Roadmap and Change Log
paint.net 5.0.13 - released on March 5th, 2024
This is a small update that fixes a handful of bugs, and updates both the AvifFileType and WebPFileType bundled plugins to include support for loading the first frame of an animation (similar to how GIF works).
paint.net 5.0.12 - released on December 1st, 2023
This is a small update that fixes a handful of bugs, and updates both the AvifFileType and WebPFileType bundled plugins to include support for loading the first frame of an animation (similar to how GIF works).
paint.net 5.0.11 - released on October 11th, 2023
This update has a handful of important bugfixes, and an updated DdsFileTypePlus plugin.
paint.net 5.0.10 - released on October 1st, 2023
This update has a handful of small improvements and bugfixes, and many improvements and fixes for GPU effect plugin development.
paint.net 5.0.9 - released on August 8th, 2023
This is a small update that fixes a few important bugs.
paint.net 5.0.8 - released on August 1st, 2023
This update improves the Colors window UI and fixes some important bugs.
paint.net 5.0.7 - released on June 24th, 2023
This is a small update with some quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes.
paint.net 5.0.6 - released on May 24th, 2023
This is a small update that improves the sharpness of the canvas, and fixes a few other small issues.
paint.net 5.0.5 - released on May 20th, 2023
This update is a hotfix for 5.0.4 that fixes loading images that have multiple frames (GIF or TIFF).
paint.net 5.0.4 - released on May 19th, 2023
This update includes another revamp of Image->Resize's resampling modes, gamma correction for key parts of the app, higher quality canvas rendering, and a host of other miscellaneous fixes and improvements. In addition, GPU-based effect plugins now default to rendering inlineargamma space (existing plugins are not affected, however!) and have better access to color management information.
paint.net 5.0.3 - released on March 29th, 2023
This update adds the ability to draw shapes from the center, the ability to resize shapes and selections uniformly (from the center), as well as the usual handful of bug fixes.
paint.net 5.0.2 - released on February 19th, 2023
This is a small update with some performance improvements, bug fixes, and updates to the bundled plugins.
paint.net 5.0.1 - released on January 21st, 2023
This is a small update with a few important bug fixes, updates to the bundled plugins, and a new toolbar button to enable/disable pressure sensitivity.
paint.net 5.0 - released on January 10th, 2023
This is a major update with new features and improvements such as pressure sensitivity for pens and drawing tablets, greatly expanded use of the GPU for effects, adjustments, and tools, and a brand new effect plugin system that includes support for GPU rendering with Direct2D. For a more detailed description ofthe new features and changes, check out the forum post for this release.
paint.net 4.3.12 - released on August 20th, 2022
This is a small update that fixes a few bugs and updates the bundled AVIF and WebP file type plugins.
paint.net 4.3.11 - released on May 24th, 2022
This is a small update that enables dark themed title bars ("immersive dark mode"), and updates the built-in DDS and WebP plugins.
paint.net 4.3.10 - released on March 9th, 2022
This is a hotfix to address an error with Image->Resize when used with certain image sizes.
paint.net 4.3.9 - released on March 8th, 2022
This is a servicing release that fixes a handful of bugs, and updates the bundled AvifFileType plugin.
paint.net 4.3.8 - released on February 16th, 2022
This update includes a new Layers -> Toggle Layer Visibility (keyboard shortcut: Ctrl + comma) command, some performance improvements, bug fixes, and a new IndirectUI control for plugins (FolderChooser).
paint.net 4.3.7 - released on January 4th, 2022
This is a hotfix for a myriad of major issues when "Translucent windows" is disabled. This was caused by a bug introduced in .NET 6.0.1.
paint.net 4.3.6 - released on January 3rd, 2022
This is a hotfix for a crash in the box filter rendering kernel, which is used to generate mip-maps for the canvas when zoomed out.
paint.net 4.3.5 - released on January 3rd, 2022
This update includes several important bug fixes, and greatly improves performance.
paint.net 4.3.4 - released on December 3rd, 2021
This update fixes a few legacy plugins (some of which were crashing), a bug in the Color Picker tool, and some minor installation issues.
paint.net 4.3.3 - released on November 21st, 2021
This version has been migrated from .NET 5 to .NET 6, includes 3 new translations, Dark Theme improvements on Windows 10+, and many bug fixes.
paint.net 4.3.2 - released on October 4th, 2021
This is a hotfix for the recently released version 4.3 update.
paint.net 4.3.1 - released on September 27th, 2021
This is a hotfix for the recently released version 4.3 update.
paint.net 4.3 - released on September 22nd, 2021
This version has been migrated from .NET Framework to .NET 5, includes major performance optimizations across the entire app, and adds native support for ARM64 devices such as the Microsoft Surface Pro X.
paint.net 4.2.16 - released on April 21st, 2021
This updates fixes and optimizes palette generation when saving at 8-bit depth or less, and also fixes any remaining issues with using "Auto-detect" for bit-depth. A new effect, Quantize (in the Effects -> Color menu), has been added, some bugs have been fixed, and bundled file type plugins have been updated.
paint.net 4.2.15 - released on January 24th, 2021
This is a small update that improves some quality-of-life issues, and fixes some important crashes due to mishandling of some non-fatal DirectX errors.
paint.net 4.2.14 - released on October 23rd, 2020
This updates adds full support for AV1 (*.avif) images, includes many optimizations to improve performance, CPU usage, and memory usage, and also has several important bug fixes.
paint.net 4.2.13 - released on August 4th, 2020
This update adds some additional low-bit-depth choices to several file types (PNG, BMP, TIFF), and fixes some bugs.
paint.net 4.2.12 - released on May 29th, 2020
This is a hotfix for a few important issues that have come to light with the 4.2.11 release.
paint.net 4.2.11 - released on May 20th, 2020
This update adds XMP metadata support, 3 new translations, some UI improvements, and several bug fixes.
paint.net 4.2.10 - released on February 13rd, 2020
This small update fixes a few important bugs, most notably with installations that directly use the MSI file for deployment (e.g. AD/GPO).
paint.net 4.2.9 - released on January 31st, 2020
This updates improves performance and significantly reduces memory usage, adds two new translations, and fixes a number of small issues.
paint.net 4.2.8 - released on December 3rd, 2019
This small update fixes a few pressing bugs, particularly for touch and pen input.
paint.net 4.2.7 - released on November 25th, 2019
This hotfix addresses a crash at startup that was happening on some systems.
paint.net 4.2.6 - released on November 21st, 2019
This update is focusing on some important fixes and performance improvements, and getting some infrastructure ready for future releases so that pens and tablets with pressure sensitivity can be fully supported (planned for v4.3).
paint.net 4.2.5 - released on October 1st, 2019
This update adds WebP (*.webp) support and fixes a few important bugs.
paint.net 4.2.4 - released on September 20th, 2019
This hotfix addresses some crashes and hangs that were happening when saving DDS images in certain formats.
paint.net 4.2.3 - released on September 19th, 2019
This hotfix addresses an issue that was preventing DDS images from working on some systems.
paint.net 4.2.2 - released on September 18th, 2019
This update adds AV1 (*.avif) loading support, significantly improves DirectDraw Surface (DDS) support, adds 4-bit saving for PNG, BMP, and TIFF, fixes several bugs, and optimizes startup time.
paint.net 4.2.1 - released on August 7th, 2019
This update addes JPEG XR file type support and fixes several important issues and crashes.
paint.net 4.2 - released on July 13th, 2019
This is a big update that focus on adding HEIC file format support, fixing performance with very large images, and upgrading and modernizing the functionality of many existing file types (JPEG, PNG, BMP, GIF, and TIFF). Many other quality of life issues have also been addressed or fixed.
paint.net 4.1.6 - released on March 18th, 2019
This update focuses on refreshing the app's theming with new high-res icons and improved support for high-DPI configurations. Some new menu commands have been added, such as File -> Save All, and a Turkish translation has been added.
paint.net 4.1.5 - released on December 4th, 2018
This update focuses on improving performance (sometimes significantly) and fixing important bugs.
paint.net 4.1.4 - released on November 4th, 2018
This is a small update that fixes some important bugs and substantially improves plugin loading performance.
paint.net 4.1.3 - released on October 24th, 2018
This is a hotfix that addresses a crash which was affecting systems with pre-DirectX 10 GPUs.
paint.net 4.1.2 - released on October 22nd, 2018
This is a small update that improves startup performance, fixes some bugs, and addresses two security vulnerabilities. Administrators who manage deployments of Paint.NET are urged to begin updating immediately. Details of CVE-2018-18446 and CVE-2018-18447 are pending publication.
paint.net 4.1.1 - released on September 11th, 2018
This is a hotfix that fixes a few small bugs, reinstates some keyboard shortcuts, and adds 2 new languages.
paint.net 4.1 - released on September 5th, 2018
This update converts some effects to use the GPU for rendering, resulting in huge performance gains. Copy/Paste can now be performed on selections,Bicubic resampling is now available for the Move Selected Pixels tool, and there are lots of little quality-of-life improvements and general bug fixes.
- Improved: Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, and Radial Blur now render using the GPU and are significantly faster
- Changed: The following effects are now rendered using the GPU: Edge Detect, Pixelate, and Relief
- Changed: The following adjustments are now rendered using the GPU: Black & White, Invert Colors
- New Effect: Distort -> Morphology (uses the GPU)
- New Effect: Render -> Turbulence (uses the GPU)
- New: Bicubic resampling is now supported for the Move Selected Pixels tool. A CPU with 6 or more cores is highly recommended if you want to make it the default mode from within Settings -> Tools.
- New: Edit -> Copy Selection. This will copy the current selection's geometry to the clipboard as JSON text.
- New: Edit -> Paste Selection. This will apply the selection from the clipboard to the current selection. All 5 selection combine modes are supported.
- Changed: The Text tool now uses Points for font size measurement. You can also elect to use the old font size metric, "Fixed (96 DPI)" via the dropdown to the right of the font size.
