0 Comments Art Review: Paint.NET

Program - Paint.NET (dotPDN LLC.)
Tested version - v4.0.21

Price - Free (custom license)
Systems - Windows 7/8.1/10
Official website - https://www.getpaint.net

Raster or Vector - Raster

Ease Of Use - Very simple to get started, and uses some basic Photoshop shortcuts. To be honest I was expecting a clone of Microsoft Paint, and saw a review of that as well, but was pleasantly surprised.

Online help, tutorials, and a forum online as well.

All software is subjective to hardware installed, so with that in mind here is my current workhorse PC (A updated HP Z200 Workstation) specs I used for testing with all updated drivers...

CPU - Intel Core i5 CPU 660 @ 3.33GHz (2 Cores, 4 Threads)
Memory - 12 GB DDR3 total
Graphics - EVGA NVIDIA GeForce GTX 750 Ti SC (Superclocked GM107) 1 GB (DDR5 memory)
Space - 2.5 TB hard drive disk space
System - Windows 8.1 Pro

Program Speed - Very responsive with no noticeable lag unless creating images larger than 10" in size, or at 600 ppi or more.

Page Options - Maximum sizes allowed will freeze your computer, and near limitless. I wanted to see what it would do and it tried to create such image sizes but locked up my PC. 😂  While it can create a image sized 40" x 40" with 600 ppi (and much larger images) without locking up, for a lag free experience 8" square images with 600 ppi did well. With 300 ppi 15" square images were fine too.

In that regard working on images sized 11" x 17" comic sized (tabloid) 300 ppi, there is a second of lag when filling small areas, but was nearly lag free for drawing with a brush.

There are no crops, bleed, or color options available under the File New menu option - see the above image.

* Incidentally the New image window shows the memory size, and for a lag free experience even with over 8 GB of free memory in 64-bit Windows, Paint.NET does best around the 60 MB image size mark.

File Formats -

• Open - PDN (Paint.NET), BMP (Bitmap), GIF, JPG/JPEG/JPE/JFIF (JPEG), PNG, TIF/TIFF (TIFF), TGA (TarGA), DDS (DirectDraw Surface)
• Save - PDN (Paint.NET), BMP (Bitmap), GIF, JPG/JPEG/JPE/JFIF (JPEG), PNG, TIF/TIFF (TIFF), TGA (TarGA), DDS (DirectDraw Surface)

Plug-in Support - Yes, DLL plug-ins. See the forum Plug-in section for many that are available.

Customizable Shortcuts/Menus/Icons - No on everything. Shortcuts and everything is not changeable even in the newest version. The list of shortcut keys are available. Only the four basic windows can be switched off/on or moved around, for any customization.

Layer Options - The options include View/Visibility, New layer, Delete layer, Duplicate layer, Merge layer down, Move layer Up and Down, and Properties. Clicking properties offers changing the Layer name, Visibility, 14 Blending modes, and Opacity amount.

Color Selection - The Color window offers a color wheel, and a palette. Clicking the More > > button shows Sliders, Numerical inputs, and all the Palette's 96 colors.

While the Palette offers a Add color to palette button, it seems to do nothing. If you are interesting in the Palette, see the Palette help for details.

Brush Options - Along the top menu the options are Brush width, Hardness, 55 Fill options (besides color includes some texture images), Anti-aliasing (On/Off), 15 Blending options, and Selection clipping mode (Pixelated/Antialiasing).

Common Necessities - Other tools that are primarily tools, and is surprising lacking in some software making it necessary to include them briefly.

Paint Fill - Flood mode (Continuous/Global), Fill type (55 textures including solid), Tolerance, Sampling (Layer/Image), Anti-aliasing (On/Off), 15 Blending options, and Selection clipping mode (Pixelated/Antialiasing).
Eraser - Brush width, Hardness, Anti-aliasing (On/Off), and Selection clipping mode (Pixelated/Antialiasing) .
Image Zoom - Onscreen buttons and slider, shortcut controls, and menu controls. Zoom range 3% to 3200%
View Rotate - No.
Selection Tools - Standard rectangle, lasso, ellipse, and Magic wand - all with varying options.

Text/Font Options - Along the top is the typical Font selector (with text preview), Size, Styles (Bold, Italic, Underline, Strikeout), Text rending mode (Smooth/Sharp (Modern)/Sharp (Classic)), Align (Left/Center/Right), Anti-aliasing (On/Off), 15 Blending options, Selection clipping mode (Pixelated/Antialiasing), and Finish button.

There are no options such as Character spacing (kerning), Word spacing (tracking), Line spacing/Alignment (leading), and such. Also text entered can not be selected, for edits, but rather arrow keys or mouse the cursor position to delete individual letters.

Drawing Aids - Page ruler (set only to pixel and not adjustable - and does not offer pull-off Guides), Grid (when zoomed in close), Line / Curve tool (with Brush options, plus Styles for the ends (Flat/Arrow/Filled Arrow/Rounded) and the center (Solid/Dashes/Dotted/Dash, Dot/Dash, Dot, Dot)), and Shapes.

The Shapes tool has various shapes (Basic/Polygon and Stars/Arrows/Callouts/Symbols), Fill mode (Draw shape outline/Draw filled shape/Draw filled shape with outline), Style option allows setting the stroke (Solid/Dashes/Dotted/Dash, Dot/Dash, Dot, Dot) and other settings same as the Brush tool.

The Shapes "Callouts" makes various word balloons that can be adjusted in size; however, the balloon tail is built-in and length/curve/etc are not adjustable so is of little use.

Extras - NONE (all mentioned above).

Pros -

• Free software
• Few floating tool windows, and become partially transparent over the image (gets a plus from me).
• Stable, no program errors or crashes - with the exception of making huge images.
• Really fast program loading times
• Great replacement for Microsoft Paint, and perhaps with some plug-ins a worthwhile program

Cons -

• Depending on your needs some necessary tool/text/page (image)/etc options are missing for any project work.
• Limited text options with no kerning, leading, or tracking.
• RGB only no CMYK, Grayscale, or such support.
• No view rotate which has become a standard tool for many artists (after all we do it with actual paper too 😏).

Recommended Use - Not intended as a one-stop program especially in any serious art capacity, but useful for sketching, "warm-up" drawing exercises, or replacing Windows Draw.