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Paint.net
- blackoil 2y agoIt is one of few softwares, I believe MSFT should simply sponsor and promote, maybe make it opensource. It is a perfect application, Windows only built in dotnet, loved by users and has a perfect positioning.
- Fnoord 2y agoIt used to be FOSS: > Initially, Paint.NET was released under a modified version of the MIT License, with the exclusion of the installer, text, and graphics.[7] However, citing issues with the open source code being plagiarized by others that had rebranded the software as their own and bundled user content without their permission, the availability of the source code was restricted, in December 2007 Brewster announced his intent to restrict access to components of the program (including its installer, resources, and user interface).[8] In November 2009, the software was made proprietary, restricting the sale or creation of derivative works of the software.[8][9] [[1]] I quit using it when it wasn't anymore. I now use Pixelmator Pro on macOS, and I love it, but it isn't FOSS. Price was OK though. Is it the best? I don't know. [[1]] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paint.NET
- alisonatwork 2y agoBig cosign on this. Paint.net is about as good as it gets in the freeware closed source world. The other one I love is MusicBee, which is a fantastic music library organizer and player. I always try to pick open source options when they're available, but these two apps are so great it's hard to find a replacement.
- kqcso 2y agoIf you are looking for nice Windows-only open source photo editor with lots of Paint and Photoshop-like features, I recommend PhotoDemon: https://photodemon.org/ https://photodemon.org/
- mnurzia 2y agopaint.net is one of the only pieces of software that I miss from Windows. After having started with Tux Paint, I found paint.net extremely intuitive and easy to use (very nice for making goofy memes in middle/high school, and quick/easy drawings). I think that even after not having used it for years I am still more productive in it than I am in, say, Photoshop or GIMP.
- mlvljr 2y agoThere is a clone, Pinta.
- cxr 2y agoPinta is a fork of an older version of Paint.NET and (as far as I know) doesn't aim to be a clone.
- throwaway5Am1k 2y ago>Pinta is a fork of an older version of Paint.NET and (as far as I know) doesn't aim to be a clone. There was a Paint.net fork (called Paint mono), but it is not Pinta. Pinta is a clone. From the original Pinta author: https://jpobst.blogspot.com/2010/02/over-holiday-break-i-stumbled-upon-this.html https://jpobst.blogspot.com/2010/02/over-holiday-break-i-stu... "Pinta is a clone of Paint.NET."
- dsage 2y agoI have found Pinta (pinta-project.com) is a great replacement that works on Linux. I don't use it very often anymore but last time I did it was basically a drop-in replacement. No affiliation, just something I have used.
- stkai 2y agoI use a Mac now, but have a Windows VM running in Parallels. Paint.net is one of the first apps I installed on that VM. It's ridiculously easy and intuitive.
- OsrsNeedsf2P 2y agoCheck out Krita[0]. It's what I used after leaving Windows - a little different, maybe 25% more complicated, but has everything you need. If you just want a MS Paint replacement, KolourPaint[1] is the way to go [0] https://krita.org/en/ https://krita.org/en/ [1] https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/kolourpaint/ https://apps.kde.org/en-gb/kolourpaint/
- coffeebeqn 2y agoKrita is great. It’s the closest thing to what once we “paint shop pro” - a no-frills but still powerful pixel editor
- wildrhythms 2y agoThe closest program I've found for Mac is Pixelmator Pro, but it's not free, and the UI/workflow is more complex in my opinion. Paint.NET is still one of my favorite pieces of software on Windows.
- emrah 2y agoNeither is Parallels, and if you are on Mx on Apple, you need to also buy Windows for Arm
- snvzz 2y agoI do not use this for two reasons: - It is not open source. - It does only run on Windows. Alternatives include Krita, Pinta and The GIMP.
- anta40 2y agoYep, I'm happy with Pinta as Paint.NET alternative on macOS. Sometimes, I feel GIMP is a bit complicated when I typically want simple quick processes like cropping, paintbrush, etc.
- gbraad 2y agothis app is almost as old as dotNet and always felt like a showcase. it works, but understand your concerns. especially as the format is exclusive to their app (and the only way to have layers)
- 5- 2y agorecently i went looking for a (slightly more featureful) mspaint.exe replacement for linux and found https://maoschanz.github.io/drawing/ https://maoschanz.github.io/drawing/ to be serviceable.
