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October 21, 2006

If You Use PhotoShop, Check Out Paint.net

Michael Arrington

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If you use Photoshop regularly, check out the just released version 3.0 of Paint.NET (download it here). It is 3.6 MB download that handles most of the basic (and many of the advanced) functions of Photoshop. It’s free, and even better it loads in just a couple of seconds on a newish Windows PC. I tested it, and it does everything that I need - if it was usable on a Mac I’d switch from Photoshop based on the speed of the application alone. Earlier versions of Paint.NET were apparently very sluggish - but I can confirm that version 3.0 is very quick to load and very responsive in basic testing. Robert Scoble gives it a thumbs up, too, although he’s clearly been drinking all night. In fact, after reading his post I’m going to open a bottle of scotch, too. :-)

The real test is whether or not Paint.NET can do something like this.

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 21st, 2006 at 1:05 am and is filed under Company & Product Profiles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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Comments

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  1. wow

    October 21st, 2006 at 1:42 am

    Its a excellent tool for people looking for a alternative and who don’t require all the advanced features of photoshop. The best part is its Free. :D

  2. Michael Arrington

    October 21st, 2006 at 1:44 am

    Photoshop is effectively free too - I don’t know anyone who’s paid for it (exept me of course). I think the best part is that it’s fast. I spend a lot of time in Photoshop every day and the load time kills me.

  3. Paul Montgomery

    October 21st, 2006 at 2:40 am

    Boo, it won’t install on my rig.

  4. Joe

    October 21st, 2006 at 3:27 am

    Just looked at their site. v3.0 is still Alpha 1. Current release is 2.72.

  5. mestdagh

    October 21st, 2006 at 3:31 am

    anyone know how this compares w/ GIMP?

  6. koko

    October 21st, 2006 at 3:53 am

    paint.net application will not be develope in a future.

  7. Damian

    October 21st, 2006 at 4:00 am

    It’s good to see .Net desktop applications are coming of age now. Whenever someone ask about .Net on the desktop or if .Net is slow, I just point them to Paint.Net.

  8. Robert Dewey

    October 21st, 2006 at 7:24 am

    LOL @ Mike’s comment.

  9. Anand

    October 21st, 2006 at 7:50 am

    Try installing rotor or mono and then paint.net should work smoothly. :)

  10. overcast

    October 21st, 2006 at 7:56 am

    @Michael

    Load time? You mean once when you first open it? That ruins the experience?

  11. ABCotaa

    October 21st, 2006 at 7:59 am

    I didn’t know Scoble was a photographer. Have any real photographers given it a “thumbs up”?

  12. Robert Dewey

    October 21st, 2006 at 8:07 am

    Wait a minute…

    “I’m going to open a bottle of scotch”

    That’s a bad choice, you should have said bourbon.

  13. Walker Hamilton

    October 21st, 2006 at 8:52 am

    Michael, try Seashore for OS X. It loads almost instantaneously on my machine.

    I have some complaints with it (resizing images is not incredibly intuitive) but overall, it’s nice for some quick image manipulation.

  14. Mike Panic

    October 21st, 2006 at 9:39 am

    No RAW processing, not interested. Cool for people who like / want / need free though.

  15. Jed

    October 21st, 2006 at 11:21 am

    Nothing compare to GIMP…

    Unless you need something useful

  16. treizep

    October 21st, 2006 at 11:28 am

    It does not the 1/10th of what Photoshop can do, but it’s a good free app.

    The only real problem is that you can only work on one picture, no multi-document support… and that’s crap.

  17. Vrogy

    October 21st, 2006 at 11:39 am

    What a rude little program- I haven’t even used it yet, and already it’s been calling mummy and daddy without my permission.

    Seriously, though- flipping the counter over on your server should be a voluntary thing. To shame.

  18. ESTAN

    October 21st, 2006 at 11:52 am

    The multi document is now a feature in version 3.0.
    Works great.

  19. Johannes Rexx

    October 21st, 2006 at 12:01 pm

    This could have been written in Java and then anybody could use it. I use Mac and Linux and would love something light and crisp. You made that impossible by using dot net.

    Why did you write it using MS proprietary languages? You cut off a host of users for no reason, you fell into the MS trap. Please reconsider your choice of programming platforms and port this to Java instead.

    Thanks much!

  20. Amit

    October 21st, 2006 at 12:10 pm

    Good post. I’ll check it out on Monday. I don’t have a PC with me. I used GIMP as an alternative to PS, but it turned out to be slow and resource consuming.

  21. jpl

    October 21st, 2006 at 12:16 pm

    > Johannes Rex

    Well, not exactly.
    .net platform is not proprietary: it is an ECMA standard (and open).
    Java is proprietary and has just begun to be open.

    The thing is that MS does not provide a VM for non MS OS, but Mono is a quite good replacement.

  22. Eric

    October 21st, 2006 at 12:32 pm

    Yeah, 3MB if you already have the .NET Framework (another 20mb+). But yeah, it’s a nice little app. for a slower PC’s with little RAM, but I wouldn’t even put this and PS in the same category.

    I’ve been using it for simple image resizing.

  23. Patricia

    October 21st, 2006 at 2:48 pm

    YAY! I always need things like this for my work. Thank you!

  24. Delicate Genius

    October 21st, 2006 at 3:33 pm

    Paint.net is hardly a replacement for Photoshop. Rather, it fulfils a different need.

    My image editing repertoire looks something like this:

    Photoshop - Serious photo manipulation used for creating art.
    Photo.net - Simple lightweight quick image editing tool.
    Picasa - Catalogue and management of images, bulk basic processing.

