Paint.NET - http://www.getpaint.net/

Overview

Paint.NET is an open source project – it is available under the MIT licence of the Open Source Initiative – I’m not entirely sure what that means, and I started reading to find out but then I got bored. It’s something like the GNU licence but different.

I’m guessing it’s something to do with being able to view the source code, but not being allowed to do anything with it unless it is sanctioned by the authors. Who knows? Either way – It is free, and anyone can DL the source code. This is interesting in that in my personal blog/website here, I mention the organizational structure that the GIMP development appeared to be lacking, and use Paint.NET as an example to be followed. I was unaware at the time that it was an open source project at all (as you can tell from the post), but I can only conclude that the MIT licence system WORKS. It was originally started by micro$oft, as a university project, and is now maintained by the alumni that created it.

Cutting to the chase, Paint.NET is designed to upgrade and replace the pitiful Microsoft Paint with a far more capable soldier; It looks and feels very much like photoshop, with a few Elements-esque touches. I am really going to put it through it’s paces in this review; Testing its every function as best as possible.

My testing regime is going to fall into four main categories of functionality, relating to the software’s aptitude for any of these particular tasks.

Core functionality

• 1) Large Image management/scanning/printing
• 2) Photographical capability
• 3) Web Design
• 4) Fun Stuff!

Interface:

The interface that greets you when you run the software is nothing if not familiar. Users of photoshop and Paint will feel instantly at home – and why fix what ain’t broke? The floating tool bar is a simplified version of Photoshops bar, there are no “duplicated” button functions, hold and click selection or any of that jazzy stuff, after all this is not Photoshop, and was never intended to be.

The menu’s are basically arranged the same as photoshop, just with less functions. In fact to call it Photoshop’s, simpler, more intuitive cousin would be pretty close to the mark. If you find Photoshop daunting, but Microsoft Paint is not good enough – then this is most definitely worth a look.

The floating windows consist of a “color” picker, missing a “u” as usual, the aforementioned tool bar, a history window and a layers window – and that is your lot. Nothing more is considered necessary, although I can imagine the lack of a navigation tool will frustrate when doing work at high zoom levels.

As per Photoshop standards , you get a nice easy access setting bar for brush width and other goodies at the top, underneath the menu, but also the addition of an win98 style mini icon bar, with quick access to load save, cut, print shortcut functions; no doubt a welcome addition for many people. A clutter for photoshop fans, most likely however. Missing from this area are the some of the advanced photoshop features such as auto select by layer, but notably there are a reasonable number of the more advanced features such as logical selection functions (xor,union etc.), which should be powerful enough for most simple masking jobs.

There are no tabs, at present on any of the floating windows; this lends clarity to the interface, for the beginner, and I applaud them for it. If tabs were added in the future, I would urge the authors to have two “interface options”, the equivalent of “elements” and “photoshop”, so that even if further features were added, one could disable them from being shown, to keep the interface as simple and clean as it is now.

A very handy feature which is available is the image list window – if you have lots of images open, you can drop down a little thumbnail of each one, to select between them; borrowing from the simplicity of Elements and a plethora of other easy to use paint equivalents.

So, moving on now, I can conclude that the interface is simple, and entirely fit for purpose. My only gripe is that there are no rollover descriptions for the toolbars, so I’m having trouble determining what to call each part of the screen. Hardly a big issue.

Core Functionality

As I expected, the software is limited – as of this review, there is only very simple layer masking capability. There is a translucency on each layer (excluding the background), but the mask functionality does not appear as a black and white layer a-la Photoshop. This is going to limit photographic and web/graphic design functionality considerably; The use of a mask function can be very difficult, without sufficient visual feedback; Representing it as a seperate page in black and white would certainly be high on my wishlist.

A truly excellent feature is that any open toolbar which is obscuring the canvas, will fade to a medium transparent as you apply a tool to the canvas, enabling you to “see” behind the window without dragging it around all the time like you do in photoshop.

Brushes are available for basic patterns, but the brush transparency (which is chosen by amending the translucency of the colour in your palette), is a bit hit and miss. It works great but if you hold your mouse button down for a fraction of a second too long, it becomes 100% opaque; the tools are not lent to click and drag brush painting, more point-and-spot functionality. The colour can be a translucent gradient, but this can only be a linear top to bottom gradient. This function would have been far more useful if it was centre-radial instead. As it is I can’t really think of much use for it, except drawing a faded line.

Anti-aliasing can be enabled and disabled, great for web design (and some graphic design), when this kind of control is needed.