- Fixed: The Text tool's recentering algorithm when typing reaches the edge of the viewport should be better
- New: Added +/- buttons to the Tolerance and Hardness sliders.
- Changed: Increased max zoom level to 6400%
- New: The mouse wheel may now be used to scroll a long menu, such as when a lot of effects are installed (thanks @toe_head2001!)
- Changed: For Windows 7 SP1 users, the Platform Update from 2013 is now required (it contains Direct2D v1.1)
- Fixed: The "Finish" button wasn't working if it was in an overflow container (thanks @toe_head2001!)
- Fixed: Opening certain large images and then zooming with the mouse wheel would sometimes result in the scroll position being completely wrong
- Changed: Hiding a layer no longer auto-selects the nearest visible layer. You can re-enable this in Settings, although this setting may be removed in a future version.
- New: For the Windows Store release, the paintdotnet: protocol can now be used to launch the app so that you can specify command-line parameters. For example, you can go to Start -> Run and type inpaintdotnet:"path to file1.png" path_to_file_2.png then both images will be opened (even if Paint.NET is already open)
- New: Added Heptagon (7-sided polygon) and Octagon (8-sided polygon) shapes
- Fixed the high-DPI inset-text scaling for the Shape selector (e.g. Pentagon with an inset "5")
- New: Palettes are now also loaded from Documents/paint.net App Files/Palettes. This folder name is not localized so that installation scripts may easily make use of it
- Fixed: View -> Pixel Grid will now correctly adjust to dynamic changes in the theme (light vs. dark)
- Fixed: The background color for the Tolerance slider has been corrected for non-dark themes
- Changed: Removed shortcut keys for all built-in Adjustments except for Invert Colors (Ctrl+Shift+I). This is being done to free up shortcut keys for other functionality.
- New: Added a shortcut key to trigger a full .NET garbage collection: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+` (tick/tilde). This should only ever be needed for troubleshooting purposes.
- New: Battery Saver Mode in Windows 10 is now respected, whether enabled manually or due to low battery. UI animations will be disabled.
- New: Long file paths (>MAX_PATH) are now supported on Windows 10, as long as the group policy setting is enabled ("Enable Win32 long paths")
- New for plugin developers: The IndirectUI Color Wheel control now supports an alpha slider. To use this, set the range (min/max values) of the Int32PropertyControl to [Int32.MinValue, Int32.MaxValue] (thanks @BoltBait!)
- New for plugin developers: there is a new FileChooser property control type for string properties (thanks @toe_head2001!)
- New for plugin developers: there is a new BinaryPixelOp.Apply(Surface, Surface, Surface, Rectangle) method overload (thanks @BoltBait!)
- Changed: The IndirectUI text control now has a vertical scroll bar when multiline mode is enabled (thanks @toe_head2001!)
- Changed: Visual C++ and OpenMP runtimes are now only loaded from the "app local" copy (never from the system directory). This fixes a number of headaches, and also works around a compatibility issue with the Surface Go
- Fixed: Crash when drag-and-dropping images onto Paint.NET when a tool was active but with uncommitted changes
- Fixed a very old and nasty crash, "InvalidOperationException: ScratchSurface already borrowed"
paint.net 4.0.21 - released on January 14th, 2018
This hotfix corrects a bug that was introduced when pasting images that are larger than the canvas.
- Fixed a bug where a pasted image would be clipped after choosing "Keep canvas size"
paint.net 4.0.20 - released on January 9th, 2018
This update introduces a new Dark Theme, greatly improves High DPI support, adds Explorer thumbnails for TGA and DDS image types, and fixes a lot of small bugs.
- New:Dark Theme support
- New: .NET Framework 4.7 is now required, and will be automatically installed if needed
- New: Explorer thumbnails are now supported for TGA and DDS file types
- Fixed and Improved: High-DPI support throughout the application
- Fixed: Color Picker tool was not always honoring the "Switch to previous tool" setting
- Fixed the arrow keys not working properly until the second shape (or line/curve) was drawn. Reported here: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/112145-moving-points-in-lines-not-working-how-its-supposed-to/
- Fixed the zoom slider being "wiggly" while being dragged around
- Fixed a glitch with the mouse cursor (resize handle) at the lower-left corner of the main window
- Fixed a crash in the Shape tool renderer (BadNumberException via ID2D1Geometry::GetWidenedBounds)
- Fixed a hang in the Frosted Glass effect that was reported here: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/112005-frosted-glass-hangs-indefinitely-on-a-1x1-pixel-image/
- Fixed a hang in the Levels adjustment that was reported here: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/111629-hang-bug-in-a-levels-tool/
- Fixed a rendering issue in the Move Selected Pixels tool that was reported here: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/112187-selections-out-of-bounds-use-the-out-of-bounds-pixels-when-resizing/
- Fixed: Canvas now processes WM_MOUSEHWHEEL, which was preventing some horizontal mouse wheels and trackpad swipe gestures from working properly
- Fixed: Plugins will no longer completely crash the app on Windows 10 S (note, however, that plugins other than custom Shapes do not work on Windows 10 S)
- Fixed: a data loss bug when saving very large images (greater than 4GB). Reported here: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/111823-large-image-save-bug/
paint.net 4.0.19 - released on October 2nd, 2017
This is a hotfix that fixes a startup crash, and fixes Explorer thumbnails.
- Fixed missing thumbnails in Explorer for non-.PDN images (e.g. .PNG, .JPG), if Paint.NET was configured to open these types by default
- Fixed a crash at startup that affected some people with a redirected Documents folder (e.g. network share)
paint.net 4.0.18 - released on September 29th, 2017
This update improves performance and is the first version to be made available on the Windows Store.
- Improved: Startup performance has been improved by about 25%
- New: Now available on the Windows Store! https://www.microsoft.com/store/apps/9NBHCS1LX4R0
- Improved: Plugins can now be installed per-user into "Documents\paint.net App Files" into folders named Effects, FileTypes, and Shapes. This is required for using plugins with the Store release. To disable this (e.g. for administrators), set the "Plugins/AllowLoadingPluginsFromUserLocations" key to "false" (HKLM\Software\paint.net).
- Improved: When using Portable Mode, custom palette files are stored next to the EXE instead of in Documents
- Fixed: There was a crash on some systems that may have prevented the app from starting up (MissingMethodException for "System.GC.Collect")
paint.net 4.0.17 - released on July 20th, 2017
This update improves performance and fixes a lot of small issues.
- Added: "Fluid mouse input" option in Settings -> UI -> Troubleshooting. If you see major glitches while drawing, try disabling this.
- Improved: Default brush size, font size, and corner radius size now scales with major DPI scaling levels (brush size of 2 at 100% scaling, brush size of 4 at 200% scaling, etc)
- Improved: Default image size now scales with major DPI scaling levels (800x600 at 100%, 1600x1200 at 200%, etc.)
- Improved performance and drawing latency by removing explicit calls to System.GC.Collect() except when low memory conditions are encountered
- Improved performance by greatly reducing object allocation amplification by reducing the concurrency level when using ConcurrentDictionary, and by removing WeakReference allocations in favor of direct GCHandle usage
- Improved: Performance and battery usage by ensuring animations always run at the monitor's actual refresh rate
- Improved (reduced) CPU usage when moving the mouse around the canvas
- Removed: "Hold Ctrl to hide handle" from the Text tool because it was not useful and caused lots of confusion
- Fixed: Various high-DPI fixes, including horrible looking mouse cursors caused by a bug in the latest .NET WinForms update
- Fixed: Gradient tool no longer applies dithering "outside" of the gradient (in areas that should have a solid color)
- Fixed: Very slow performance opening the Effects menu when lots of plugins are installed after installing the Windows 10 Creators Update
- Fixed: When cropping and then performing an undo, the scroll position was totally wrong
- Fixed a rendering glitch in the Save Configuration dialog (it would "wiggle")
- Fixed: At certain brush sizes, the brush indicator on the canvas had a visual glitch in it due to a bug in Direct2D
- Fixed: Text tool buttons for Bold, Italics, Underline were not localized for a few languages
- Fixed a rare crash in the taskbar thumbnails
- Fixed: Drawing with an aliased brush and opaque color (alpha=255) sometimes resulted in non-opaque pixels due to a bug in Direct2D's ID2D1RenderTarget::FillOpacityMask
- Fixed: "Olden" effect should no longer cause crashes (it still has some rendering artifacts due to its multithreading problems, however)
paint.net 4.0.16 - released on April 16th, 2017
This is a hotfix for a crash that results from copying images from some web browsers.
- Fixed a crash or hang that sometimes happens when copying images from Internet Explorer, Edge, or Firefox, and then using File->New or Edit->Paste in paint.net.
paint.net 4.0.15 - released on April 10th, 2017
This is a hotfix that fixes a crash in the Magic Wand tool.
- Fixed a crash in the Magic Wand tool if it was used twice in a row with a selection mode other than Replace.
paint.net 4.0.14 - released on April 9th, 2017
This is a minor update that slightly improves the brush tools, and fixes a few weird issues that some people were seeing.
- Improved the performance of the Brush tools when antialiasing is enabled
- Improved the quality of the Brush tools when antialiasing is disabled
- Fixed: Edit->Paste wasn't working with some images that came from Firefox (as discussed at https://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/111012-not-enough-memory-to-paste-from-clipboard/ )
- Fixed: Improved the reliability of Image->Crop to Selection on 32-bit systems. Instead of crashing when it runs out of memory, it will just show an error.
- Fixed: Reduced crashes when loading UI images caused by an unreliable Windows component ("System.ArgumentException: Parameter is not valid")
- Fixed: When manually checking for updates in the Settings dialog and the user didn't actually have the necessary security privileges, a crash might result instead of an error dialog.
paint.net 4.0.13 - released on December 12th, 2016
This is a minor update that fixes a few high priority problems that many people were bumping into.
