13th March 2007

Paint.net

posted in Technology |

I frequently need to do small-scale image editing tasks but am not a pro-graphic person, so I’ve always been reluctant to pay the big bucks for the industry-standad Adobe products like Photoshop. Up til now I’ve used Digital Image Studio which was made by my friend Chris (and his team) for simple photo editing, but it doesn’t really cut it for icons or other more detailed graphics that involve drawing / doing anything more than color adjustment/cropping/resizing.

I’ve recently been using the Gimp a bit. Overall it seems to have a lot of functionality, but it also continues to demonstrate the classic complaint against open source software- they rarely invest enough in usability since the people who are doing the work are scratching their own itches and are pretty much by definition already experts at the software by the time they start contributing to it. I don’t mean to slam the Gimp - its nice that its out there.

Today I heard about Paint.Net which is a new free app built in .Net that is like the built-in Windows Paint app (which I have used an embarrising amount) but on steroids. I haven’t had a chance to play with it much so far but I’d highly recommend checking it out- it seems really cool.

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