I've been in several offices where people think they need Photoshop to crop or resize photos. Consequently no-one has Photoshop (because its expensive) and people end up pasting 2000x800 images of logos into their letterhead and wondering why all the word files got so big.
Paint.Net is brilliant for doing common tasks like that.
Its a shame you have to play 'guess the download link' - that has really stopped me from recommending it to people recently.
I think the big difference is that they come with the OSes that those types of people are likely to use. And being stores, they provide software that package managers are unlikely to provide.
I think package managers becomes less useful to average users when you can't expect all of your software to be there.
On Android they sometimes do install OS level stuff (libraries, etc). I think he has a good point.
The biggest difference I see is that package managers on most Linux distributions are designed to be extensible to support other sources. Application stores generally are not.
My daughter accidentally downloaded 6 different programs while trying to download Paint.net some which were malware. While I understand these are ads probably out of their control, their website is extremely deceptive in my opinion and should be modified to make the actual Paint.net download more obvious.
I did the same about 6 months ago trying to grab speedfan for someone else in the office. I never had any trouble before cause adblock and so didn't even think to be careful :(
It's why I do use adblockers. I try to disable them on sites that don't do anything nearly this scummy, which is frustrating because stuff like Paint.net I otherwise want to support.
I'm pretty sure these ads are exactly what they are to maximize click-rate, and therefore to give Paint.NET's author the most money. Very exploitative (with emphasis on exploit).
What I find interesting is that when people go to the PDN forums to call him out on it, even in a nice way ("hey, I love your software but I got a bunch of malware instead due to the big fake buttons, just wanted you to know"), he blasts them and whines about how little money he makes off of a project he pours his life into, and how he's going to just quit because it's not worth the hassle anymore.
Then he releases a new version, makes even bigger buttons that lead to even scummier malware, and the cycle repeats.
I get the need to make money off of your hard work, and certainly the guy does a fantastic job on the software, but he's pulling some really shitty tactics to make that money. Why not a lite/pro version setup, or something else above board?
The lite vs. pro version is a great suggestion and I would have purchased a pro version for my daughter immediately to avoid the malware hassles it caused us. Instead she purchased an academic version of Photoshop which was $100 USD or in that ballpark. This is a shame because Paint.net is a great product and I'd like to see it succeed but their business side is poorly executed. I'll need to head over to the PDN forums and express my frustration.
For three years I worked for a company that actually created and distributed the fake download button ads (along with a wide variety of other "interesting" projects). I even designed some of the creatives during early A/B tests. And even I still click the wrong link on occasion.
Paint.NET is one of the first things I get when I install windows somewhere. It's actually pretty frustrating that there isn't a nice simple image editing tool like that for Mac (or Linux). There's Gimp but...
I actually run paint.net inside a windows vbox on OS X. Pixelmator doesn't cut it. People say paint.net is simple but it's actually very powerful. It's just designed so well that it fools people into thinking it's simple.
One downside of pixelmator (as compared to Acorn) - you can't cut/paste Excel spreadsheets and get all the nice formatting and gridlines - Acorn handles that.
Also wondering what is wrong pixelmator. My trial ran out before I could decide whether it was really capable enough. It seemed like something wasn't quite right with it though.
The OSX alternative is Seashore. It's got the same goal as Paint.Net, to be a simple and easy to use image editor and is based on gimp, so it's stable and supports many things.
Krita is an impressive painting app, but not really designed for photo-editing. The developers of Krita currently have a Kickstarter campaign running to fund new features and possibly port it to the Mac
I'm too stupid to use Gimp. It's like every time I want to do something I think is really simple (and in other tools it is really simple) takes me longer to do in Gimp. Sometimes I can't get it right, give up and try something else.
While acengiano here is being downvoted, this is really one of my biggest gripes with Gimp. I'm having a terrible user experience.
It also doesn't help that I'm already well used to the paint.net/photoshop keyboard shortcuts. Besides Gimp having its own, different keyboard shortcuts, it also has some unique (and again different) conventions for how to use the mouse to select regions and stuff like that.
It may be equally productive once you're used to it, but I never liked Gimp enough to get into how the different ways it has chosen to do things actually works.
