A few posts back, I talked about a great, free program called PhotoPlus from Serif Software. It’s a photo editing package with much of the power and features of Photoshop (including access to Photoshop plugins) without the cost. When putting together this post, I tried out pretty much every free image editing program out there, including what was my runner-up, Paint.NET. Created by a team of college students as a replacement for the Paint program in Windows, Paint.NET is a fantastic example of clever programming and good ideas at work. (Keep reading for the complete review!)

What’s Good

First off, like PhotoPlus, Paint.NET is “free, as in beer” but it’s also “free, as in speech,” which PhotoPlus is not. That means you’re free to use the program any way you’d like to, pass it on to friends, take the source code and add features, or anything you want. I’m sure most of you are thinking, “Oh… great… nerd.” That’s OK - I’m used to it.

As far as actual functionality goes, Paint.NET has most of the features people have come to expect, including layers (with blending modes and opacity), effects (but not Photoshop compatibility), good text manipulation (why is text so bad in every free program?), and the ability to undo changes easily. It’s got a great Clone (rubber stamp) tool and nifty spline based line tools (that means you can create cool curvy lines very easily). It has a few cool tricks too, like transparent palettes so that as you change settings for filters and such, you can see how the filter affects the photo underneath the palette. Cool!

What Still Needs Work

All of these features made Paint.NET a real contender while I was searching for a great free image editing package. Unfortunately Paint.NET has some niggling issues that dropped it below PhotoPlus. First off, effect rendering was strangely slow. I’m not sure why, but every filter, no matter how simple, took a number of seconds to render, even though the full-screen preview was already in place. I’m not sure what’s going on there, but when working with an image, I tend to want my effects, especially blurs, to show up as quickly as possible.

Something that drove me crazy was the lack of a color palette with standard color swatches. I have no idea why this feature isn’t included (even the original Paint included it), but it’s the sort of issue that drives me crazy when I’m trying to be consistent with the colors I’m using.

Finally, something I noticed when playing with an image for a while was that program performance tanked as I made changes. Performance hits also occur when areas of an image are selected. Everything slows down, from menus to palette animations. I’m not sure if this is a problem with the program or my system, but it wasn’t encouraging.

Of course, none of this matters if you’re a Mac or Linux user, since it’s a Windows only program.

Let’s Wait and See

I honestly see Paint.NET becoming one of the best, free photo editing applications available in the year or so. It’s just not there yet. As more people jump in with the project and it gains traction, it can only get better. I’m excited to see how it morphs from a cool college project into a full-featured Photoshop killer. Until then, feel free to grab a copy of PhotoPlus and jump into some advanced photo editing. You’ll be glad you did.