- Fixed "Missing api-ms-win-core-timezone-l1-1-0.dll" error that was being seen on some Windows 7 systems due to partial install or uninstall of Microsoft's Universal C Runtime
- Fixed the layout for the File->New, Image->Resize, and Image->Canvas Size dialogs in all known situations (various languages, DPI sizes, font configurations)
- Fixed: Old versions of PSD plugin couldn't load due to removal of PrivateThreadPool
- Fixed a crash when typing a negative number for a zoom level
paint.net 4.0.12 - released on September 12th, 2016
This is a hotfix that fixes some crashing on single CPU systems, and a rendering bug in the Rounded Rectangle shape.
- Fixed: The Rounded Rectangle shape's rendering was incorrect for some values of "Corner size"
- Fixed: Effects and Adjustments were crashing the app on systems with only 1 CPU core, or virtual machines configured for only 1 CPU
paint.net 4.0.11 - released on September 10th, 2016
This update adds the ability to configure the Rounded Rectangle shape's corner size. It also fixes issues with scrolling and panning, effect rendering performance, high DPI, and a rare system hang caused by WPF.
- New: The Rounded Rectangle shape's corner size ("radius") is now configurable
- New: Overscroll can now be disabled from within Settings
- Fixed: The Zoom tool was broken in 4.0.10
- Fixed: Auto scroll will no longer engage overscroll. This prevents the image from shooting off in all directions when drawing on it or when making a selection.
- Fixed: Panning with the middle mouse button would sometimes be "sticky", as reported at http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/110131-dragging-with-the-mouse-wheel-is-sticky/
- Fixed: Effect rendering performance had significantly regressed in 4.0.10, by as much as 50%, on Intel CPUs with HyperThreading. http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/110090-paintnet-run-significantly-slower-on-windows-10-compared-to-windows-7/
- Fixed: Selecting the entire image and then using Zoom to Selection or the Zoom Tool would align the image in an awkward manner
- Fixed: In rare cases, Settings -> Plugin Errors was hanging the whole system (bug in WPF?). This UI is now implemented in WinForms instead of WPF. http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/110002-plugin-error-screen-complete-pc-freezelockout/
- Fixed: Some more high-DPI issues, especially when using multiple monitors with mixed DPI, or when using Remote Desktop
paint.net 4.0.10 - released on July 8th, 2016
This update introduces overscroll, the ability to scroll the canvas past the image boundaries. It also includes a bigserving of other minor fixes.
- New: The canvas may now be scrolled past the edge of the image
- New: When holding the spacebar, you may scroll using the keyboard arrow keys (in addition to click-and-drag panning). Holding Ctrl will scroll at 10x the rate.
- New: You can now hold Ctrl+Shift while clicking on the floating window icons in order to reset their location and docking. Ctrl+Shift along with the appropriate hotkey (F5, F6, F7, F8) also does the trick.
- Improved: The rate of auto-scrolling, which triggers when the mouse is at the canvas edge and a button is being held down, has been improved and is based on time instead of frames
- Improved: Fixed Size selection drawing now defaults to 400x300 pixels instead of 4x3 inches
- Improved: Tooltips for Custom Shapes now include their file system location
- Improved: Edit->Invert Selection should perform much faster when used with unmodified selections from the Magic Wand tool
- Improved: When running within VMWare, "Hardware accelerated rendering" is disabled by default (Microsoft's WARP is faster than VMWare's D3D emulation)
- Fixed: Erratic brush/pencil drawing when running within VMWare (this is caused by a bug in Win32's GetMouseMovePointEx API, and is not actually limited to VMWare)
- Fixed: Color Picker tool could crash if used at the bottom of the image, as reported athttp://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/109248-paintnet-crashes-when-color-picker-off-screen-update/
- Fixed: There was a glitch in the Gradient tool's rendering when dx was equal to dy, as reported athttp://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/107380-gradient-bugs-in-direction-and-length/
- Fixed: The Layers window would sometimes auto-scroll the active layer to the bottom when performing certain operations, as reported athttp://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/32527-layers-auto-scrolling-when-adding-or-duplicating/
- Fixed some mouse cursor glitches when using panning using the spacebar
- Fixed many glitches and a few crashes in the image size dialogs (File->New, Image->Resize, Image->Canvas Size)
- Fixed a problem with inconsinstently skipped input when using the arrow keys to move tool handles, as reported athttp://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/108932-selected-area-moving-with-direction-keys-bug/
- Fixed: Custom Shapes did not always have the correct bounding box, and would have weird behavior as a result
- Fixed: Line/Curve handles were unusable for up to 500ms after adjusting properties in the toolbar
- Fixed some crashes and soft hangs in the Save Configuration dialog
- Fixed a blemish at the top of the main window when Windows is set to 200% DPI
- Fixed: There were some precision bugs with IndirectUI sliders that would cause them to get "stuck" at certain values (mostly affects effect plugins)
- Improved: IndirectUI's Angle Chooser control now supports the DecimalPlaces property (for plugins)
- Improved: IndirectUI's Slider controls now support all-negative ranges (e.g. [-200, -20])
paint.net 4.0.9 - released on January 5th, 2016
This is an update that fixes a few crashes and bugs that were found in 4.0.8.
- Fixed: Selection tools would sometimes crash
- Fixed: Line/Curve tool would draw nothing if the Shapes tool was configured for "Draw Filled Shape"
- Fixed: Thumbnails for .PDN files were not working on some systems
- Fixed: The "Finish" button in the toolbar would not update its enable/disable state when switching between images
paint.net 4.0.8 - released on December 30th, 2015
This is a hotfix that fixes a crashing bug with the Line/Curve tool in 4.0.7.
- Fixed: The Line/Curve tool was crashing when drawing vertical lines of particular lengths.
paint.net 4.0.7 - released on December 30th, 2015
This update improves performance in several key areas, fixes accent color support in Windows 10, and fixes many important bugs and crashes.
- Changed: .NET Framework 4.6 is now required, and will be installed if necessary
- New: Swedish translation
- Fixed: Title bar now uses the Windows 10 accent color
- Fixed: Floating windows were not remembering their locations on some non-English systems
- Improved: Performance of "committing" (finishing) is now up to 10x faster, which greatly improves responsivness for quick drawing operations
- Improved Shapes tool quality when drawn without antialiasing, with line styles, and at 1 pixel brush width
- Improved Shapes tool rendering performance on CPUs with many cores (8+)
- Improved: Installing a "complex" custom Shape no longer causes very long hangs at app startup
- Improved: Image->Resize is now much faster
- Fixed: Image->Resize would sometimes cause the main window to flicker or lose focus
- Fixed: Image->Resize would sometimes do nothing instead of resizing the image to a very large size
- Fixed: Labels on the vertical ruler were misleading because they were on the wrong side of the tick mark
- Improved the ruler's performance
- Fixed: Edit->Copy now works if the data copied to the clipboard is larger than 2GB
- Fixed: Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys now work in the main canvas area
- Fixed: Paint.NET will no longer incorrectly block Windows from restarting
- Fixed: Rotate/Zoom no longer crashes on very large images
- Improved: Reduced CPU/GPU and battery use when the app is not in the foreground
- Improved: Reduced CPU and battery use of the UI for the Move and Shapes tools
- Added: Custom Shapes XAML now supports cardinal splines via PolyCurveSegment (a new PathSegment type)
- Improved: Various performance improvements
- Fixed: Several rare or uncommon crashes
paint.net 4.0.6 - released on August 2nd, 2015
This update adds the ability to install custom shapes, is updated for Windows 10, and fixes some minor bugs and crashes.
- New: You can now create and install custom shapes for the Shapes tool.
- New: Updated to work better with Windows 10.
- New: Increased the maximum brush size to 2000.
- New: IndirectUI-based effect plugins can now provide help text, accessible via the question mark button.
- New: Effect plugins may now access the current palette via IPalettesService.
- Improved: Reduced memory usage of brush tools when using large brush sizes.
- Fixed: Holding shift to constrain the angle of the roll control (Layers -> Rotate/Zoom) wasn't working correctly.
- Fixed: Various shapes (hexagon, pentagon, triangle, etc.) are now symmetric when holding the shift key.
- Fixed: Multiple high-dpi blemishes in the main window and many dialog boxes (Settings, Save Configuration, all effect dialogs, etc.)
- Fixed: Various minor/rare crashes.
paint.net 4.0.5 - released on December 7th, 2014
This update fixes a few important bugs, some of which were introduced in 4.0.4.
- Fixed: Subtraction mode in the Magic Wand tool was generating B-A instead of A-B.
- Fixed: Crash when using Effect->Repeat.
- Fixed: Crash (AccessViolationException) on some systems when initializing the canvas for hardware accelerated rendering. It will still crash but then switch to software rendering for the next startup, which will then avoid the crashing.
- Fixed: Crash when clicking on the Shapes tool if you had run an old 4.0 beta/alpha and had also changed which shape is used at startup to be a line or curve.
- Fixed: Crash when using Settings -> Update -> Check Now due to incorrectly determining that UAC is not enabled.
paint.net 4.0.4 - released on November 29th, 2014
This update greatly improves performance in some key areas, fixes some important bugs, and reintroduces a feature that was omitted in the transition from 3.5 to 4.0.
- New: Added a 'Fill' property to the Paintbrush tool (regression from 3.5).
- Faster: Move Selected Pixels has been significantly optimized.
- Faster: Magic Wand Tool has been significantly optimized.
- Faster: Working with aliased selections ("aliased selection quality" in the toolbar) has been significantly optimized.
- Faster: Edit->Copy and Edit->Copy Merged are now up to 2x faster.
- Faster: Drawing when a selection is active; clipping performance is now improved.
- Fixed: The Text tool no longer produces terrible looking text when using Smooth rendering mode without antialiasing.
- Fixed: The Gear shape had a few glitches.
