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Jan 12

CyberWare: Paint.NET 3.0 Released…Breaks the Mold

Posted in: Apple, Features, Freeware, Microsoft, Newly Released, Reviews, Screenshots, Software, Today's Chili

This article was written on January 28, 2007 by CyberNet.

Tracking Down Great Software For You!

Paint.NET is an photo and image editor that is about as feature intensive as you can get while still keeping it a fast (and light) application. When you start Photoshop you have to wait 10 to 30 seconds before you can start using it, but Paint.net is ready to go almost instantly…which is why this is one of my favorite image editors. Most of the time I am looking to do something quick, and Paint.NET can do 95% of the tasks that I need to do, which primarily consists of cropping or rearranging an image.

The new Paint.NET 3.0 just made things a lot better with my two favorite additions being the “tabbed” interface and a new gradient tool:

Simple and intuitive tab-based multi-document user interface.
Now available in 8 languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish.
Interactive Gradient Tool that makes it very easy to draw and then fine-tune placement and coloring of a gradient.
User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel).
New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen.
More intuitive and more powerful toolbar.
Generally improved and cleaner user interface.
History files are now compressed to save disk space, reduce disk activity, and improve performance.
“Merge Down” layer command.

The only thing that I would like to see now is a right-click menu for a lot of the various options. For example, when managing layers I would like to be able to right-click on one of them and select “Delete” to remove that layer. I find myself right-clicking expecting a menu to popup in Paint.NET since I have become so accustomed to Photoshop’s right-click menus. Maybe they’ll work on that for the next release.

Overall though, I would hate not having this application installed on my PC now. I haven’t looked into being able to put this program on a USB drive and take it with me, but it would be really nice to have it wherever I go so I might try that out to see what happens.

Congrats to the Paint.NET team for making such a great application…I think this should be included with Windows.