampled
- Fixed PdnZoomBlurEffect when the AlphaMode property was set to Straight
- Fixed PdnZoomBlurEffect when the BorderMode was set to Soft