Paint.Net 4.0 is now available | Hacker News Reader

Paint.Net 4.0 is now available

blog.getpaint.net

295 pointsdtech169 comments

I've been in several offices where people think they need Photoshop to crop or resize photos. Consequently no-one has Photoshop (because its expensive) and people end up pasting 2000x800 images of logos into their letterhead and wondering why all the word files got so big.

Paint.Net is brilliant for doing common tasks like that.

Its a shame you have to play 'guess the download link' - that has really stopped me from recommending it to people recently.

Artweaver is pretty nice too - there is a freeware edition for non-commercial and academic purposes.

You can use https://pixlr.com/editor/ for such trivial uses.

> Its a shame you have to play 'guess the download link' - that has really stopped me from recommending it to people recently.

It's one of the tools available on Ninite. Point them there instead: https://ninite.com/.

Or Chocolatey: http://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net/

Exactly.

cinst paint.net

This is how you should install software on any OS. If you're still hunting for downloading links you're doing it wrong.

Oh yes. Users who don't know how to crop a photo w/out Photoshop are totally using a Package Manager and the command line to install stuff. </sarcasm>

Chocolatey is great, but unfortunately package managers don't work for every piece of software on every OS. Period.

How are app stores (something which users are used to already) different from package managers with a user-friendly GUI?

The only thing I can think of is that they don't really install OS level stuff, think software libraries or runtimes etc.

Other than that they're literally identical to something like synaptic.

On Android they sometimes do install OS level stuff (libraries, etc). I think he has a good point.

The biggest difference I see is that package managers on most Linux distributions are designed to be extensible to support other sources. Application stores generally are not.

I think the big difference is that they come with the OSes that those types of people are likely to use. And being stores, they provide software that package managers are unlikely to provide.

I think package managers becomes less useful to average users when you can't expect all of your software to be there.

chocolatey looks amazing!!!

You can use normal Paint (mspaint.exe) since at least Vista to resize and crop pictures, too.

Has been possible in older versions of Paint too, albeit indirectly; select region, copy, file->new, paste.

If that is cropping then Notepad supports code formatting

Thanks for my daily chuckle

Supports PSD too, http://psdplugin.codeplex.com, not sure if it supports the latest version yet though.

There is a built in workaround in word itself : pasting the huge picture, adjusting size, cut & paste as PNG.

https://imageresizer.codeplex.com/ for simple and quick right-click-to-resize functionality. Works for multiple selected files too.

> Its a shame you have to play 'guess the download link'

getpaint.net > download tab > download now > Free Download Now

That is quite a few clicks.

Let me show you what it looks like without adblock:

http://imgur.com/a/kuKqo

My daughter accidentally downloaded 6 different programs while trying to download Paint.net some which were malware. While I understand these are ads probably out of their control, their website is extremely deceptive in my opinion and should be modified to make the actual Paint.net download more obvious.

heck, I downloaded some random program while trying to install it a few weeks ago - and I've got a compsci MSc from Oxford.

I did the same about 6 months ago trying to grab speedfan for someone else in the office. I never had any trouble before cause adblock and so didn't even think to be careful :(

I am surprised that any ad networks allow these links. It ine of the few things that makes me want to install an ad blocker.

It's why I do use adblockers. I try to disable them on sites that don't do anything nearly this scummy, which is frustrating because stuff like Paint.net I otherwise want to support.

I'm pretty sure these ads are exactly what they are to maximize click-rate, and therefore to give Paint.NET's author the most money. Very exploitative (with emphasis on exploit).

What I find interesting is that when people go to the PDN forums to call him out on it, even in a nice way ("hey, I love your software but I got a bunch of malware instead due to the big fake buttons, just wanted you to know"), he blasts them and whines about how little money he makes off of a project he pours his life into, and how he's going to just quit because it's not worth the hassle anymore.

Then he releases a new version, makes even bigger buttons that lead to even scummier malware, and the cycle repeats.

I get the need to make money off of your hard work, and certainly the guy does a fantastic job on the software, but he's pulling some really shitty tactics to make that money. Why not a lite/pro version setup, or something else above board?