- Fixed: Using a Fill pattern with the Paint Bucket would sometimes produces misaligned or "corrupt looking" results.
- Fixed: The alignment of the menu buttons in the top-right was off by 2 pixels, causing them to look weird at high-DPI.
- Fixed: The zoom buttons in the status bar would not recognize clicks unless the main window was already in focus.
- Fixed: Some incorrect errors about requiring Windows 7 SP1 when launching the installer from something like an old version of WinZip.
- Fixed: Edit->Clear Selection and Edit->Cut were filling with transparent black (#00000000) instead of transparent white (#00FFFFFF). This caused some discrepancies compared to older versions of Paint.NET (regression from 3.5).
- Fixed: Pressing Ctrl+A when a drawing tool was active would sometimes incorrectly show a tinted selection.
- Fixed: Text in the title bar was not visible when using a 3rd party Aero theme with black titlebars.
paint.net 4.0.3 - released on July 22nd, 2014
This update fixes a few small bugs and improves performance.
- Further improved performance when working with images that have a lot of layers.
- Fixed some flickering in the Layers form.
- Fixed the Language selector in the Settings dialog.
- Fixed 2-finger touchpad and touch screen scrolling.
- Aero peek thumbnails now include the pixel grid if it's enabled.
- Fixed a crash in the thumbnail renderer that sometimes happened when switching between images.
- Ctrl+W no longer exits the application if zero images are open.
paint.net 4.0.2 - released on July 15th, 2014
This update fixes a few small bugs and feature regressions from 3.5.
- Fixed the gamma and contrast for text rendering on some systems where the wrong values were being used ("rainbow" text)
- Colors window now correctly lets you paste a hex color value that starts with a hash, e.g. #112233
- Gradient tool now lets you reverse a transparency gradient by clicking the right mouse button on one of the handles (regression from 3.5)
- Move Selected Pixels now lets you hold Control to leave a copy of the selected area behind on the initial move (regression from 3.5)
- Paint Bucket tool's hatch fill modes weren't working with the Overwrite blending mode (regression from 3.5)
- Fixed a keyboard tabbing issue in the Resize dialog (regression from 3.5)
- Fixed the language setting in the Settings dialog not always allowing you to set it to English if your system's default language is non-English
- Fixed a performance issue that caused images with many layers (50+) to take a VERY long time to open, close, or even switch away from (regression from 3.5)
- Fixed a rare crash at application exit
- Fixed an issue that prevented 4.0.1 from installing on top of 4.0 when using the MSI (e.g. AD/GPO network deployment)
- Fixed an issue that would sometimes cause the installer to take 30+ seconds to appear
paint.net 4.0.1 - released on July 12th, 2014
This update is focused on fixing some important crashes, bricks, and functionality issues, and also on a few key performance optimizations.
- Move Selected Pixels tool performance has been significantly optimized.
- Move Selected Pixels tool was always leaving transparent black behind instead of the secondary color with alpha removed.
- Brush tools with odd-sized brushes and no antialiasing were drawing at 1 size smaller.
- Fixed some apparent ‘lag’ in the brush tools due to an off-by-1 glitch in the stroke path calculation code.
- The brush tool preview circle no longer scales by the system DPI setting, which made it too big.
- Removed the momentary hourglass/wait cursor after drawing (e.g. pencil and brush tools).
- Optimized performance of the Shapes tool, especially for the Ellipse shape.
- Paint Bucket tool will now correctly treat the selection as a boundary contour.
- Zoom tool no longer crashes sometimes when pressing the right mouse button while already holding the left mouse button.
- The status bar now reports the correct selection location when it’s outside the image boundaries (e.g. negative values).
- Auto-scrolling on the edge of the window now works correctly and doesn’t require you to "jiggle the mouse" for each scroll update.
- Touch screens no longer scroll when swiping up/down with one finger.
- Improved the pixel grid’s contrast so it’s not overwhelmingly bright.
- The transparency "checkerboard" is now aligned to the top-left of the image, instead of the top-left of the canvas.
- The cursor position reported in the status bar was off-by-1 when the value was supposed to be negative.
- Some controls (e.g. units selection in the Image->Resize dialog) were not drawing focus rectangles when using the keyboard.
- Fixed a crash (OutOfMemoryException) when using a selection tool when hardware acceleration is disabled.
- Fixed a crash (TimeBeforeLastUpdateException) in the installer. This usually happens when running in a virtual machine, and only affects animations.
- Fixed a crash (BadImageFormatException) at startup. This indicates an installation error, and will be automatically repaired.
- Fixed various crashes caused by having the wrong (old) version of PaintDotNet.SystemLayer.Native.dll. This indicates an installation error, and will be automatically repaired.
- Improved performance when software rendering is used (e.g. when hardware accelerated rendering is disabled).
- All 7th generation Intel GPUs now default to hardware rendering. All older Intel GPUs default to software rendering.
- Fixed graphical artifacts (blackness, flickering, mouse trails) on certain GPUs (e.g. NVIDIA Optimus).
- NVIDIA ION graphics cards now default to software rendering due to crashes.
- Fixed an issue that was causing beta updates to be offered even if “Also check for pre-release (beta) versions of paint.net” was disabled in Settings
paint.net 4.0 - released on June 24th, 2014
This release improves performance and memory usage with a new rendering engine optimized for multicore CPUs and hardware acceleration (GPU). Most tools now support "fine grained history" and live adjustment of their properties, including the Magic Wand and Paint Bucket. Selections are now antialiased, which greatly improves their quality.
- System Requirements
- Windows 7 SP1 or newer is now required.
- .NET Framework 4.5 is now required, and will be installed if needed.
- A dual-core (or more!) processor is highly recommended.
- Hardware acceleration (GPU) via Direct2D is now supported.
- Please disable this in the Settings dialog if you experience visual artifacts.
- Performance
- A brand new, asynchronous, fully multithreaded rendering engine allows performance to scale very well with respect to the number of CPU cores whether you have 2, 4, 6, or even 16 of them.
- The responsiveness of the user interface has been greatly improved, especially when working with large images.
- Memory usage is lower.
- Improved battery life impact due to fixing the way the floating windows manage their transparency.
- Startup performance when many plugins are installed is improved, thanks to the Multicore JIT feature introduced in .NET 4.5.
- Selections
- Selections are now antialiased, which greatly improves the quality around the edges of selected content. You can turn this on and off at any time from the toolbar.
- Everything related to selections now has much higher performance and greatly reduced CPU usage, especially if hardware acceleration (GPU) is enabled.
- The selection outline is now rendered using the "dancing ants" animation, which greatly improves the contrast between it and the image itself.
- General
- The functionality previously provided by the Utilities, Window, and Help menus has been simplified, consolidated, and moved to the top-right corner of the main window.
- The image thumbnail list has been moved up 1 row so that it no longer intrudes into the current Tool's toolbar space. This means it will no longer "jump around" when you switch between tools. This also means that it is aligned to the top of the monitor when the main window is maximized, making it easier to click on images (Fitt's law).
- The image thumbnail list can now be reordered with drag-and-drop.
- A brand new Settings dialog makes it much easier to configure all the tool and toolbar defaults, among other things.
- The zoom slider and units selector have been moved from the toolbar to the bottom right corner of the window (into the status bar).
- Each image now shows up as its own taskbar item. This can be disabled in the Settings dialog with "Show image previews in the Windows taskbar."
- Layers can now be reordered with drag-and-drop.
- Ctrl+Click on the Move Layer Up/Down buttons will now move a layer to the top/bottom, respectively.
- Improved quality of Image -> Resize.
- Edit -> Copy Merged will copy all layers to the clipboard without having to use Image -> Flatten first.
- Copying to the clipboard now includes the "PNG" format, which allows transparency to survive from many popular applications (e.g. Office)
- You can now use the middle mouse button to scroll/pan the image at any time (same functionality as holding down the spacebar along with clicking and dragging the mouse).
- Shift+Backspace will now fill the selection with the secondary color (Backspace, the shortcut key for Edit -> Fill Selection, still fills with primary color as usual).
- paint.net now shows up in Windows' “Default Programs” control panel so you can configure its file type associations without reinstalling.
- EXIF rotation metadata is now applied when opening images (e.g. JPG taken with a rotated camera).
- Eleven (11) new languages, bringing the total to 21: Chinese (Simplified),Chinese (Traditional), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, and Spanish.
- Crash logs are now stored in %LOCALAPPDATA%\paint.net\CrashLogs (e.g. C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\paint.net\CrashLogs) instead of on the desktop.
- Effects
- New effect: Photo -> Vignette.
- Improved the quality of the Photo -> Red Eye Removal effect.
- Improved UI for Layers -> Rotate/Zoom.
- Effect plugins now show up with a jigsaw puzzle icon next to them in the menus. You can hover over the effect to see information about it, including the author and location of its DLL.
- Errors while loading effect plugins are now displayed in the Settings dialog.
- Tools
- Most Tools now support "fine-grained history." You may adjust the properties of what you've drawn (e.g. colors, toolbar settings) before committing to the layer (use the "Finish" button or press Enter), and each change is tracked in the history.
- Tools may now draw directly with a blending mode, configurable from the toolbar. All of the layer blending modes are supported, as well as “Overwrite.”
- Drawing tools (Pencil, Paintbrush, Eraser, Clone Stamp, Recolor) now have much smoother mouse input handling via GetMouseMovePointsEx.
- Brush tools (Paintbrush, Eraser, Clone Stamp, Recolor) now have soft brushes support via a “Hardness” setting in the toolbar.
- The Move tools (Move Selected Pixels, Move Selection) have a much better UI for scaling, moving, and (especially) rotation.
- The Move tools now support moving the rotation anchor, which changes the center of rotation.
- The new Shapes tool replaces the Rectangle, Rounded Rectangle, Ellipse, and Freeform shape tools. 27 shapes are currently available. You may move, resize, and rotate a shape, as well as reconfigure any other properties from the toolbar (color, outline size, etc.) before committing it to the layer.