- pxoe 2y agoproprietary app, proprietary format (pdn), which coincidentally is the only supported one that works with layers. save yourself the trouble of locking yourself into this format and app.
- freitasm 2y agoI use Paint.Net on my Windows machines. It's a great piece of software—and free. I bought the Microsoft Store version to support the author, although I continue to install the free download. I also run https://github.com/viliusle/miniPaint https://github.com/viliusle/miniPaint using Cloudflare Pages so it's hosted in one of my sub-domains as minipaint.[mydomainhere] and it's great for quick jobs.
- cglong 2y agoWhy do you prefer the standalone installer to the Store version?
- sedatk 2y agoMy guess would be that they needed instant updates. Rick had said that MSStore took days to publish updates, IIRC.
- freitasm 2y ago1. The store version has a limit on the number of computers - not that I am currently close to the limit, but I don't like it. 2. Not updated fast enough. 3. I want to keep my Microsoft Account separate from my Work account on my work laptop, and I don't want to create a Microsoft Account for work.
- pogue 2y agoThat's a cool tip! Can you run Minipaint for free on Cloudflare or do you have to subscribe to their services to use it? How does it compare to something like photopea.com ?
- freitasm 2y agoCloudflare Pages are free. Mine is on https://minipaint.freitasm.com https://minipaint.freitasm.com Compared to Photopea - there are no cloud services access and limited formats (no PSD, etc). But gratis and no ads.
- telchior 2y agoI've been using paint.net for years now and it does have some pros. - Sufficient even for mid-complexity art tasks - Nice, simple interface - Plenty of plugins I don't mind the proprietary format -- since I'm usually just doing quick tasks in it, I'm either saving as jpg or png, or don't expect to need to open the pdn file at some later time or in other software. However for anyone looking to start with something new, I'd really recommend using Krita or some other more recent program. Paint.net's available plugins are wildly disorganized, spread across at least one forum and hundreds of threads, often out of date or not working as intended, etc. Great community and they deserve all the praise for maintaining free software for many years, but much like Gimp, it's just not the best free option available anymore.
- NoxiousPluK 2y agoAgreed, I switched to Krita and it's amazing in comparison.
- pdntspa 2y agoIf there is one thing about Paint.net that I really like, it is that is has separate, simple controls for manipulating a selection independently of whatever the selection is selecting. Like you can move the marching ants around super easy. Years ago I had a job that involved a lot of cropping + rescaling images and my workflow with paint.net was so much faster than anything else
- forgotpwd16 2y agoKrita/GIMP are great but also more complicated. So depends on what someone needs which one is better.
- blackbeans 2y agoI have tried all but pdn is the best software for quick editing. In the time it takes for Krita or GIMP to launch, I'm already halfway in pdn. I really miss it when using Linux.
- lpribis 2y agoFor Linux there is Pinta, which is a very similar UI to pdn. It works well enough much of the time but I've found it way more unstable than pdn (and without the plugin ecosystem).
- ChrisArchitect 2y agoSome more discussion earlier this year: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34334780 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34334780
- anon115 2y agoi love this app its so easy to use
- oaiey 2y agoWhen I remember right, Paint.net has this funny origin story: someone wanted to proof that .NET was not suitable for delivering a paint application. He proofed himself otherwise and made a permanent job out of it.
- steve1977 2y agoThat seems to be a myth (but certainly a nice one) https://betanews.com/2006/02/27/interview-a-look-inside-paint-net/ https://betanews.com/2006/02/27/interview-a-look-inside-pain...
- barlog 2y agoI've been using Pant dot NET for 20 years since the initial version. The project was originally started by WSU (Washington State University)'s Rick Brewster and his team with backed MSFT. But it wasn't adopted for Windows.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- conorgdaly 2y agoAlways choose this app but find myself using Irfan view for printing nearly every time as the Windows native print dialog which paint.net and other image apps use to be severely lacking.
- Mountain_Skies 2y agoPaint.net is great. I even purchased it from the Windows store even though you can install it for free outside of that channel. The one thing that does annoy me about it is that there's no way to dock the floating windows. I'm sure being able to rearrange them is great for some people's workflows but for me, I'd prefer them just to be docked to the main window. Maybe something like Visual Studio where everything can be docked to any side or completely undocked but just a everything docked option would be fine for me.