The lite vs. pro version is a great suggestion and I would have purchased a pro version for my daughter immediately to avoid the malware hassles it caused us. Instead she purchased an academic version of Photoshop which was $100 USD or in that ballpark. This is a shame because Paint.net is a great product and I'd like to see it succeed but their business side is poorly executed. I'll need to head over to the PDN forums and express my frustration.

wow that's insane.

ImgBurn has the same disease: http://i.imgur.com/8HbuKgl.png

The real download links are below the fold.

I realize this might normally qualify as a throw-away comment on HN, but, "Good grief!"

People who aren't familiar should take a look: I hadn't realized how bad it's gotten.

People like my mother (just helping her the other day) would be totally stymied by this. And... I guess I can be glad my sister just got a Mac.

(Speaking of which, why is there an ad for "Free Zip for Mac" on a page for a .NET dependent Windows program?)

Hopefully the general public will soon learn to avoid the big green "Download here" arrows too.

But then the ad-makers will probably come up with something else instead.

For three years I worked for a company that actually created and distributed the fake download button ads (along with a wide variety of other "interesting" projects). I even designed some of the creatives during early A/B tests. And even I still click the wrong link on occasion.

Paint.NET is one of the first things I get when I install windows somewhere. It's actually pretty frustrating that there isn't a nice simple image editing tool like that for Mac (or Linux). There's Gimp but...

> There's Gimp but...

Yeah. Gimp doesn't really cut it in my books.

I'd love to get paint.net running in Linux under Wine, but so far all my attempts have failed.

Just out of curiosity, why doesn't Gimp cut it in your books?

My money is on UX. But let's hear it from OP.

While acengiano here is being downvoted, this is really one of my biggest gripes with Gimp. I'm having a terrible user experience.

It also doesn't help that I'm already well used to the paint.net/photoshop keyboard shortcuts. Besides Gimp having its own, different keyboard shortcuts, it also has some unique (and again different) conventions for how to use the mouse to select regions and stuff like that.

It may be equally productive once you're used to it, but I never liked Gimp enough to get into how the different ways it has chosen to do things actually works.

Gimp shortcuts aren't displayed, most often. Try creating a path and draw a line on it: You'll have to use the mouse very, very often. And you'll only find the shortcuts if you search online.

That's sad because you could be much more efficient with it.

GIMP is too complex (and too slow to startup) for simple image editing tasks.

None of the substitute photo viewer type apps on Linux really seem to stand in particularly well either - I like Shotwell at the moment, but it still lacks an easy to use crop/copy/paste workflow.

Are you aware of Darktable? I think it's a great Adobe Lightroom replacement, even has some features the latter is missing I believe.

http://www.darktable.org/

Wow, this looks awesome! I own and use Lightroom now, but will give Dark Table a look.

gThumb has been my favourite for years for quick resize/crop/rotate/white balance edits and image folder browsing. I don't know why it never was picked as default on Linux Desktops.

On this comment I checked it out and it looks like gthumb does a address a lot of problems. Thanks!

For me on Windows it is dog slow, even on i7 system.

Don't get it actually, as it a native code application coded mostly in C, unless Python and Guile plugins now own the majority of the code.

I managed to run it using mono. It wasn't flawless.

I'm too stupid to use Gimp. It's like every time I want to do something I think is really simple (and in other tools it is really simple) takes me longer to do in Gimp. Sometimes I can't get it right, give up and try something else.

Pinta[0] is a decent Paint.NET-inspired Linux image editor.

[0]: http://pinta-project.com/

You should definitely check out http://pinta-project.com/

I use Pinta at work. It's no Paint.NET.

What are the differences? They seem almost identical to me for my limited usage.

Pixelmator is my go-to OS X alternative.

I second Pixelmator. It's great for simple edits, and also provides some of the more complex, Photoshop-esque tools. Also pretty fast.

+1 for Pixelmator, but there is also Acorn, quite popular.

Seashore isn't too bad either, http://seashore.sourceforge.net

Yep, I like (and own and use) Pixelmator but before I was willing to pay money for something, Seashore was my go to app for basic editing.

My understanding is that it's bits of the GIMP processing engine with a nicer UI.

Massive fan of Pixelmator, my #1 goto option on OSX. Very few apps have Pixelmator's quality and polish.