    Photo.net has it’s place and does a great job at it. I’ve been using it on and off for basic image manipulation and have always liked it (it’s leaps and bounds more intuitive than gimp too).

    It’s good to see that Photo.net is much faster than it used to be and that if finally supports multiple images (I wish they’d get this going in MDI).

    -dg

  25. David

    October 21st, 2006 at 3:46 pm

    Another vote for Seashore (http://seashore.sourceforge.net) on Mac OS X — open source (GPLv2), Intel native, and always good enough for me.

  26. Laurent

    October 21st, 2006 at 6:29 pm

    Another good one on mac is chocoflop. It’s still a beta but it’s very mac like (CoreImage based). You need a good graphics card to run it.

    http://www.chocoflop.com/

  27. Bethany

    October 21st, 2006 at 6:47 pm

    I tried out seashore for the mac and didn’t care for it - it’s not nearly powerful enough. I’m currently using GimpShop which I like a lot more.

  28. Drew Olanoff

    October 21st, 2006 at 6:52 pm

    I’m loving this, good call TC.

  29. Diego Barros

    October 21st, 2006 at 7:36 pm

    GIMP’s UI is awful. Go with Paint.NET instead.

  30. quickcur

    October 21st, 2006 at 7:43 pm

    It is no more than an image viewer. As for that, I recommend InfoView (I am not sure about the name). It is too quick to say that it can “handles most of the basic functions of Photoshop”. Look at the “Effect” menu. That is where you can apply effect quickly to your photo or image. Photoshop has about 100 selection. Paint.Net has 10. Paint.Net basically build a framework which should be very easy given current status of software developmemt. What it lacks is the most important feature that people would like to pay hundreds of dallors. That is the kernel of Computer Graphics Algorithm.

    Paint.Net is just a Net program. Photoshop is Compute Graphics Software. That is the difference.

  31. quickcur

    October 21st, 2006 at 7:58 pm

    For a computer software, if you price it $10 and no one want to buy it because it does not worth it or there is comparable free bees, it is a failure. Paint.Net certainly fall in this catogary.

    It is too often for people in the “Free” domain to claim that “we can do the same thing with much less and for free”. But what end up is just a bunch of garbage.

    If you build a trans-pacific cabel but do not link it to each family because “it is too easy and every one knows how to do it”, it is still garbage.

  32. David Mackey

    October 21st, 2006 at 9:26 pm

    Its sweet that Paint.Net is open source as it allows specialized applications to implement many of these features in specialized software. I look forward to getting my hands on 3.0 when the final release is made.

  33. Pierre

    October 21st, 2006 at 10:52 pm

    I like your picture of Seattle in this page … is it available somewhere ?
    (my email address is pierre(dot)seattle(@)ouvaton(dot)org if you find the time to send it to me)
    I looked for it in your album in flickr but didn’t find it … but I found other beautiful pictures of Seattle that you may want to check here : http://seattlefrancophone.info/viewtopic.php?t=203 …

  34. chris cornell

    October 21st, 2006 at 11:18 pm

    Hmm, i clicked on Update on my 2.x version and it didn’t detect the new version. Am I required to download the whole new 3.0 version?

  35. ESTAN

    October 22nd, 2006 at 1:20 am

    the 3.0 is still in the alpha phase, so a manual download is required. It will uninstall the previous installed version.

  36. James

    October 22nd, 2006 at 2:12 am

    This may be the slowest application I’ve ever used. I actually fell asleep waiting for it to load. That’s .NET for you I suppose. If he’d written it in C++, Delphi or VB6 then it may actually have been usable.

  37. ESTAN

    October 22nd, 2006 at 4:04 am

    hehe lol, nice, maybe you should rewrite it in C++ it.

  38. Judi Sohn

    October 22nd, 2006 at 6:29 am

    I use Photoshop on my Mac, but when I need something to do a quick edit on the PC, I’ve found the editor that comes with SnagIt (screen capture application) to more than suffice. No layering, compositing, etc. But some basic color correction/resizing/manipulation and export/import to a variety of formats. That’s usually all I need. It’s not free, but it’s cheap enough.

  39. Komarik

    October 22nd, 2006 at 10:07 am

    Its a nice little program. Loads really fast. But it lacks a lot of features that I;ve got used to in Photoshop. Layers feature is horrible. But you cant complain when it’s free ;)

  40. jack

    October 22nd, 2006 at 1:52 pm

    There’s a real software gem called photofiltre..

    http://www.photofiltre.com/

    Though it’s intented called an ‘image retouching tool’, it has many masques , filters and brushes that are in the photoshop realm. Great plugins also.

    Free too.

  41. Lars Fischer

    October 22nd, 2006 at 2:25 pm

    Ever heard of the Gimp?

  42. anada

    October 22nd, 2006 at 6:06 pm

    i gave it up when requiring Microsoft .NET Framework to run it.

  43. Dustin

    October 23rd, 2006 at 11:17 am

    Paint.net and GIMP both seem to be missing my favorite PS tool - SLICE!

  44. Gautam

    October 24th, 2006 at 5:37 am

    Photoshop is overkill just for Web graphics. You would rather want to compare Paint.NET to ImageReady or Fireworks, which still beat it hands down in terms of features. Can’t argue with the price though.

    If you want something that replaces Photoshop on the cheap and does a decent job of it, I suggest you look closely at Pixel.

    http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12

    It’s currently beta, free to try out and can be pre-ordered for $32. It works on every OS you know of and appears to have ripped off Photoshop completely in terms of user interface and features.

    Has potential though, and the free beta is definitely worth checking out.

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