- Color Picker has a configurable sampling radius, and can sample from either the current layer or the whole image.
- Gradient tool now supports a new Spiral gradient type and allows configuration of the repeat mode (none, repeat, wrapped).
- Gradient tool has improved rendering quality via dithering and antialiasing. You can control both of these with the standard antialiasing toggle in the toolbar.
- Magic Wand and Paint Bucket now allow live adjustment of Tolerance and the Origin (click location) after clicking (press Enter to commit/finish).
- Magic Wand and Paint Bucket can now sample from either the current layer or the whole image.
- Paint Bucket tool now supports anti-aliasing.
- Recolor tool can now use the color of the pixel where you click as the color to be replaced. Or, as usual, it can use the secondary color.
- Text tool now supports multiple rendering modes: Smooth, Sharp (Modern), and Sharp (Classic). These correspond to DirectWrite rendering modes of Outline, ClearType Natural Symmetric, and GDI Classic, respectively.
- Text tool now supports colored fonts on Windows 8.1.
Paint.NET v3.5.11 - released on August 17th, 2013
The primary goal of this update is preparing for the v4.0 release: previous versions of Paint.NET will not be able to offer the v4.0 update. Also included are some small fixes and performance improvements that have been ported over from the v4.0 codebase.
- Fixed: The Gaussian Blur effect was incorrectly calculating alpha values for non-opaque pixels.
- Improved performance of the Sharpen effect by about 25%
- Improved performance of the Median effect by about 30%
- Improved performance of the Fragment effect by about 40%
- Improved performance of the Unfocus effect by about 100%
- Reduced memory usage when many selection manipulation operations are in the history/undo stack (the undo data is now saved to disk)
- The built-in updater now supports upgrading to paint.net 4.0 (when it's available)
Paint.NET v3.5.10 - released on October 9th, 2011
This update fixes some broken shortcut keys for the View -> Actual Size command.
- Fixed: Ctrl+Shift+A now works again as a shortcut for View -> Actual Size (broken in 3.5.9)
- Fixed: Ctrl+0 still works for View -> Actual Size even if 10 or more images are open (broken in 3.5.9, it would switch to the 10th image).
Paint.NET v3.5.9 - released on October 1st, 2011
This update improves the "Auto-Detect" bit-depth feature, and fixes a few small issues.
- Improved: The "Auto-detect" bit-depth setting for PNG, BMP, and TGA now also determines which bit-depth to use based on which one produces the smallest file size, as well as which ones can save the image without losing fidelity.
- Improved: You can now use Ctrl+0 as a shortcut key for View -> Actual Size, in addition to Ctrl+Shift+A and Ctrl+Alt+0.
- Fixed: Some text in the DirectDraw Surface (DDS) Save Configuration UI was not being loaded.
- Fixed: Some DirectDraw Surface (DDS) files authored with other software (e.g. Unreal 2004) could not be loaded.
- Fixed: In some rare circ*mstances, clicking on the Save button in the toolbar would crash.
- Fixed: The Korean translation has been added back in, with the help of Bing machine translation to cover the few remaining strings that were untranslated.
Paint.NET v3.5.8 - released on March 5th, 2011
This update fixes some issues with the fault-tolerant save feature introduced in 3.5.7.
- Fixed: Saving to a folder that has been moved or renamed will display an error instead of crashing (regression from 3.5.6)
- Fixed: Saving to a Sharepoint site will now work (regression from 3.5.6)
- Fixed: Saving to a file that is marked as read only will now give an error instead of crashing (regression from 3.5.6)
- Fixed: General reliability and correctness improvements to fault-tolerant saving
Paint.NET v3.5.7 - released on February 20th, 2011
This update improves reliability of saving, further improves Copy/Paste functionality, and fixes some other miscellaneous bugs.
- Saving an image is now fault-tolerant. If there is an error or crash while saving, the original file will be left alone.
- Worked around a bug in some plugins that are incorrectly using the built-in Gaussian Blur effect. For example, Sharpen+. Now they won't crash.
- Fixed a bug with Edit->Paste into New Image, where the new image would be 1 pixel too wide or tall, as reported athttp://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/20969-paste-problem/
- Fixed a bug with the Rectangle Select tool and Fixed Ratio selection, which would be off by 1 pixel, as reported athttp://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/20820-croppig-by-fixed-ratio-is-inexact
- When pasting an image from Paint.NET into Paint.NET, it will be a little smarter about where it puts the image. Previously, if the location wasn't within the viewport, it would be placed at the top-left corner of the viewport. Now it will find the nearest point along the edge of the viewport to place the image.
- The EXIF rotation ("orientation") metadata is now discarded when opening an image, which was causing aggravation with images that could then never be reoriented correctly using Image->Rotate
- The EXIF metadata for JPEG thumbnail data are now correctly discarded.
- Fixed a handful of memory leaks.
- Fixed a typo in the Italian translation. In the setup wizard it was referring to "Pain.NET" (woops)
Paint.NET v3.5.6 - released on November 18th, 2010
This update fixes several issues related to copy-paste, improves performance and quality for a few adjustments, and fixes a data loss bug.
- When pasting an image, Paint.NET will be smarter about ensuring it is placed within the area that has been scrolled/zoomed to.
- Improved the performance and quality of the Curves and Hue/Saturation adjustments.
- Some minor improvements to memory usage, which should help out a few scenarios on 32-bit systems.
- Fixed: If a JPEG was loaded that had an embedded ICC profile, and was then saved as an 8-bit or 24-bit PNG, then the resulting file would be corrupt (32-bit PNG worked fine though).
- Fixed: 16-bit TGAs no longer load with the red and blue channels swapped.
- Fixed: Copy-paste from a Remote Desktop session will no longer be 'shifted' by 3 pixels.
- Fixed: Copy-paste from Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Chrome should preserve alpha/transparency.
- Fixed: Copying from Paint.NET and pasting into Windows Live Writer should now work.
- Fixed: Taking a full-screen screenshot with Print Screen on a multimonitor system, where those monitors don't form a simple rectangle, will now fill the 'gap area' with transparent instead of black. (Example: two monitors of the same size, one of which is rotated by 90 degrees)
- Fixed: If Paint.NET is opened without specifying an image to open, and then the default image is modified and saved, then Paint.NET will no longer close it upon opening another one. This was causing data loss if that default image had layers, and was then saved in a format that did not support layers (anything other than .PDN).
- Fixed: Some systems were showing 'red X' thumbnails for .PDN files in Windows Explorer, instead of the real thumbnail.
- Fixed: The EXIF "Creation Software" saved along with images is no longer localized. This prevents certain languages from seeing "Paint.NET ????? v3.5.6" in the image properties (metadata).
Paint.NET v3.5.5 - released on April 25th, 2010
This update fixes a bug when saving 8-bit images, improves layer composition and Gaussian Blur performance, and is now updated to support the new .NET Framework 4.0 in some cases.
- Fixed the bug where saving as 8-bit PNG/GIF/BMP wasn't always working, usually with larger images.
- Improved the performance of the Gaussian Blur effect by 30-40%.
- Improved the performance of all the layer blending modes by 15-30%.
- Improved the performance of zooming with the mouse wheel on dual-core Intel Atom systems.
- Updated to support .NET 4.0 if no other version of .NET is installed.
- Reduced download size from 4.8MB down to 3.5MB.
- Fixed a small error in the Chinese translation.
Please note that the system requirements have been updated. For Windows XP, you must now have Service Pack 3 (SP3) installed; SP2 is no longer supported. For Windows Vista, you must now have Service Pack 1 installed.
Paint.NET v3.5.4 - released on February 25th, 2010
This update fixes a few small bugs, and improves performance of the Flatten command.
- Improved performance of the Image->Flatten command by making it multithreaded.
- Fixed the File->Save As dialog not opening to the correct folder.
- Fixed a crash with certain plugins and their use of the File Open dialog.
- Fixed a very rare crash with the toolbar's font list.
Paint.NET v3.5.3, released on February 7th, 2010
This update fixes a few small bugs.
- Fixed DirectDraw Surface (.dds) file format support for CPUs which do not have SSE2 (Pentium III, Athlon XP).
- Fixed an issue with the File->Save dialog related to file type plugins that were only written for opening (importing).
- Fixed some crashes which were supposed to be "out of memory" errors.
- Fixed a race condition with the New Image, Canvas Size, and Resize dialogs. If you typed extremely fast you could cause a crash by typing a negative number and immediately pressing OK or Enter.
- Fixed a File->Save dialog issue in Win7/Vista where it could ask you about overwriting the wrong file.
Paint.NET v3.5.2, released on January 4th, 2010
This update resolves some feature disparities in the Text tool between GDI (XP) and DirectWrite (Win7/Vista). It also improves overall performance, as well as the correctness and quality of the Move Selected Pixels tool, the Image->Resize function, and the Hue/Saturation adjustment.
- All font face variants (e.g., Arial vs. Arial Narrow) are now available with the Text tool in Win7/Vista with DirectWrite.
- Bitmap font types (e.g. Courier, Terminal, Fixedsys) are now available with the Text tool in Win7/Vista.
- Fixed some bad text kerning with the Text tool at small font sizes when antialiasing was turned off.
- For the Image->Resize function, the quality, correctness, and performance of Bilinear and Bicubic sampling modes have been improved. Super Sampling also has some performance improvement.
- Improved the rendering quality for the Hue/Saturation adjustment. Also made a new icon for it.
- Fixed many subtle rendering issues with the Move Selected Pixels tool. These were apparent when flipping or rotating a selected area.
- Fixed: The Line/Curve tool was applying pixel snapping to the curve nodes, which caused lines to "bend" when using the Shift key to constrain the angle.
- Fixed some extraneous CPU usage related to unnecessary or redundant thumbnail updates.