Gimp shortcuts aren't displayed, most often. Try creating a path and draw a line on it: You'll have to use the mouse very, very often. And you'll only find the shortcuts if you search online.
That's sad because you could be much more efficient with it.
GIMP is too complex (and too slow to startup) for simple image editing tasks.
None of the substitute photo viewer type apps on Linux really seem to stand in particularly well either - I like Shotwell at the moment, but it still lacks an easy to use crop/copy/paste workflow.
gThumb has been my favourite for years for quick resize/crop/rotate/white balance edits and image folder browsing. I don't know why it never was picked as default on Linux Desktops.
Depends on what you need on the Mac. For many common image editing tasks like rotating, cropping, resizing, saving in a different image format, some simple levels, exposure, saturation, sharpening and white balance adjustments as well as a few mark up tools (adding text, arrows, various shapes) Preview is perfectly adequate.
That’s probably more than enough for people who don’t actually create any images. Maybe the photo editing is a bit anaemic, but Photoshop’s photo editing tools are cryptic and hard to use for occasional users and those probably benefit a lot more from a simple editing panel with a few relevant sliders than from all the hard to unlock power of Photoshop.
The only notable absent thing is some sort of image straightening tool (only 90° rotations are possible).
If you want to do actual image editing there are a couple of excellent apps, namely Acorn and Pixelmator, both modern and frequently updated. You have to pay for them but that’s Mac software. You should have to pay for them. That’s only proper.
There's a large amount of free software available on Windows that doesn't have an equivalent on Mac. It matter less over time as more things move to the web, but Paint.net is still a good example.
I had a similar situation and came across... "Pinta" (Linux), I think it was. Did enough while retaining relatively simple and straight-forward controls. (It was no Paint.NET, but neither was it the beginner-adverse Gimp.)
I'd have to have another look to refresh my memory, and it was only a brief need, but might be worth having a look.
P.S. And of course, for vector graphics, "Inkscape".
And, oops: I see now that someone else mentioned Pinta already.
Preview is a markup tool, not an image editing tool.
On OS X it is either Acorn (my preferred tool, because you can cut/paste excel spreadsheets into it elegantly), or Pixelmator (which I also use occasionally)
Depends on what you mean by 'editing'. I can crop, resize, rotate and stitch together images in Preview which is editing in my book and covers about 95% of all image editing I ever need.
I've used Paintbrush for this use case because it gets the job done and is free; it hasn't been updated in a while but still seems to work fine under Maverick.
Once I read somewhere that Paint.NET developer is the only in the interwebs than can make a living out only of donations for his software. I don't know if this is true, but it is totally deserved.
I use Paint.NET for a lot of things, most of them professionally. If I someday get lucky in this startup lottery thing, I intend to donate some thousands of dollars.
EDIT for add: I see a lot of comments talking about using Paint.NET for croping and resizing. I do so much more than this. I actually create all kinds of communication materials with it. Flyers, images for a landing page, business cards, etc. The layers feature is what make it of great value for me. Also the feature to open different images at the same time is great to create an image that includes a logo, a stock photo, a standard background.
Two things that are missing: be able to save it using CMYK color scheme (better for professional printing) and saving as PDF (easier to send it to graphic stores).
I think you're talking about Phil Katz the author of PKZIP and the creator of the zip format. AFAIK, Eugene Roshal, the author of WinRar is still alive and kicking.
Maybe he makes money also with the 50 pages displaying ads you have to visit before to be able to download the file.
But this does not detract from the qualities of the software, that I use daily.
I use adblock, but when I fired up another browser, I still had three clicks, and the only ads were one typical square block ad, that didn't get in the way at all.
It isn't really a bad thing. He's giving the software away for free. I'm never a fan of the ones that pretend to be the download link (the ad on the left linked to http://www.mac-zip.com/lp/freezip_osx/df?mnag=155060&mnct=45... god knows what kind of stuff you'd get if you downloaded/ran that...)
Interestingly, others seem to be seeing two ads. With Chrome I only get one ad square, the one on the left part of the page. The ad on the right never shows up.