Paint.NET is a great option on Windows for quick and easy graphic work, has been enough to keep me off Photoshop (as a web dev) for years.

What got me to buy Pixelmator was the amount of instructional material they provide on their website, that is well laid out and easy to follow.

That would be a non-free alternative...

It has been long time since I tried, but ... http://code.google.com/p/paint-mono/

Then there is http://pinta-project.com/, that was created basically as a cross-platform clone of paint.net

Apart from that, if you want a painting tool, Krita is reasonably good.

I'm not a heavy graphics user, but Pinta on Linux (and Windows) does the trick for me.

Preview is a pretty simple image editing tool that ships with OSX

Preview is a markup tool, not an image editing tool.

On OS X it is either Acorn (my preferred tool, because you can cut/paste excel spreadsheets into it elegantly), or Pixelmator (which I also use occasionally)

Depends on what you mean by 'editing'. I can crop, resize, rotate and stitch together images in Preview which is editing in my book and covers about 95% of all image editing I ever need.

Rita is quite nice, perhaps a bit too simplistic and is vector based. Doesn't support text input either.

http://www.frykholm.se/rita.html

Pixelmator for mac, it also has a vector editor. The new version also allows for 16bit editing, which GIMP doesn't do yet (but Krita does).

GIMP 2.10 does.

http://www.gimpusers.com/tutorials/whats-new-in-gimp-2-10

(I admit, GIMP 2.10 isn't technically out yet, but it is just around the corner.)

Does it support color profiles yet? That is a big deal preventing it from being used in any professional setting.

Krita is pretty great for simple image editing on Linux (I even use it on Windows sometimes).

Krita is an impressive painting app, but not really designed for photo-editing. The developers of Krita currently have a Kickstarter campaign running to fund new features and possibly port it to the Mac

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/krita/krita-open-source...

i use the http://pixlr.com/ editor, no need to install anything

I actually run paint.net inside a windows vbox on OS X. Pixelmator doesn't cut it. People say paint.net is simple but it's actually very powerful. It's just designed so well that it fools people into thinking it's simple.

What don't you like about Pixelmator? (I've been thinking of buying it for my MBP...)

One downside of pixelmator (as compared to Acorn) - you can't cut/paste Excel spreadsheets and get all the nice formatting and gridlines - Acorn handles that.

Also wondering what is wrong pixelmator. My trial ran out before I could decide whether it was really capable enough. It seemed like something wasn't quite right with it though.

It's designed to look like Paint :)

I'm with you, Pixelmator is a bundle of aggravation. I can't stand it.

I've used Paintbrush for this use case because it gets the job done and is free; it hasn't been updated in a while but still seems to work fine under Maverick.

When it was first released, it worked quite well under mono on Linux. (so I guess also on Macs, but I never tried) Is that not the case anymore?

Edit: The Internets claim that ported paint.net 3 exists as paint.mono. Not version 4 though :(

The OSX alternative is Seashore. It's got the same goal as Paint.Net, to be a simple and easy to use image editor and is based on gimp, so it's stable and supports many things.

I'm not sure there's a similar project for Linux.

Depends on what you need on the Mac. For many common image editing tasks like rotating, cropping, resizing, saving in a different image format, some simple levels, exposure, saturation, sharpening and white balance adjustments as well as a few mark up tools (adding text, arrows, various shapes) Preview is perfectly adequate.

That’s probably more than enough for people who don’t actually create any images. Maybe the photo editing is a bit anaemic, but Photoshop’s photo editing tools are cryptic and hard to use for occasional users and those probably benefit a lot more from a simple editing panel with a few relevant sliders than from all the hard to unlock power of Photoshop.

The only notable absent thing is some sort of image straightening tool (only 90° rotations are possible).

If you want to do actual image editing there are a couple of excellent apps, namely Acorn and Pixelmator, both modern and frequently updated. You have to pay for them but that’s Mac software. You should have to pay for them. That’s only proper.

There's a large amount of free software available on Windows that doesn't have an equivalent on Mac. It matter less over time as more things move to the web, but Paint.net is still a good example.

I had a similar situation and came across... "Pinta" (Linux), I think it was. Did enough while retaining relatively simple and straight-forward controls. (It was no Paint.NET, but neither was it the beginner-adverse Gimp.)