- Fixed a few dialogs that looked wrong with Aero glass with Remote Desktop or Virtual PC.
- Fixed a nasty memory leak with Flatten followed by Undo.
- Fixed some issues related to effects that took awhile to cancel. As it turns out, drag-and-drop was enabled at this time, which easily lead to crashes or hangs.
- Some Win7 systems could not detect that .NET 3.5 SP1 was installed, even though it was. A fallback detection function has been added.
- For plugin authors, the Effect class now has a pollable IsCancelRequested property. This can be used to improve responsiveness for expensive OnSetRenderInfo() implementations which are otherwise non-interruptible.
- For plugin authors, the Surface.FitSurface() method is now optimized to use multiple threads, which improves performance.
Paint.NET v3.5.1, released on November 19th, 2009
This update adds a new feature for Windows 7 users, and fixes many small issues that have been found since 3.5's release.
- New: For Windows 7, added taskbar progress reporting for long running operations (effects, adjustments, Image->Resize, save, install)
- Made some corrections to the French translation
- Running setup with /auto will no longer launch Paint.NET when it's done
- Fixed an issue where Paste into New Image would refuse an image on the clipboard, even if regular Paste would take it
- Fixed a race condition with Edit->Paste and Image->Resize whereby it would take up 100% CPU and take between 1 minute to 1 hour to finish
- Fixed an issues with Copy/Paste where it would leave an extra line of transparent pixels on the left, top, right, and/or bottom edges
- Fixed lag with the paintbrush tool that was being seen on some systems
- Fixed some issues with the paintbrush and eraser tool being misaligned when zoomed in
- Fixed a crash that would happen at (seemingly) random times, such as after drawing with the paintbrush tool, on some systems
- Fixed a minor and obscure rendering glitch with the Move Selected Pixels tool
- Fixed an issue with glass over Remote Desktop or Windows 7 Virtual PC
- Fixed a minor glitch whereby the "Unsaved Changes" confirmation dialog could never finish rendering the image thumbnail if one of the Move tools was active
Paint.NET v3.5, released on November 6th, 2009
This release focused on improving performance reliability, reducing memory usage, upgrading to the latest .NETFramework version, and refreshing the user interface for Aero and glass (Windows 7 / Vista).
- New: Refreshed user interface with new icons and visual styling. On Windows 7 and Vista, it is enhanced for Aero and "glass".
- New effect: Blurs -> Surface Blur, by Ed Harvey
- New effect: Distort -> Dents, by Ed Harvey
- New effect: Distort -> Crystalize, by Ed Harvey
- New: Russian translation.
- Performance and memory usage have been extensively optimized throughout the entire program.
- .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is now required, which has many built-in performance improvements.
- Disk space usage has been reduced by about 12MB by using NTFS compression on installation files related to staging (.MSI) and diagnostics (.PDB).
- Compression for .PDN images has been improved.
- Effect dialog responsiveness has been improved.
- Images open much faster, especially on single CPU systems.
- Startup performance on most systems will be better by about 20%.
- Memory usage has been reduced when more than one image is open.
- Rendering quality has been greatly improved when zoomed in.
- The selection outline is no longer animated. Instead of "dancing ants", a context-sensitive "XOR" stipple pattern is drawn. This has allowed for improved performance and lowered CPU consumption (and longer battery life).
- The font manager for the Text tool has been completely rewritten, which fixes many problems seen with crashes and missing fonts.
- On Windows XP, the Text tool has improved reliability and font selection (it uses GDI instead of GDI+).
- On Windows 7, the Text tool will use DirectWrite (instead of GDI) which gives better performance and greatly improved quality. On Windows Vista, you may install DirectX 11 to enable this feature; otherwise GDI will be used.
- The toolbar font list has improved usability, rendering quality, and significantly improved performance.
- The toolbar font list no longer requires an application restart to recognize newly installed fonts.
- When many fonts are installed, both memory usage and startup performance have been greatly improved.
- It is now drastically easier to move a very small selection.
- All installation prerequisites are now installed automatically, such as .NET and Windows Installer.
- Updates are now downloaded in the background, and installed after you exit the application. In previous versions, this was a foreground task and you could not use Paint.NET while the update was downloaded.
- Added a "Utilities" menu. Updates, Languages, and Plugin Errors have been moved there.
- Added a "Manage Fonts" command to the Utilities menu. This will launch the built-in Windows font control panel.
- Clicking the middle mouse button on an image thumbnail will now close the image.
- Improved the Unfocus effect.
- The DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) file type now allows you to select the resampling algorithm for auto-generated mip-maps.
- A processor that supports SSE is now required (almost all CPUs purchased this decade satisfy this).
- Fixed an issue with Gaussian Blur and its treatment of alpha values.
- Fixed a crash with the "Units" selector in the toolbar.
- Fixed a crash due to an overflow that prevented very large images from working (64-bit only).
- Fixed many other miscellaneous glitches and crashes.
- The Korean translation has been removed. Sadly, we were unable to find the resources to complete this.
Paint.NET v3.36 Released: August 26th, 2008 Paint.NET v3.35 Released: July 7th, 2008 Paint.NET v3.31Released:May 1st, 2008 Paint.NET v3.30Released:April 10th, 2008
This is mostly a servicing release to make some small improvements and to fix a few important bugs.
This releases introduces a new Posterize adjustment, a new Intersect selection mode, dramatically improved performance for selection editing, and several small bug fixes.
This is mostly a servicing release to fix a few important bugs.
Thisrelease adds an Italian translation, a new "Fragment Blur" effect, and the ability to save PNG images at 8- and 24-bit color depths. For developers, the IndirectUI system has some new controls, some new constraint rules, and can now be used for file type plugins.
- New: Italian translation.
- New: Ability to save PNG's at 8- and 24-bit color depths.
- New: Ability to save BMP's at 8-bit color depth.
- New: "Auto-detect" bit-depth option for PNG, BMP, and TGA file types. It will analyze the image and determine the lowest bit-depth that can still save the image without quality loss.
- New: "Fragment" blur effect, by Ed Harvey
- New: The "Polar Inversion" distortion effect has been enhanced to allow changing the rendering offset, and the behavior for "edge" pixels (clamp, reflect, or wrap).
- New: For developers, added a Color Wheel control to IndirectUI for use in effect plugins.
- New: For developers, added ability to customize certain properties of the effect configuration dialog via IndirectUI.
- New: For developers, IndirectUI can now be used to write configuration UI for file types.
- New: For developers, IndirectUI has a new radio button control type for enumerations, and some new property constraint rules.
- Changed: Most effects and adjustments, including plugins that use IndirectUI, have been visually refreshed. The new look is cleaner and more compact. These changes are shown in more detail athttp://blog.getpaint.net/2008/03/10/cleaning-up-the-ui-for-paintnet-v330/
- Fixed: Various UI issues with the Levels adjustment.
- Fixed: When pasting text into the Text tool with Ctrl+V, it would hide the nub for moving the text.
- Fixed: If the startup tool was set to the Zoom or Pan (Hand) tool, then the toolbar would render incorrectly.
- Fixed: Thumbnails for PDN images now include transparency, which improves their appearance in Windows Vista.
- Fixed: In some cases, an exponential property slider would get "stuck" at some values when using up/down keyboard keys. This mostly affects some effect plugins.
- Fixed: When using keyboard navigation, sometimes the File menu would scroll its items out of view.
- Fixed: Some crashes that were tracked down to out-of-bounds coordinate values in certain effects.
- Fixed: The installer would fail if Paint.NET had never been installed before, and was being installed to any non-default directory. This bug only affected version 3.22.
Paint.NET v3.22Released:January 12th, 2008
This release fixes a few minor bugs and adds a new, much-needed Reduce Noise effect.
- New: "Reduce Noise" effect.
- Changed: Ctrl+W will now close Paint.NET if zero images are open.
- Fixed: In Windows XP, when launching web content, sometimes Internet Explorer was used instead of the user's chosen default browser.
- Fixed: The Unfocus effect was not handling alpha values properly.
- Fixed: The Brightness / Contrast adjustment was only displaying its text in English.
- Fixed: The /auto parameter for the installer now correctly allows for an automated installation. This was inadvertently broken in 3.20.
Paint.NET v3.20 Released: December 12th, 2007
This release adds numerous enhancements and tweaks to the built-in effects, a re-organized Effects menu, a new and much easier system for effect plugin development, better error handling for plugins, and the ability to draw Fixed Ratio and Fixed Size selections with the Rectangle Select tool. It also includes the customary list of tweaks and fixes.
- Rectangle Select tool can now draw selections based on a Fixed Size or Fixed Ratio setting.
- The selection combination mode is now accessible from the toolbar (Replace, Add, Subtract, Invert ("xor")).
- The "flood mode" for the Magic Wand and Paint Bucket tool are now accessible from the toolbar (Continuous, or Global).
- Reorganized the Effects menu so that all effects are classified under submenus named Artistic, Blurs, Distort, Noise, Photo, Render, and Stylize.
- Improved rendering quality for the Motion Blur effect.
- Enhanced the Radial Blur effect so that the center of blurring can be chosen, as well as the quality.
- Enhanced the Zoom Blur effect so that the center of zooming can be chosen.
- Enhanced the Bulge distortion effect so that the center of "bulging" can be chosen.
- Enhanced the Frosted Glass distortion effect in several ways: 1) performance has been improved from between 1,000% to 10,000% depending on image size and property settings, 2) the scatter radius can now be set up to 200 pixels, 3) a "minimum" scatter radius can be chosen, 4) a smoothness setting is now available.
- Enhanced the Tile Reflection distortion effect by adding a Quality property.
- Enhanced the Twist distortion effect by 1) allowing counter-clockwise twisting, 2) allowing the size of the twisted area to be configured, 3) allowing the location/center of twisting to be chosen.
- Enhanced the Add Noise effect by adding a "coverage" property.
