Choosing Font
Simple, intuitive, and innovative user
interface
Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive
and quickly learnable without assistance. In order to handle multiple images easily,
Paint.NET uses a tabbed document interface. The tabs display a live thumbnail of the
image instead of a text description. This makes navigation very simple and fast.
Extensive work has gone into making
Paint.NET the fastest image editor available. Starting the app is nearly
instantaneous and every feature has been thoroughly optimized to take advantage of
the latest multicore CPUs, GPUs, and NVMe SSDs. Whether you have a power-conscious
laptop or a monstrous desktop with a gigantic GPU, you can expect Paint.NET to start
up immediately, respond quickly to every mouse click, and take full advantage of all
of your hardware.
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.
Back by popular demand, Paint.NET 5.0
now supports pressure sensitivity with compatible pens and drawing tablets from
Wacom, UGEE, Microsoft, and more. This enables you to draw beautiful,
natural-looking brush strokes.
Comprehensive File Format Support
Paint.NET supports a wide variety of popular and standard file
formats, including: JPEG, BMP, PNG, GIF, TIFF, DDS, TGA, HEIC, AV1 (AVIF), WebP,
JPEG XR, and of course PDN (Paint.NET's native image type that supports layers).
Support for more file types can be added with plugins.
Active Online Community
Paint.NET has an online forum with a friendly, passionate, and
ever-expanding community. Be sure to check out the constantly growing list of
tutorials and plugins!
Updates are free and contain new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. If you are using the Microsoft Store release, updating is done in the background when you aren't using the app. For the "classic" release, updates only take two clicks and can be installed when you're finished with your session.
Many special effects are included for enhancing and 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.
Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing
shapes, including an easy-to-use curve tool for drawing splines or Bezier curves. The
Gradient tool has been cited as an innovative 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, a Recolor tool, and an
extensible Shapes tool, among others.
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.