Paint.NET: Free Image Editor

Paint.NET: A graphics editor for the rest of us.  There are several free image editors around, but this one takes the cake as far as I’m concerned.  Cheaper than Photoshop.  (Cheap as in free.)  Not as clumsy and ugly as GIMP.

It doesn’t have all one million tools and capabilities as the aforementioned, but it does what I need it to, and makes it easy to do so.  Layered images?  Check.  Save as JPG, PNG, GIF, etc, with compression quality options?  Check.  Color adjustment tools?  Check.  Easy to resize and crop?  Check.  If you are looking for a very capable image editor tool, this may be it.

As the .NET in the name may imply, this app is Windows only and will stay that way.  Bummer.

One brief rant: I’m frustrated I can’t seem to find a decent free / shareware editor for OS X.  There was a day when the mac had some of the best graphics software, but those days seem to be long gone.  Tried Seashore.  It’s a small step above MS Paint.  GIMP on OS X is fairly terrible (X11, need I say more?).  Even bought Pixelmator.  Pretty interface, but no “Crop to selection?”  You gotta be kidding me!  Pixelmator also seemed to have trouble keeping my colors straight.  When working on web images, the color profile would always look slightly different after I saved with Pixelmator.  Drove me crazy.  Never had any other image program do such a thing.  Makes Pixelmator unusable for me.  Wasted $50 :-(.

Anyway, back to Paint.net.  Love it.  So check it out.  http://www.getpaint.net

Also, if you’re a developer, make sure to install the ICO plugin, which makes paint.net a full featured ICO file (Windows ICON) editor.  (For example, to create your favicon.ico file.)  Get the ICO plugin here: Icon/Cursor Paint.NET Plug-in.  Then save the .dll file to the Program Files/Paint.net/FileTypes folder.