- New Mandelbrot Fractal and Julia Fractal render effects.
- New IndirectUI system for plugin authors so that they can develop much more sophisticated effect configuration dialogs with a fraction of the amount of work that used to be required.
- If an effect plugin crashes, it is much more likely that Paint.NET will be able to recover from the error.
- The option to restart Paint.NET will then be provided as a recommended course of action.
- If an effect plugin fails to load, or is blocked from loading, then a "View Plugin Load Errors..." item will be added to the File menu which can be clicked on to show the error and/or diagnostic information.
- Improved the cursors for the Magic Wand and Paint Bucket tools.
- Ctrl+Alt+0 now works for View->Actual Size (aka, "Zoom to 100%"), which is a shortcut key that other software uses (e.g., Photoshop).
- Updates are now installed faster by only creating one System Restore point instead of two (it used to implicitly create one for uninstall, then one for the reinstall).
- Lots of little bug fixes.
Paint.NET v3.10 Released: August 23rd, 2007
This release adds two new effects originally written by David Issel ("BoltBait"), support for theDDS filetype originally written by Dean Ashton, as well as many small bug fixes and some visual fit and finish.
- New: Soften Portrait effect, by David Issel, http://www.BoltBait.com .
- New: Ink Sketch effect, by David Issel, http://www.BoltBait.com .
- New: DirectDraw Surface (DDS) file format support, by Dean Ashton,http://www.dmashton.co.uk/ . Improved from the original source code by optimizing the DXT compression library ("Squish") to take advantage of multiple cores / processors.
- New: "Paint.NET Search", available from the Help menu (shortcut key is Ctrl+E), allows you to search for Paint.NET help, forum posts, tutorials, plugins, and other related material: http://searchpaint.net (Note: This feature is only available in English.)
- Improved: Visual fit-and-finish for the Layers window.
- Improved: Visual fit-and-finish for the close / 'X' button on image thumbnails.
- Improved: Small (about 5-10%) performance improvements for some effects such as Oil Painting, Frosted Glass, and Gaussian Blur.
- Improved: Increased max brush size to 500, as per forum members request.
- Improved: Expanded list of available font sizes up through 288.
- Changed: The keyboard shortcut key for the Color Picker is now 'k'. This makes it so that the toolbar option, "After click: Switch to previous tool", is not useless for those using the keyboard shortcuts.
- Fixed: In some cases, undoing an action that removed a layer would result in the un-removed layer not showing up until you resized the Layers window ("ghost layers").
- Fixed: Pressing F1 from the main window no longer launches the online help in two browser tabs.
- Fixed: Adding a new layer now adds it above the currently active layer, instead of at the very top of the layer list.
- Fixed: Merge Down now activates the merged layer instead of the one above it.
- Fixed: In Vista, clicking on a URL link from the installer will no longer launch the web browser with inherited, elevated privileges.
- Fixed: Pressing Ctrl+[ no longer cancels out of drawing a line/curve, but instead decreases the brush size by 5 as expected.
- Fixed: Ctrl+clicking on the brush size +/- buttons now changes the brush size in increments of 5.
- Fixed: Save Configuration dialog would "creep downward" from its last position every time it was opened again.
- Fixed: TGA codec now saves the # of alpha bits to the image descriptor byte. This was causing some other applications to load TGA files saved with Paint.NET as solid black images.
- Fixed: Clicking the 'X' to close the Layer Properties dialog was not reverting changes made to the layer while the dialog was open.
- Fixed: Installation will not proceed unless Paint.NET is closed, and will also not allow Paint.NET to be opened until installation is completed. This helps to ensure a fully coherent and complete installation or update.
- Fixed: If a file failed to open, and there were no open images, and the user pressed either the Zoom In or Zoom Out toolbar buttons, then Paint.NET would crash.
- Fixed: In Vista, it was possible to crash the Save As dialog by typing a filename that was too long.
- Fixed: In Vista, it was possible to crash the updater if you let the UAC prompt time-out.
- Fixed: It was possible to crash Paint.NET on some systems by clicking on a tool in the Tools window while the "Save As" dialog was open.
v3.08 Released: June 1st, 2007
This is mostly a service release that fixes some bugs, while also improving keyboard / accessibility cues for some dialogs.
- Fixed: Pasting an image from Office 2003 applications now works (e.g. Excel 2003 graphs).
- Fixed: Some dialogs were not indicating which command button was the default. These buttons now have a highlight to indicate which one will be activated if the user presses Enter or Space.
- Fixed: Some minor keyboard navigation issues with task dialogs
- Fixed: Performance issue with the File->Acquire submenu taking a long time to appear
- Fixed: Window activation issue when the Print wizard was finished / closed
- Fixed: Crash when there was 1 image open and the user pressed Ctrl+Q and then Ctrl+W
- Fixed: Minor performance issue if the user had 1 modified image open and then canceled the "Save changes?" dialog
- Fixed: Misbehaving filetype factory implementations (plugins) will no longer cause a crash
v3.07 Released: May 8th, 2007
This update enhances the Line/Curve tool, significantly reduces the download size, and fixes some bugs related to opening and saving files in Windows Vista.
- New: Line/Curve tool has been enhanced to allow drawing arrowheads, and to draw with various dashed- and dotted- styles.
- New: Image tab thumbnails now have an indicator if the respective image has unsaved changes (an orange asterisk is shown).
- Improved: The Save Configuration dialog (choose JPEG quality, etc.) now allows you to maximize it. It also remembers its relative location and size.
- Changed: The help file / documentation is now hosted online. This has reduced the download size by more than 3 MB, and will also allow us to provide translations without ballooning the size of the download (each language would have added between 2 and 4MB).
- Changed: The "image list button" (downward triangle) is also shown when only 1 image is open (it used to only display if 2 or more images were open). This is being done for the sake of consistency.
- Fixed: Some operations would reset the selected layer to the first/lowest layer. This selection is now preserved.
- Fixed: The Image->Rotate commands no longer hang if a selection was active.
- Fixed: Several problems have been fixed within our implementation surrounding the new Vista Open/Save dialogs. This includes: opening an image from an http:// source, opening images from a digital camera that is not mapped to a file system path (such as a drive letter), the Save dialog not always prompting you about overwriting an existing file, and many corner cases that previously caused crashes.
v3.05 Released: March 29th, 2007
This is a minor update that adds a new effect, improves certain parts of the user interface, and fixes a few minor bugs.
- New: Pencil Sketch effect
- New: In Windows Vista, the new-style Save/Open dialogs are used. Among other things, this enables Search functionality.
- Changed: The View->Units, Image->Flip, Image->Rotate, and Layers->Flip submenus have been "flattened" (their commands were moved out into the View, Image, Image, and Layers menus respectively)
- Improved: Download size reduced by about 300 KB by using PNGOUT
- Improved: Some uses of confusing "MessageBox" style dialogs have been changed to a much friendlier "TaskDialog" style interface
- Improved: When changing the language, Paint.NET can now restart itself automatically
- Improved: Better performance for Move Selected Pixels tool for quad-core systems. This issue is documented and explained here,http://blogs.msdn.com/rickbrew/archive/2007/03/01/paint-net-many-core-performance-scaling-analyzed.aspx
- Removed: The "Clear History" button has been removed because it was not very useful
- Fixed: Sometimes the Colors window would get "lost" between sessions of Paint.NET
- Fixed: Stack-overflow crash when using certain effects, such as Gaussian Blur, on very large images with certain settings (such as a 200 pixel radius)
- Fixed: When cancelling the multi-image Unsaved Changes dialog, the input focus was sometimes confused
- Changed: Renamed PdnLib.dll to PaintDotNet.Core.dll
- Fixed: Very rare race condition in background thumbnail renderer
v3.01 Released: February 26th, 2007
This is a small update that fixes a few bugs that have been found since 3.0 was released.
- Fixed: Crash when trying to save a palette with a blank name
- Fixed: Changing an image's DPI resolution did not set its "dirty" flag (you would not be asked to save changes)
- Fixed: Error messages at startup were covered by the splash screen
- Fixed: Crash when a modal dialog was open (such as an effect) when the user tried to logoff/restart/shutdown Windows, and they chose to save their images
- Mitigated some CPU usage issues when the app was minimized and a complex selection was active
v3.0 Released: January 26th, 2007
This major release introduces a new multi-document interface (MDI), availability in 8 languages, a highly-requested interactive gradient tool, four new effects, a user-definable color palette, lower disk space usage for scratch files, and a generally cleaner and improved user interface.
What's new in Paint.NET v3.0?
- Simple and intuitive tab-based multi-document user interface
- Now available in 8 languages: English, Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), and Spanish
- Interactive Gradient Tool that makes it very easy to draw and then fine-tune placement and coloring of a gradient.
- User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel)
- New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen
- More intuitive and more powerful toolbar
- Generally improved and cleaner user interface
- History files are now compressed to save disk space, reduce disk activity, and improve performance.
- "Merge Down" layer command
Please note that Windows 2000 is no longer supported. Paint.NET v3.0 will not install unless your operating system is Windows XP SP2 or newer.
Paint.NET v2.7x v2.70Released: August 2nd, 2006 With this release we have also refreshed Paint.NET's system requirements. We now list 256 MB as the minimum memory required instead of 128 MB. This is in line with what we have seen to be a more reasonable minimum system for using Paint.NET. Also, Windows XP users must now have SP2 installed (SP1 was required before), Windows 2000 users must have SP4 installed (SP3 was required before), and Windows Server 2003 users must have SP1 installed (no SP was required before).
v2.72Released: August 31st, 2006
This small release adds a new effect and fixes a few small bugs.
This is a small interim release that includes many of the popular effect plugins we have written that users have enjoyed using with Paint.NET v2.6x. We have decided to release this as a ".1" update now so that more users may benefit from these plugins, as opposed to waiting until the final release of v3.0 to include them (which could be awhile).