Actually RGB is better for professional printing. Printers typically have specific colour profiles for their printers and converting your CMYK profile to their CMYK profile will usually result in differences you weren't expecting.
RGB -> CMYK (@ the printer) will be closer to what you expect (what you saw on screen).
Sorry, but this makes no sense. You have the same issues with portably reproducing colours with RGB that you have with CMYK. Either way, unless you're working with calibrated hardware and explicit colour management, you don't have much chance of getting a printer to reliably reproduce what you saw on your screen; sometimes it simply isn't possible, because your RGB and CYMK representations aren't going to support exactly the same gamut.
I said that because I use an online printing service, and everytime I send a PDF they demand it is in CMYK. As they look very professional in everything else and the quality of the final product is great, I just assumed it was a best practice. Good to know.
The major improvement for everyone is decreased startup time thanks to Multicore JIT. That was one of my few irritations with Paint.NET.
Paint.NET should perform better overal thanks to GPU acceleration and multithreaded rendering. I've personally used the alpha's and beta's for a while now and it just feels zippier.
For several years I had put off using Paint.NET over GIMP due to the dependency on .NET, but as soon as I realized that it still managed to outperform GIMP, I moved on the spot.
Still do not get how GIMP gets compiled on Windows to perform so poorly.
JIT'ed bytecode only carries a ~10% performance overhead versus well-optimized compiled native code, so the argument that a .NET program would be slower is bogus nonetheless.
In this case, GIMP is fully POSIX and GTK based so it needs to translate all POSIX stuff for Windows + rely on a subpar implementation of GTK for the Windows platform.
A good example of how native vs managed usually impacts performance much less than the application structure.
Sure, I am aware of JIT vs AOT compilation, although .NET JIT has not been touched that much on the last years. Looking forward to RyuJIT improvements.
Just that a statement that writing something in C does not make it fast by itself.
My GF is a teacher who did some graphics design and typesetting part-time during her time at the university. She used the Adobe products of course. When teaching at a school for the first time, and doing image manipulation with the pupils, she had to use Gimp because it is free and because of that the "oficially recommended" program. She had real trouble adjust to the GUI and teaching it to her pupils and at the same time the tool was way oversized for the tasks. I showed her Paint.NET and it was like heaven-sent for her.
I agree the GIMP developers are missing out on a big opportunity by not making their UI look/behave more like the commercial products people are used to. But on the other side there are a lot of people used to the current GIMP UI as well.
Good thing there are projects like Gimpshop (though I havent' tried it yet), GIMP is a open source project so I don't see why we wouldn't have multiple UI's just like there are for Linux, KDE, GNOME, Xfce, ... as long as the core remains the same.
Every time image editing comes up on forums, so does mentions of GIMP. To me, there seems to be no shortage of "GIMP has UX problems" claims.
So what gives? Do they not believe that this is a legitimate problem hurting their adoption? Or do they not care about adoptions? Somehow it's not a priority? Or their execution is severely lacking.
I'm not in any way affiliated with GIMP or even a graphics professional but as a programmer I think part of it is ideological (GIMP is not a copy of photoshop, why would we spend a lot of resources to change something that works for us and copy adobe for example just to appeal to users who don't want to learn to use a new UI or workflow) and part of may be just because they are more or less happy with it, they have a steady user base (at least it seems that way guessing by the mentioning of GIMP on forums as you say), also it's not like they (programmers/community) are going to get rich off of it so there might be no profit motive in revamping the whole thing.
I think the project just needs some fresh blood, either a fork that strives for a (better) more familiar UX for people that are switching from commercial products or an easy way to decouple the UI from the core and build custom front ends. There's no point in re-developing all the functionality that's already in GIMP, it's a functional product with years of development behind it.
I've been using GIMP for years and if I don't use it for a couple weeks still have to look up in the help where the crop tool is. The GUI is pretty rough to use.
There's some history there. Basically a scammer was passing it off as a paid app [1].