- sinuhe69 2y agoOh yes. I found Paint.Net and used it for many years as a quick photo editing solution. It's lightweight, reasonably fast and sophisticated enough for most daily tasks. However, I find I no longer install it on my new Windows boxes because of Photopea. Photopea is kind of a Photoshop Express clone and runs entirely in the browser. It's amazing how fast and easy photo editing software can be. WASM is really amazing stuff! If you want a cross-platform photo editing tool, give it a try!
- moffkalast 2y agoHmm yes "It seems like you're blocking our ads" is exactly the kind of popup I want from an image editor, lol.
- jahnu 2y agoYou can also pay a small subscription fee to avoid ads.
- KronisLV 2y agoSome people will be okay with the ads. Others will prefer to go the subscription fee route to get rid of them. Some others will look at the ads and just decide to use software without anything like that in the first place, something truly free. I think it's nice that we get the choice and that there's enough software out there for that to be the case. At the same time, if developers are successfully monetizing web based software, I wonder why that's not the case for desktop software. I remember using a program called RaiDrive (https://www.raidrive.com/ https://www.raidrive.com/) to mount ext4 volumes through SFTP on a Windows machine and it worked pretty well, however they had an ad banner at the top of the window which seemed oddly fitting for a free version of software with lots of functionality, but maybe that's just due to me being used to ads everywhere nowadays (albeit uBlock Origin and Pi-hole exist).
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- infinitezest 2y ago
- luismedel 2y agoRegarding its native file format, IIRC it's a dump (aka serialization) of the internal structures used in the program. More or less like the old Office did for its native doc and xls files.
- firebot 2y agoPhotopea.com! It's basically a free version of Photoshop. I haven't used paint.net in like a decade(maybe 2 decades). I didn't like the interface at all. And it seemed to heavily rely on .NET graphics APIs, which are fine, I guess. Hopefully it's improved since then. Doesn't sound like it. Closed source now? Meh.
- krackout 2y agoSince I didn't see it mentioned, my multiplatform (Java based) alternative to Paint.net is Pixelitor, https://pixelitor.sourceforge.io/ https://pixelitor.sourceforge.io/ Something in between MS Paint - Paint.net I think. I also use XPaint; it's quite capable but the interface is very different, too much deviated from usual GUI apps.
- 3836293648 2y agoPaint.NET is by far my most missed Windows app on linux. GIMP is a mess of UI and Pinta just crashes constantly and is lacking in features.
- FredPret 2y agoPaint.net is the one thing I missed when I switched from Windows to Mac when M1 came out. It's a brilliant quick photo editor. People say to use Pinta on Mac but it's not the same. The closest I've found is Pixelmator Pro, which is also awesome, but is not free and quite a bit heavier than Paint.net.
- qwerty456127 2y agoPaint.Net is by far the best non-pro graphics editor ever. So practical and intuitive. To me lack of Paint.Net seems the biggest problem of desktop Linux, also of Mac. Sadly Pinta appears buggy. But it still is tolerable and has no real alternative. Both Photoshop and GIMP feel too unintuitive and this way take too much time to do simple things when you are not a graphics pro. GIMP also arguably looks ugly. Paint.Net is a great example of the whole UX (intuitiveness, convenience and aesthetics) done right. As I understand Paint.Net it is a WPF app. I wish the author would just use Avalonia XPF to port it to Linux and Mac. XPF is a drop-in replacement for WPF which can easily make WPF apps cross-platform for some money. I wouldn't mind paying my share.
- superdisk 2y agoThis is a vague memory so I might be wrong, but I think it's WinForms, not WPF, and it makes calls into Windows directly using P/Invoke so it's not trivially portable.
- ygra 2y agoBoth WPF and WinForms, additionally at least DirectWrite and Direct2D and by now a bunch of shader code for the various effects. I guess there's a lot of things that can go wrong when trying to run it via Wine.
- Defletter 2y agoYup, Paint.NET was the thing I mourned the most switching from Windows to Linux... still do. I'm somewhat surprised that there hasn't been more of an effort to get it working on Wine. I figure there's some context I'm missing, but still. It just seems odd that so many games have been made to work, but Paint.NET is sitting with a listed rank of "Garbage".
- davikr 2y agovery good - wish it supported other platforms.
- cobertos 2y agoThis was _the_ one thing that kept me switching from Windows to Linux. Bit the bullet and now I full time use Krita and Linux Mint. But it doesn't stop me from pulling it open anytime I need to do work on a Windows PC. Great for Cg (with its builtin .dds support!) and texture work (.vtf and other plugins) The community has been good to me. Good piece of software.
