Paint.NET 3.5 Released – A Free Alternative to Photoshop

After more than a year under development, one of my favorite applications Paint.NET has received a major upgrade.  The very popular and FREE image editing application Paint.NET Version 3.5 has been released and made available for public download.  Version 3.5 of Paint.NET is a significant upgrade and includes major bug and stability updates as well as significant UI enhancements including enhanced Windows 7 and Windows Vista Aero Glass support.  VERY GROOVY INDEED!

For those of you not familiar with Paint.NET, think of it as a FREE, quick and simple image editing application (Windows Only) whose features range between good ole’ MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop’s (probably 3/4 of the way towards Photoshop). The great thing however about Paint.NET is that it’s very lightweight compared to the more sluggish GIMP or Photoshop applications not to mention it’s FREE. 

The new update coincides nicely with Microsoft’s release of Windows 7, and yes, as I mentioned earlier it’s tuned for the Windows 7 Aero Glass look and feel.   To grab the latest update, existing Paint.NET users can just use the built-in Update feature shown on the right <Click Help, Check for Updates>.  For new users, just download, unzip and install.  The process is very straightforward and shouldn’t take more than a couple of minutes.  Best of all, no crapware or spyware to worry about with Paint.NET! Once installed, I’m sure you will agree that for a FREE application, Paint.NET delivers.  It’s clean interface and ease of use makes it a MUST install on all new systems I build.

Enough talk, go try it out for yourself.  It’s free after all!  FYI, for those Paint.NET die-hard users, here’s the full changelog for Paint.NET 3.5 Vs. 3.36 

Paint.NET v3.5 – Released on November 6, 2009, this release focused on improving performance and reliability, reducing memory usage, upgrading to the latest .NET Framework version, and refreshing the user interface for Aero and glass (Windows 7 / Vista).

• New: Refreshed user interface with new icons and visual styling. On Windows 7 and Vista, it is enhanced for Aero and “glass”.

• New effect: Blurs -> Surface Blur, by Ed Harvey

• New effect: Distort -> Dents, by Ed Harvey

• New effect: Distort -> Crystalize, by Ed Harvey

• New: Russian translation.

• Performance and memory usage have been extensively optimized throughout the entire program.

• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is now required, which has many built-in performance improvements.

• Disk space usage has been reduced by about 12MB by using NTFS compression on installation files related to staging (.MSI) and diagnostics (.PDB).

• Compression for .PDN images has been improved.

• Effect dialog responsiveness has been improved.

• Images open much faster, especially on single CPU systems.

• Startup performance on most systems will be better by about 20%.

• Memory usage has been reduced when more than one image is open.

• Rendering quality has been greatly improved when zoomed in.

• The selection outline is no longer animated. Instead of “dancing ants”, a context-sensitive “XOR” stipple pattern is drawn. This has allowed for improved performance and lowered CPU consumption (and longer battery life).

• The font manager for the Text tool has been completely rewritten, which fixes many problems seen with crashes and missing fonts.

• On Windows XP, the Text tool has improved reliability and font selection (it uses GDI instead of GDI+).

• On Windows 7, the Text tool will use DirectWrite (instead of GDI) which gives better performance and greatly improved quality. On Windows Vista, you may install DirectX 11 to enable this feature; otherwise GDI will be used.

• The toolbar font list has improved usability, rendering quality, and significantly improved performance.

• The toolbar font list no longer requires an application restart to recognize newly installed fonts.

• When many fonts are installed, both memory usage and startup performance have been greatly improved.

• It is now drastically easier to move a very small selection.

• All installation prerequisites are now installed automatically, such as .NET and Windows Installer.

• Updates are now downloaded in the background, and installed after you exit the application. In previous versions, this was a foreground task and you could not use Paint.NET while the update was downloaded.

• Added a “Utilities” menu. Updates, Languages, and Plugin Errors have been moved there.

• Added a “Manage Fonts” command to the Utility menu. This will launch the built-in Windows font control panel.

• Clicking the middle mouse button on an image thumbnail will now close the image.

• Improved the Unfocus effect.

• The DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) file type now allows you to select the resampling algorithm for auto-generated mipmaps.

• A processor that supports SSE is now required (almost all CPUs purchased this decade satisfy this).

• Fixed an issue with Gaussian Blur and its treatment of alpha values.

• Fixed a crash with the “Units” selector in the toolbar.

• Fixed a crash due to an overflow that prevented very large images from working (64-bit only).

• Fixed many other miscellaneous glitches and crashes.

• The Korean translation has been removed. Sadly, we were unable to find the resources to complete this.

Paint.NET Version 3.5 Download Link [via Paint.NET Blog]