• 1) Opening and handling large images

Opening a large image (A1 full colour 200 dpi scan – 32 megapixels) on a PC with 2 gigs of RAM was faultless, and very quick. Opening the same image on a PC with only 256MB of RAM resulted in an out of memory error. The lack of scratch disks required Windows to control virtual memory for it, and as we all know, windows isn’t very good at that, so ultimately it failed. Graduating to an A0 300dpi 24bit image, @ 80 megapixels, we hit the limit for the 2gig machine, and received an error that the image was too large as well.

Acquiring from a TWAIN scanner initially worked OK, however the A0 300dpi 24bit 80 megapixel colour scan I took was too big for it to handle. The software also failed to load the same sized image on the 2gig PC. We can therefore assume a practical 32 megapixel image limit, which is more than satisfactory on most pcs, but you must scale the memory requirements with the operational requirements.

• 2) Photographic capability

Working on the 32 megapixel image with 2 gigs of ram in windows XP, this software handled everything with finesse. It was fast, and effective, and you could run any of the functions very quickly. Particularly impressive was the curves interface, which made Photoshop’s feel clunky and outdated, while being equally effective.

Other interesting functions include an attractive Sepia function, noise reduction, which was pretty quick and highly effective (especially in noisy areas on dark patches of digital photos); Completing the package were Red eye removal, Portrait soften (for that glam soft focus finish), a sharpen feature, and a glow function that saturates + soft focusses an image making it look a little mystical. All of this comes as a real time preview while you are adjusting the sliders to get the perfect effect. For 90% of common photo processing requirements, Paint.NET delivers the goods quickly easily and at high quality.

I couldn’t recommend it for HDR work, as the masking feature was somewhat lacking, and the brush feature wasn’t up to scratch for it, for reasons already entered into; This would be a stumbling block even if the currently missing 32bit colour functionality was added in the future. Removal and replacement of sky and other areas of your photos are all possible, if a little less powerful than full price alternatives.

All in all, with bicubic resizing to top it all off, for the amateur photographer with a compact camera, this package has all the features you will need, and probably then some; A large proportion of the DSLR amateur market will also be served very well indeed. Some more processing hungry Digital SLR owners may be left wanting.

• 3) Web / Graphic Design Work

One word. Basic. That’s what you’re getting, for free, and that’s what your finish will look like. Without Photoshop’s (or illustrator’s) wonderful layer effects, and masking capabilities, both web and graphic design potential is, for this day and age, rather limited.

The text function does not create a new layer that can be changed, moved or modified, it simply plants your text on the editing layer, never to be changed again. To get effects such as outer glow, will require a complex sequence of work-around copy and pastes from various windows, and layers must be created manually for every bit of text, all to do what Photoshop can do in a moment, with one mouse click.

Rudimentary brush tools, and masking limits graphic design capabilities, although you do see the photoshop-esque layer blending modes, and a layer based opacity option, allowing some basic effects to take place. Playing with the transparency layer can only be described as clunky.

You can apply gradients in shapes, and there is a tick box to change over to applying a gradient to the transparency layer (effectively masking under a different name), and you can get some reasonable effects, its just not….quite….there yet, when held up against the kind of competitor you would expect a web or graphic designer to be using. It is 70% of the way there however.

• 4) Fun Stuff!!!

As a replacement for Paint, one would expect the software to be great fun for the kids, and this software has it in spades. The tools are simple, and easy to use, with great effects like distortions of many types, blurs, artistic effects like ink sketch and other great fun tools (which we all enjoy playing with once in a while); All of which gives you a live preview on your image before you click OK.

You can draw with the paintbrush in a million colours then mess it all a about, then make it look like a painting. What more could they want??? Except splodgy brushes…..splodgy brushes would be good.

Plugins

Until now I have only discussed Paint.Net’s out of the box functionality. However, there are a plethora of plugins available, numbering hundreds. This may add outer glow functions, bevel and emboss features, graphic design functionality, all of the things I have said Paint.NET can’t do, it probably can, and probably does, with the correct plugin.

If the authors were to hold a competition for the best plugins for inclusion as standard, and include them in the next release, then they would truly have a remarkable piece of software, which could hold its head high in the face of the LINUX born GIMP, its only open source competition. But most of Paint.NET’s users are unlikely to browse hundreds of pages of plugins to find the one they want. Standard inclusion of missing features available as plugins would be the cherry, on the cup cake of perfection-in-class.

Go here to see a list of available plugins.

Conclusion

This review is too brief to cover the true potential of Paint.net’s future. With more work, and more plugins, it could become a real contender, dashing the GIMP into the rocks, with its wave of simplicity, and useability.

If you are into simple features, or even reasonably advanced photo manipulation – this is most definitely the package for you, but steer clear of it for design work for the time being, or unless you are willing to wade through an avalanche plugins of varying quality. That aside - watch this space…I have a feeling Paint.NET is going nuclear in the next year or two.

written by Pensive