Still Using Microsoft Paint?
April 12th, 2008At work today a friend of mine showed me a slick little image editor called Paint.NET. It combines the power of Adobe Photoshop with the speed and simplicity of Microsoft Paint, and boasts the same price as the Gimp. In other words… it’s completely free.
Paint.NET has layers, color, contrast and brightness controls, effects and unlimited undo. It includes the magic wand, clone brush and a gradient tool. The main feature lacking in Paint.NET is support for vector graphics. Whenever you add a line, a square, a circle, or some text, it’s stored as pixel data, not vector data. So if you misspell Grandma, you can’t go back and easily add a letter like you can in other editors. And you can’t resize your circles either. For most projects this isn’t a big deal. If you remember to insert a new layer whenever you add a new object to your scene you can use the eraser to correct your mistakes.
The bottom line is that if you’re still using Microsoft Paint, you owe it to yourself to take a look at Paint.NET. Installation is easy, and the download is minuscule. Get it here.