I'd have to have another look to refresh my memory, and it was only a brief need, but might be worth having a look.

P.S. And of course, for vector graphics, "Inkscape".

And, oops: I see now that someone else mentioned Pinta already.

I agree. I went all Linux years ago, and Paint.NET, minesweeper, and Irfanview are the major things that I miss.

GIMP doesn't take that long to start now, though. I missed Paint.NET a lot more when the GIMP took longer to load.

Once I read somewhere that Paint.NET developer is the only in the interwebs than can make a living out only of donations for his software. I don't know if this is true, but it is totally deserved.

I use Paint.NET for a lot of things, most of them professionally. If I someday get lucky in this startup lottery thing, I intend to donate some thousands of dollars.

EDIT for add: I see a lot of comments talking about using Paint.NET for croping and resizing. I do so much more than this. I actually create all kinds of communication materials with it. Flyers, images for a landing page, business cards, etc. The layers feature is what make it of great value for me. Also the feature to open different images at the same time is great to create an image that includes a logo, a stock photo, a standard background.

Two things that are missing: be able to save it using CMYK color scheme (better for professional printing) and saving as PDF (easier to send it to graphic stores).

Maybe he makes money also with the 50 pages displaying ads you have to visit before to be able to download the file. But this does not detract from the qualities of the software, that I use daily.

What am I missing? I had three clicks, zero ads.

I clicked here: http://www.getpaint.net/download.html

Then I clicked here: http://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html

Then here for the file: http://www.dotpdn.com/files/paint.net.4.0.install.zip

I use adblock, but when I fired up another browser, I still had three clicks, and the only ads were one typical square block ad, that didn't get in the way at all.

these are the ads:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/q9dzn78tfh2srnb/Screenshot%202014-...

It isn't really a bad thing. He's giving the software away for free. I'm never a fan of the ones that pretend to be the download link (the ad on the left linked to http://www.mac-zip.com/lp/freezip_osx/df?mnag=155060&mnct=45... god knows what kind of stuff you'd get if you downloaded/ran that...)

Interestingly, others seem to be seeing two ads. With Chrome I only get one ad square, the one on the left part of the page. The ad on the right never shows up.

Just use ninite.

Maybe. Myself I just used the "If you’re using Paint.NET v3.5.x, go to the Utilities menu and click on “Check for Updates.” path.

I would also like to have a confirmation from HN if the developer indeed make a living only out of Paint.NET.

The developer of Paint.NET works for Microsoft. Thus, he does not "make a living only out of Paint.NET."

Of course, that does not say whether or not he could live off Paint.NET if he wanted to.

thanks!

ninite.com may help with that.

You can also install from Chocolatey: https://chocolatey.org/packages/paint.net

cinst paint.net

I'm pretty sure the Dwarf Fortress guys also survive purely on donations.

So does joeyh with git-annex. I am sure there are many others.

Survive is the right word, they receive about $4k per month between two of them.

Sadly, this reminds me of the joke:

http://www.memecenter.com/fun/1114268/my-gift-to-winrar-if-i...

I wouldn't donate to winrar. The original author died years ago and the program hasn't made any advances since.

I think you're talking about Phil Katz the author of PKZIP and the creator of the zip format. AFAIK, Eugene Roshal, the author of WinRar is still alive and kicking.

It appears you are correct and Wikipedia cites confusion surrounding this issue. Donate away!

Actually RGB is better for professional printing. Printers typically have specific colour profiles for their printers and converting your CMYK profile to their CMYK profile will usually result in differences you weren't expecting.

RGB -> CMYK (@ the printer) will be closer to what you expect (what you saw on screen).

I didn't know that, thanks!

I said that because I use an online printing service, and everytime I send a PDF they demand it is in CMYK. As they look very professional in everything else and the quality of the final product is great, I just assumed it was a best practice. Good to know.

Sorry, but this makes no sense. You have the same issues with portably reproducing colours with RGB that you have with CMYK. Either way, unless you're working with calibrated hardware and explicit colour management, you don't have much chance of getting a printer to reliably reproduce what you saw on your screen; sometimes it simply isn't possible, because your RGB and CYMK representations aren't going to support exactly the same gamut.

Well yes you'll always have the Additive vs subtractive colour problem.