- omnibrain 2y agoThis, Notepad++ and IrfanView are the 3 pieces of Software that truly set my Windows PCs apart from my MacBook.
- wruza 2y agoPaint.Net is an example of how to make great apps. Very focused, fast and easy to use. I tried multiple alternatives, including Krita, which was the most decent. But its layout, speed, colorschemes, behaviors and some visual bugs are meh compared to subj. The most annoying is its content window black-flash when the cursor crosses the border. Btw, does someone know a good SD webui plugin for PDN?
- MrYellowP 2y agoBeen using paint.net for years. The only downside it has is mentioning it's name, because people keep going to the completely unrelated "paint.net" website. Super fucking annoying. Anyhow, the only paint program I've used in years. I consider it to be the modern Deluxe Paint ][. Can't get anyone to use it though, because they're all clueless normies stuck in the belief they need to use PhotoShop for everything. If that makes no sense to you, consider the insane amount of people who buy an expensive DSLR, because they believe it makes them better photographers. Hint: It doesn't.
- abanana 2y agoI fully agree with a lot of that. It's the modern Deluxe Paint in a lot of ways. I've had web developers hear "paint.net" and think Microsoft Paint (maybe the ".net" makes them think Microsoft), and why am I using something so basic? > insane amount of people who buy an expensive DSLR I'm not with you at all on that one. DSLR sales have plummeted every year for the last decade. "Normies", as you put it, think their smartphone camera is a high-end camera and all they could possibly ever need for taking top-quality photographs. The appalling noise their tiny sensors produce seems to have become so normalised, they don't even notice.
- stormed 2y agoPaint.net was the program to get me into graphic design. I hold this, and Notepad++ as the killer apps for Windows.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- pkz 2y agoIt is a great piece of software but annoying that you can't edit text.
- YourCupOTea 2y agoRecently I’ve been using Photopea and it has been excellent. Web based and very full featured
- Aardwolf 2y agoDisappointing to see that they still didn't port it to other platforms after all these years. I thought that should be easy to do since .net is multiplatform. I can't say I understand the strategy, there are enough painting programs for Windows (which they even seem to focus on extra much on the frontpage of the website too) yet they are donation based but exclude other platforms.
- GartzenDeHaes 2y agoIt uses a bunch of p/invoke native calls and other Windows specific features.
- uobytx2 2y agoDid something new happen with paint.net? Or just a post to remind us? I love paint.net. Recently purchased a windows store license for it. Clearly a winner for most of the image editing needs I have, for things like basic cropping, dpi changes, or changing formats. I treat it like I did GraphicConverter on Mac. Just a beloved image tool. Lately I’ve been using it for simple file conversion with roll20, to hand-tune my assets for small downloads with webp.
- Jare 2y agoLike many others, I was a die hard Paint.NET person while Windows-only. When I went multiplatform 8 years ago, Krita took its place. Bulkier, buggier and in some ways less convenient, but so many great features and fully cross platform. I tried pdn again recently and was shocked at the chaos that plugins still are. I recall trying Gimp 2.99 with the new UI some years ago (they take their time don't they) and finally liking it a lot. I would love for it to get a popularity boost like Blender did.
- harha_ 2y agoI don't like how it forces you to update. Maybe you can disable that though? Haven't bothered to check. :D
- freedomben 2y agoIt's sad to see that paint.net (the domain) is parked now. Back in the day they had a little notice at the top of their site for people (like me) who were looking for Paint.NET's website. I always thought that was super cool of them because they didn't have to do that.
- HeckFeck 2y agoAh, memories. When I was on Windows I did all my edits and 'shops in this. Capable enough for layering and clone stamping, I touched up images of friends and I in absurd situations. E.g. a photo of us camping was made to look like a battle scene from Call of Duty 4. Then I shared it on Fb for a few likes and comments. I wonder if the younger generation still make time for things like this. Wouldn't have happened without Paint.NET, I was too conscientious to pirate Photoshop.
- matchamatcha 2y agoThe main thing I remember about Paint.net are forced updates and being the only software besides windows update to create system restore points. Always felt a bit overkill for updating a basic graphics program. It was great to have something free with more features than Paint and less complicated than GIMP though.
- emeril 2y agoI still prefer paint shop pro from the 1990's (some of the versions from back then are 32 bit and mostly run in windows) it runs extremely fast on any modern windows box