Paint.NET - Features

Features

Simple, intuitive, and innovative user interface
Every feature and user interface element was designed to be immediately intuitive and quickly learnable without assistance. In order to handle multiple

images easily, Paint.NET uses a tabbed document interface. The tabs display a live thumbnail of the image instead of a text description. This makes navigation very simple and fast.

Performance: It's fast. Really fast.
Extensive work has gone into making Paint.NET the fastest image editor available. Starting the app is nearly instantaneous and every feature has been thoroughly optimized to take advantage of the latest multicore CPUs, GPUs, and NVMe SSDs. The use of DXGI Flip Model ensures low input latency and reduced power consumption. Whether you have a power-conscious laptop or a monstrous desktop with a gigantic GPU, you can expect Paint.NET to start up immediately, respond quickly to every mouse click, and take full advantage of all of your hardware.

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.

Pen and Drawing Tablet Support
Back by popular demand, Paint.NET 5.0 now supports pressure sensitivity with compatible pens and drawing tablets from Wacom, UGEE, Microsoft, and more. This enables you to draw beautiful, natural-looking brush strokes.

Comprehensive File Format Support
Paint.NET supports a wide variety of popular and standard file formats, including: PNG, JPEG, JPEG XL, AVIF, HEIC, WebP, JPEG XR, BMP, GIF, TIFF, DDS, TGA, and of course PDN (Paint.NET's native image type that supports layers). Support for more file types can be added with plugins.

Color Management Support
Paint.NET now has full color management support, a feature commonly found in more expensive or complicated imaging software. This ensures that images with embedded color profiles look the way they're supposed to, as originally captured by a camera or as intended by the author. The use of Windows Advanced Color means that Paint.NET can use the full color gamut of your monitor, authentically displaying images that use color spaces such as Display P3.

Active Online Community
Paint.NET has an online forum with a friendly, passionate, and ever-expanding community.

Be sure to check out the constantly growing list of tutorials and plugins!

Automatically Updated
Updates are free and contain new features, performance improvements, and bug fixes. If you are using the Microsoft Store release, updating is done in the background when you aren't using the app. For the "classic" release, updates only take two clicks and can be installed when you're finished with your session.

Special Effects
Many special effects are included for enhancing and perfecting your images. Everything from blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, distortion, noise, and embossing are included. Also included is our unique 3D Rotate/Zoom effect 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, curves, and levels. You can also convert an image to black and white, or sepia-toned.

Powerful Tools
Paint.NET includes simple tools for drawing shapes, including an easy-to-use curve tool for drawing splines or Bezier curves. The Gradient tool has been cited as an innovative improvement over similar tools provided by other software. 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, a Recolor tool, and an extensible Shapes tool, among others.

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.