Paint.NET 5.1.8 – Free Image Editor

Paint.NET is a free image editing and photo manipulation software for Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface, supports layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and various valuable and powerful tools.

Paint.NET started development as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft. Originally intended as a free replacement for the MS Paint software, it has become a powerful yet simple photo and image editing tool.

An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

Compare Paint-NET to other digital photo editing software packages, such as Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor, and GIMP.

Paint.NET can enhance and clean up your photographs. For example, using the Clone Stamp tool, you can carefully remove the power lines crisscrossed in front of the Space Needle. Every feature and user interface element is immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance.

Features:

Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface

Paint.NET’s user-friendly interface is designed to be intuitive and easy to learn, ensuring a seamless experience for all users. Its tabbed document interface simplifies managing multiple images by displaying live thumbnails instead of text descriptions, enabling fast and effortless navigation.

Performance: It’s fast.

Paint.NET is optimized for speed, offering near-instant startup times and utilizing modern multicore CPUs, GPUs, and NVMe SSDs for top-tier performance. Whether on a lightweight laptop or a high-end desktop, it launches instantly, responds smoothly, and maximizes hardware efficiency.

Layers

Layers, often exclusive to high-end or complex professional software, are essential for advanced image composition. Imagine them as a stack of transparent slides that, when layered together, form a single, unified image.

Pen and Drawing Tablet Support

Paint.NET 5.0 now supports pressure sensitivity for compatible pens and drawing tablets from Wacom, UGEE, Microsoft, and others. This highly requested feature enables smooth, natural brush strokes for professional-quality artwork.

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). You can add support for more file types 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!

Automatically Updated

Enjoy free updates with new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. The Microsoft Store version updates seamlessly in the background when the app is idle, while the classic version allows you to install updates in just two clicks after your session.

Special Effects

Paint.NET provides various special effects to enhance and refine your images, including blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise reduction, and embossing. One of the standout features is the 3D Rotate/Zoom effect, which simplifies adding perspective and tilt to create polished, professional-looking edits.

Adjustment tools let you fine-tune an image’s brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, curves, and levels. Convert photos to black and white or apply a sepia tone to achieve a classic, professional look that stands out.

Powerful Tools

Paint.NET offers intuitive tools for drawing shapes, including a user-friendly curve tool for creating splines and Bezier curves. The Gradient tool is widely regarded as a significant improvement over similar tools in other software. Its selection-handling features are powerful yet simple to master, accommodating both beginners and advanced users. Additional tools include the Magic Wand for color-based selections, the Clone Stamp for modifying image sections, a text editor, a zoom tool, a Recolor tool, and an extensible Shapes tool, making it a versatile option for image editing.