- New effect: Glow
- New effect: Bulge
- New effect: Polar Inversion
- New effect: Tile Reflection
- New effect: Twist
Paint.NET v2.6x
v2.64 Released: July 8th, 2006
This small updates fixes a few minor bugs, and improves Windows Vista compatibility. As a bonus, it also adds much better GIF save quality.
- Improved GIF save quality by implementing Floyd-Steinburg error diffusion algorithm
- Printing now works in Windows Vista
- Fixed a startup performance problem on some systems that was an artifact of the way the .NET Framework was verifying Authenticode signatures as part of its assembly loading process
- Executable files now have UAC manifests to ensure proper execution privilege and to disable file and registry virtualization in Windows Vista
v2.63 Released: June 4th, 2006
This small update fixes some more relatively minor bugs, and makes the built-in updater much more convenient in Windows Vista.
- Built-in updater now works in Vista without having to use "Run as Administrator" beforehand (UAC permission is still required to install updates)
- Fixed a color intensity calculation that had Red and Blue swapped (affects Brightness/Contrast adjustment, and some plugins)
- Fixed .PDN images with transparency having a black background in their Explorer thumbnail
- Fixed crash when an image has bizarre DPI settings (such as 6 billion DPI)
- Fixed crash when an image has an invalid resolution unit specified (neither pixels, inches, nor centimeters)
- Fixed a few rare race conditions which resulted in crashes
- Fixed a rare crash with the history
- Fixed crashlog being created when the updates dialog appears over another modal dialog
- Fixed crashlog not reporting application version with certain damaged installations
- Placed a clickableWindows Live OneCare ad in the Setup wizard that expires on July 10th, 2006
v2.62 Released: May 10th, 2006
This small update fixes some bugs, and improves the user experience on some Windows Vista systems.
- Small icon (16x16) is brand new, redesigned so that it is clearer
- Application resolution is no longer virtualized in high-DPI mode in Windows Vista
- Fixed race-condition related crash with Edit->Paste and Move Selected Pixels tool ("Object is in use elsewhere")
- Fixed some font related crashes that occur when standard fonts are corrupt or missing
- Fixed a crash that sometimes occurs when trying to save files whose name begins with a period
- Fixed a rare division-by-zero crash in the Clone Stamp
- Fixed rare crash related to scanning
- Mitigated rare crash that can happen in various places, ("GetRegionData returned false, GetLastError() = 6")
- Improved crash log reporting
v2.61 Released: March 29th, 2006
This small update fixes a few uncommon bugs, and adds a "Donate" item to the Help menu that links to our donation page.
- Fixed crash when clicking File->New when there is a malformed image in the clipboard
- Fixed several crashes related to pressing Ctrl+Z (Undo) or Ctrl+Y (Redo) before releasing the mouse button while still drawing
- Fixed Zoom Tool "haze" remaining after pressing Ctrl+Z before releasing the mouse button
- Fixed uninstaller not removing Start->Programs menu shortcut
- Fixed "Auto" button in Adjustments->Levels not updating one of its sliders
- Fixed a few small plugin API problems
- Fixed a race condition in the file loading code related to EXIF tags
- Added "Donate" to Help menu
v2.6 Released: February 24th, 2006
This release is an upgrade of v2.5 that utilizes the brand new .NET Framework v2.0 runtime. It introduces full 64-bit support, an aesthetically updated user interface, better performance, a new "Curves" adjustment, and seven new layer blend modes.
What's new in Paint.NET v2.6?
- Full 64-bit support, for both x64 and Itanium systems
- New "Curves" adjustment for editing an image's color curves
- Seven new layer blend modes: Color Burn, Color Dodge, Reflect, Glow, Overlay, Negation, and Xor
- Aesthetic improvements to the entire user interface
- Better performance, especially for 64-bit systems
- Zooming, esp. with the mouse wheel, has been enhanced
- Rewritten layer composition engine is now mathematically correct, and faster
- Deployment via AD/GPO is now much easier (use /createMsi with setup package)
- User interface now works correctly in high-DPI (120dpi, 144dpi, 196dpi)
- Layers window list is no longer "upside down"
- Upgraded to use .NET Framework 2.0
- Many other improvements and fixes
Paint.NET v2.5 The major goals of this release were to improve performance, expand selection support to be much more useful and powerful, provide support for localization to other languages, and to have an easier way for users to have the latest version (update manager). Other features added include the ability to work with measurements in inches and centimeters, a 3D Rotate/Zoom effect, Sepia adjustment, Radial Blur and Add Noise effects, GIF transparency support, TGA file format support, file format plugin support, and a refined Text tool.
Released: November 26th, 2005
What's new in Paint.NET v2.5?
- Faster performance and lower memory usage
- Full flexibility for scaling, rotating, and moving selections and selected pixels
- Ability to subtract from and add to selections
- Internationalization (I18N) support
- Officially available in German
- Line / Curve tool lets you draw spline and Bézier curves
- Ability to work in measurements of inches and centimeters
- 3D Rotate / Zoom effect lets you rotate, tilt, and tile images at various perspectives
- Radial Blur and Add Noise effects
- Sepia adjustment
- Improved Text Tool, including higher quality font rendering
- GIF transparency support
- TGA file format support
- Greater extensibility with a brand new File Format API
- Simpler, faster setup wizard
- Update manager simplifies getting the latest version
- Cleaner user interface with none of the annoying flickering of past releases
- Many other changes, improvements, and fixes
Paint.NET v2.1 v2.1a Released: May 5th, 2005 v2.1 Released: April 30th, 2005
v2.1b Released: May 12th, 2005
This small updated fixes a crash when resizing an image with a new width but the same height.
This small update fixed a few crashes that people were experiencing related to the "Open" and "Save As" dialogs. If you are not experiencing these crashes with v2.1 then you do not need to download this update.
The major goals of this release were to improve performance, refine the user interface and experience, and to support some highly requested features such as PNG transparency support and JPEG quality configuration. To summarize, Paint.NET v2.1 is much faster, more compatible, and produces better quality images than v2.0. It is a highly recommended upgrade.
- Many bug fixes and miscellaneous user interface tweaks.
- Installation via Group Policy is now supported.
- Rendering quality, usage, and performance of selections is improved.
- Much better performance all around.
- Magic Wand selection tool.
- Ellipse/circle selection tool.
- PNG transparency is now supported.
- GIF save quality significantly improved.
- JPEG quality selector and preview, and file size preview.
- Upgraded PDN file format to support very large images.
- Thumbnails are now shown for .PDN files in Windows Explorer.
- Much higher quality rendering when zooming out.
- Background layer is no longer "locked".
- EXIF data is now preserved for supporting file formats.
- Lower memory usage. History items are now saved to disk instead of completely stored in memory.
- Better Tablet PC support. Also, Ink isn't used unless you have a Tablet PC; this has increased compatibility and performance on regular systems.
- Ability to resize image based on a percentage.
- Brand new image resampling routines for Image->Resize menu item (no more transparent borders).
- No more flickering in the UI.
- More optimizations for multiprocessor and multicore systems.
- Startup time is greatly reduced.
Paint.NET v2.0
Released: December 17th, 2004
This was the release that was Slashdotted. Many important features were added and the stability of the product was increased.
- Windows 2000 Compatible
- Levels Adjustments
- Auto Levels adjustment
- Clone Tool
- Color Replace Tool
- Zoom Tool
- Edge Detect Effect (Developed by Chris Crosetto)
- Relief Effect (Developed by Chris Crosetto)
- New emboss effect (Developed by Chris Crosetto)
- New oil painting effect
- New Frosted glass effect
- Red Eye removal effect
- Grid Mode when zoomed in close
- Help text for each tool displayed on the status bar
- Import Image to New Layers
- Variable zoom (not constrained to powers-of-2)
- Moving a selection makes the marching ants disappear
- Ability to adjust Hue / Saturation
- Ink support (for tablet PC users)
- Additional keyboard shortcuts
- Subtraction/difference blend operation for layers
- Image to auto zoom until fit inside window
- Tolerance Slider for adjustments for paint bucket and color replace
- Cursor transitions for tool actions
- Mouse positioning using keyboard arrows
- Limit history length
Paint.NET v1.1
Released: October 1st, 2004
This release included many user interface tweaks and bug fixes.
- New Effect: "RotoZoomer" which can perform arbitrary angle rotation, and zooming.
- More responsive Effect preview rendering.
- Faster application startup time.
- "Open Recent" menu keeps track of the last 8 images you worked with, along with a thumbnail for each.
- Selecting an area now draws an outline along with the blue highlight.
- Layer Properties now visually previews and updates all properties in real time without having to press the "Apply" button.
- Invert and Desaturate are put into the Layers -> Adjustments menu, along with a new adjustment called "Brightness & Contrast."
- Better performance when running in a Remote Desktop session by way of disabling dialog box / toolform transparency.
- Zoom works correctly now: when you zoom in or out, the image will be centered to the intuitively correct location.
- Lower memory usage and better resource usage in general.
- "Paste" now works with the Text tool.
- The location that images are pasted to is more intuitive in some scenarios.
- Improved "History" toolform user interface.
- User interface upgraded to make full use of XP themes. In v1.0, many dropdown boxes and "updowns" had a Win2K/OfficeXP look to them.
- Other miscellaneous user interface tweaks.
- Many "under the hood" improvements, tweaks, bug fixes and refactorizations.
- New file format. Paint.NET v1.1 stores files with a ".pdn" extension which is not compatible with Paint.NET v1.0's ".lbmp" extension.
- Extensibility! After you install the program, check out the "RotoZoomerSource.zip" for an example of how to write an Effect plugin. You will need Visual Studio 2003 .NET to write a new plugin. No other types of plugins are supported for v1.1.
Paint.NET v1.0
Released: May 6th, 2004
The original project that started it all. This was completed in 15 weeks as an undergraduate senior design project atWSU, and was 36,000 lines of code.