“Free, easy to use photo editor with layers support”

Paint.NET is an efficient, small, light photo editor with a minimalistic GUI. It's impressive how it can have so many tools in just 1.8MB of space and it uses less then 55 MB of RAM to run. Although it wouldn't be fair to compare it with Photoshop, it is true that many home users will find Paint.NET perfect for their needs and really easy to use.

Unfortunately, it limits you to edit only one image at a time and there are two major features missing: the magnetic lasso for the selection of objects in a picture and support for Twain-scanners/cameras. That said, the program is constantly updated and you can always find different ways to do things.

A very interesting feature is the possibility to install many different plug-ins that you can choose in the program's forum. You can for example install a shape3D tool, a pack of custom brushes, a motion sharpen plug-in and or silhouette tool.

Paint.NET is a very promising photo editor which is good enough for non professional users. Although it lacks some important functions and limits you to work on one picture at a time, it's useful enough for everyday use.

Languages:

English, German

Recent changes in Paint.NET:

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.

OS requirements for Paint.NET:

OS: Win98SE/XP/Vista

Minimum requirements:

.NET Framework 2.0

Pros

Minimalistic GUI
Effective graphic effects in a small app
Downloadable plug-ins

Cons

Allows you to work on just one picture per time
Lacks of common features

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From the publisher of Paint.NET

Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions.

Features:

Simple, intuitive user interface

Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. It is also designed to be immediately familiar to users of the original MS Paint software that comes with Windows.

Layers

Usually only found on expensive or complicated professional software, layers form the basis for a rich image composition experience. You may think of them as a stack of transparency slides that, when viewed together at the same time, form one image.

Powerful Tools

Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing shapes, including an easy-to-user curve tool for drawing simple splines or Bezier curves. The facilities for creating and working with selections is powerful, yet still simple enough to be picked up quickly. Other powerful tools include the Magic Wand for selecting regions of similar color, and the Clone Stamp for copying or erasing portions of an image. There is also a simple text editor, a tool for zooming, and a Recolor tool.

Unlimited History

Everybody makes mistakes, and everybody changes their mind. To accommodate this, every action you perform on an image is recorded in the History window and may be undone. Once you've undone an action, you can also redo it. The length of the history is only limited by available disk space.

Special Effects

Many special effects are including for perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, and embossing are included. Also included is our unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect (new for v2.5) that makes it very easy to add perspective and tilting. Adjustments are also included which help you tweak an image's brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, and levels.

Open Source and Free

Paint.NET is provided free-of-charge, and the source code (all 105,000 lines of it) is also available for free under generous licensing terms. The bulk of Paint.NET is written in C#, with only a small amount of code related to setup and shell-integration written in C++.