Paint.NET 4

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > Paint.NET 4

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

Paint.NET 4.0 has been released, it's a pretty big update and has been a long time coming. It doesn't support XP or Vista anymore, so if you're on those, unfortunately you can't use it.

So what's new? Here is the official blog post: http://blog.getpaint.net/2014/06/24/paint-net-4-0-is-now-available/

Things I have tried and liked:

Paintbrush now has a hardness value, so you can draw very soft lines. Also alpha value in the color now works correctly (imo), in that a single brush stroke is now at most as opaque as the alpha value says, and not (almost always) fully opaque. The transparency remains the same even if you cross over the same line with the same stroke.
All tools have a blending mode. So you can use e.g. multiply to darken some areas of your drawing without having to use a separate layer.
The starting point and tolerance of flood fill and magic wand can be adjusted after you've used the tool (instead of having to adjust the tolerance and then redoing the selection/fill) and they can use the whole image for sampling instead of a single layer.
Color picker can now take the average of 3x3, 5x5, 11x11, 31x31 or 51x51 pixels in addition to sampling a single pixel. It can also either sample the whole image or only the current layer.
Selections can be antialiased
You can adjust the rotation and position of lines and curves after you've drawn them initially. Same goes for the new shapes tool, but I don't think the shapes are very interesting. The line/curve tool now has an explicit spline/bezier mode instead of the old undiscoverable "drag a handle with the right mouse button to enable bezier mode"

# ¿ Jun 26, 2014 14:10

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Nov 19, 2025 07:42

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

Yes, for basic editing Paint.NET is awesome. It lacks some things that I miss pretty often, like a smudge and liquify tools. There are plugins, but unfortunately you have to work "blind" with them.

Supposedly version 4 laid some groundwork for plugins being able to add tools and brushes, but they are not in this version yet.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2014 14:54

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

Flipperwaldt posted:

Switched over to StylePix a couple of years ago and I'm not sure, even with the new additions, what makes Paint.net worth checking out again.

StylePix is not free, right?

Paint.NET is both free and has a user interface that is designed for humans (unlike Gimp, even after all these years).

# ¿ Jun 26, 2014 19:35

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

Flipperwaldt posted:

Can you edit text yet in Paint.Net? That's what got me to switch away from it.

No.

# ¿ Jun 26, 2014 20:58

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

Okay, I've noticed a couple of small annoyances in 4.0: It doesn't remember the positions of the tool windows and I don't like that the sample layer/image toggle is linked between all the tools that use it.

I often use flood fill to make an opaque bottom layer to otherwise transparent layered image, so I want to fill the whole empty layer with a solid color. That doesn't mean I want to sample colors with the color picker only from the layer I'm working on.

# ¿ Jun 30, 2014 14:17

Adbot: ADBOT LOVES YOU

# ¿ Nov 19, 2025 07:42

Wheany: Mar 17, 2006; Spinya^{ha^{ha^haha}ha}ha_{ha_{ha_haha}ha}ha!; Doctor Rope

I'm bumping this thread to because there have been three new bug fix releases since 4.0. The list of chages is here: http://www.getpaint.net/roadmap.html

# ¿ Jul 23, 2014 13:45

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > Paint.NET 4