But I don't understand how RGB has problems reproducing colours... webpages seem to do fine, and that's all they do?

What about the Gimp? It can do all Paint.Net does, plus more, also save to PDF and they where adding CMYK support last time I checked.

In case you don't enjoy clicking through half a dozen pages to get to the download, the actual link is on this page http://www.dotpdn.com/downloads/pdn.html

Haven't really tried much yet, but initial impression is that it seems noticeably snappier than the older version.

That said, I mostly use it to crop images and highlight regions when documenting bug-reports with screenshots.

Most of these enhancements are probably not meant for me :)

The major improvement for everyone is decreased startup time thanks to Multicore JIT. That was one of my few irritations with Paint.NET.

Paint.NET should perform better overal thanks to GPU acceleration and multithreaded rendering. I've personally used the alpha's and beta's for a while now and it just feels zippier.

For several years I had put off using Paint.NET over GIMP due to the dependency on .NET, but as soon as I realized that it still managed to outperform GIMP, I moved on the spot.

Still do not get how GIMP gets compiled on Windows to perform so poorly.

JIT'ed bytecode only carries a ~10% performance overhead versus well-optimized compiled native code, so the argument that a .NET program would be slower is bogus nonetheless.

In this case, GIMP is fully POSIX and GTK based so it needs to translate all POSIX stuff for Windows + rely on a subpar implementation of GTK for the Windows platform.

A good example of how native vs managed usually impacts performance much less than the application structure.

Sure, I am aware of JIT vs AOT compilation, although .NET JIT has not been touched that much on the last years. Looking forward to RyuJIT improvements.

Just that a statement that writing something in C does not make it fast by itself.

Why wouldn't something like Paint.NET just be AOT compiled with ngen?

At least the 3.x versions were.

it's JIT compiling of the third-party plugins, which are dropped by the user in a folder and not AOT compiled.

  > Startup performance when many plugins are installed is improved, thanks to the Multicore JIT feature

Paint.NET assemblies are NGEN-compiled.

My GF is a teacher who did some graphics design and typesetting part-time during her time at the university. She used the Adobe products of course. When teaching at a school for the first time, and doing image manipulation with the pupils, she had to use Gimp because it is free and because of that the "oficially recommended" program. She had real trouble adjust to the GUI and teaching it to her pupils and at the same time the tool was way oversized for the tasks. I showed her Paint.NET and it was like heaven-sent for her.

I agree the GIMP developers are missing out on a big opportunity by not making their UI look/behave more like the commercial products people are used to. But on the other side there are a lot of people used to the current GIMP UI as well.

Good thing there are projects like Gimpshop (though I havent' tried it yet), GIMP is a open source project so I don't see why we wouldn't have multiple UI's just like there are for Linux, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, ... as long as the core remains the same.

Every time image editing comes up on forums, so does mentions of GIMP. To me, there seems to be no shortage of "GIMP has UX problems" claims.

So what gives? Do they not believe that this is a legitimate problem hurting their adoption? Or do they not care about adoptions? Somehow it's not a priority? Or their execution is severely lacking.

I'm not in any way affiliated with GIMP or even a graphics professional but as a programmer I think part of it is ideological (GIMP is not a copy of photoshop, why would we spend a lot of resources to change something that works for us and copy adobe for example just to appeal to users who don't want to learn to use a new UI or workflow) and part of may be just because they are more or less happy with it, they have a steady user base (at least it seems that way guessing by the mentioning of GIMP on forums as you say), also it's not like they (programmers/community) are going to get rich off of it so there might be no profit motive in revamping the whole thing.

I think the project just needs some fresh blood, either a fork that strives for a (better) more familiar UX for people that are switching from commercial products or an easy way to decouple the UI from the core and build custom front ends. There's no point in re-developing all the functionality that's already in GIMP, it's a functional product with years of development behind it.

I've been using GIMP for years and if I don't use it for a couple weeks still have to look up in the help where the crop tool is. The GUI is pretty rough to use.

really? I think ive got crop as muscle memory now. shift+c I think...

yup.

It's a bit sad that this program was open-source once, and then further versions got closed. (It's the other way around to what usually happens!)

There's some history there. Basically a scammer was passing it off as a paid app [1].