Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers.

Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems.Paint.NET is a photo editor and manipulation software.

The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI extensions.

Paint.NET has many of the powerful features that expensive commercial applications have, including the ability to use layers.

This is the second semester that Paint.NET has been a project at Washington State University, and we have the goal of adding as much functionality as expensive commercial applications provide, but of course, for free!

In the spirit of all this freedom, we welcome any suggestions, as well as provide the source code free of charge for anyone who wishes to tinker with it.

Here are some key features of "Paint.NET":

- Simple, intuitive user interface
- Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. It is also designed to be immediately familiar to users of the original MS Paint software that comes with Windows.
- 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.
- Powerful Tools
- Paint.NET 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 a huge 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. Other powerful tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color, and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.
- 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.
- Special Effects
- Many special effects are included for perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing are included. Also included is our unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting.
- Adjustments are also included which help you tweak an image's brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.
- Open Source and Free
- Paint.NET is provided free-of-charge, and the source code (all 133,000 lines of it) is also available for free under generous licensing terms. The bulk of Paint.NET is written in C#, with only a small amount of code related to setup and shell-integration written in C .

Requirements:

- NET Framework 2.0
- 500 MHz processor (Recommended: 800 MHz or faster)
- 256 MB of RAM (Recommended: 512 MB or more)
- 1024 x 768 screen resolution
- 200 MB hard drive space
- 64-bit support requires a 64-bit CPU that is running a 64-bit version of Windows XP, Windows Vista, or Windows Server 2003, and an additional 128 MB of RAM

What's New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]

- Fixed DirectDraw Surface (.dds) file format support for CPUs which do not have SSE2 (Pentium III, Athlon XP).
- Fixed an issue with the File->Save dialog related to file type plugins that were only written for opening (importing).
- Fixed some crashes which were supposed to be "out of memory" errors.
- Fixed a race condition with the New Image, Canvas Size, and Resize dialogs. If you typed extremely fast you could cause a crash by typing a negative number and immediately pressing OK or Enter.
- Fixed a File->Save dialog issue in Win7/Vista where it could ask you about overwriting the wrong file.