See also [2]:
"Excluding the installer, text, and graphics, Paint.NET was released under a modified version of the MIT License.[6] It was initially released as completely open source, but due to breaches of license, all resource files (such as interface text and icons) were released under a Creative Commons license forbidding modification, and the installer was made closed-source.[7]
Version 3.36 was initially released as partial open source, but the sources were later removed by Brewster, citing problems with plagiarism. In version 3.5, the license was altered to reflect this, and users are now prohibited from modifying the software. As free licenses cannot be revoked, developers can still legally develop forks based on version 3.36 and earlier. Brewster later stated that he hopes to release portions of the source code back into the public."
If the author see no obvious benefits with keeping it open source but sees downsides I don't see why it would be an over reaction. I did exactly the sane thing as he a few years ago. I've since opened sourced it again since people were wanting to contribute.
I deleted my original comment because it was mean and not deserved. However on not costing you anything, software is never free as in cost of ownership. Ask the folks that still suffer after Google Reader.
You've proved too much now; if you're going to follow through with that argument, rather than just lob it into the discussion with an "any weapon to hand in the moment" philosophy, you just proved you can't use any software, ever, because someday, you might not be able to use it.
How about instead appreciating the different scenario outcomes between stand-alone OS-native installable software and "software as a service", and then the variations within each - a multidimensional hue with Stallman GNU/Open Source/BSDs/Linux etc. close to each other at one bundle of ends, nowhere near the Googles, Apples, Oracles and Microsofts etc. at various others, surrounding a kind of "works on my machine(s)" conglomeration in the middle with varying levels of documentation and support.
The more rugs that get pulled from under you, the more you appreciate what your abdication of control loses you and the experience gained hopefully makes your next decision a wiser one.
Since my house got raided the only computers left were Macs. I really don't miss that much of Windows except Visual Studio and Paint.NET. Paint.NET is and feels really robust and everything it does just works like you expect it. I tried all alternatives for Macintosh and they all don't have the same features and have UI issues.
Or the parent doesn't know open-source alternatives exist. It doesn't hurt to remind about them, seeing as their development would benefit more people in the long run.
People who start with GIMP prefer its UI over Photoshop's. It's a matter of getting used to it, really. Or, failing that, "donate" to Adobe to get your ideal UI.
I appreciate that the author wants to get something back, but really? Why would I have to click through 4 or 5 pages just to get the download started, while nearly being tricked to click several abusive CNET "Download Here!" ads. Free apps like this would make a much more professional impression if they didn't clutter their websites with ads that no one will ever click (except for by mistake).
For the people asking for a Mac or Linux equivalent, Paint.NET is actually a .NET Framework application (hence the .NET) and has been ported to run on Mono: https://code.google.com/p/paint-mono/ (a little out of date, but still.)
hi, paint.net user here,
using paint.net since netframework 3.0 and stopped upgrading from above v3.5
i think it may not madder for the programmer of paint.net, but...
i stopped ugrading cause for me it seemed that all the newer versions are mainly fixing bugs which were not in v3.5, and it continues...
yes, in all the years using paint.net errors/bugs
only happend through plugins smile.
there are two points which i would like to be "nachgereicht" but thats something for the paint.net-forums...
what you can do with pixels when there are vector-based drawing programs...
maybe make others smile (?) heres an example
truly inspired by frankie zappas: "bobby brown"
direct link to image: http://i.imgur.com/0CIgBXV.png
Yes, anti-aliased selections! I love Paint.NET. It suits all my image editing needs completely. I've been using it for over 2 years. It's my go-to image editing program and I recommend it to anyone who wants a professional, feature-full, and free tool.
Plus Paint.NET occupies a sweet spot: it is simple enough to easily do easy tasks like cropping, while complex enough to do so slightly more advanced things.
I find it to be especially popular among IT professionals as they usually don't need to do photo-manipulation ("photoshopping"), but need to process images every so often.
There are many people who can't afford Photoshop, so Paint.NET is useful for those who want something better than paint without having to sell their car to pay for software.
What was snarky about it? I agree, he should file a bug report, as I'm on a modern system and don't have lag (I use paint.net and Gimp on Windows 7). But his comment was fairly emotionless and to the point.
Paint.Net is brilliant for doing common tasks like that.
Its a shame you have to play 'guess the download link' - that has really stopped me from recommending it to people recently.