by Jeff Gulley

Created on: January 12, 2009   Last Updated: June 07, 2011

My personal favorite free photo editing software is Paint.NET. Paint.NET is an easy-to-use image editing application with an extremely user-friendly graphical user interface (GUI), which benefits the experienced and inexperienced image editor alike.

I personally came about image editing as a minor requirement for my job. I work in software, and in creating documents to present our software, screenshots were required which sometimes required enhancements. I originally began with the Microsoft Paint program which comes with the Windows bundled applications. While helpful in its simplicity, Microsoft Paint has numerous limitations which did not meet even my most intermediate of needs.

Thus, I scoured the Internet and discovered Paint.NET. The first thing users might discover when approaching Paint.NET is a bit of ambiguity in the webpage. If you type "www.paint.net" into your browser, you will be taken to a simple site where you can redirect yourself to one of two other sites: www.warrenpaint.com, or www.getpaint.net. It seems that, when they titled their software, the makers of Paint.NET had not checked the actual website availability. www.paint.net was already in use by Warren Paint & Color Company; nevertheless, Warren Paint has graciously allowed Paint.NET a redirect from the root site.

However, once Paint.NET is downloaded and installed (Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 or higher is required), users will have a much easier time the rest of the way.

Upon first opening Paint.NET, there are four default windows open on top of the canvas screen: Tools, Colors, History, and Layers (Paint.NET uses layers as most other top-of-the-line image editing applications do). Newcomers to image editing will have some immediate difficulty understanding the different tools available in the Tool window (as I did), but some basic experimentation should enable most users to easily educate themselves on these tools. Another aspect of image editing that newcomers will have is with "layering" the image; unfortunately, I don't have the time or space (or knowledge, really) to explain layering here, but I can assure you that Paint.NET's GUI also makes learning how to work with layers an easy transition.

One of the great features of Paint.NET is the ability to choose a simple view or more complex view in the Colors window. Most simple drawings need only a simple color selection, and Paint.NET allows for a very easy "point-and-click" method of selecting a color from the graphical gamut.

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