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If you want software that respects your software freedom, you'll want to get off of using Microsoft Windows (because Windows is proprietary, user-subjugating, non-free software) and use the GIMP. Paint.net is non-free software. It's license clearly states "You may not modify, adapt, rent, lease, loan, sell, or create derivative works based upon the Software or any part thereof." which includes free software freedoms—distributing for a fee, making derivative works, and altering the software.

You see Rick Brewster, Paint.NET author, convey the same anti-software freedom sentiment in the Paint.NET blog article referred to in this story alongside Krita, a free software drawing application licensed under the GNU GPL. Consider a quote from Brewster's own blog:

Paint.NET is also not something I want to be chopped up and swept into other projects like Krita. Remember, I make my living off of this — why would I just give away my IP like that? (although, of course, the whole conversation space here is much more complex — please don't assume I'm anti-OSS or something)

If whatever "OSS" refers to (I'm guessing open source software) includes not letting users "chop up" the covered software and include code in other projects, then that's a clear and firm difference between the older free software social movement and the younger, business-centric, reactionary open source developmental methodology. Free software allows the user to do precisely what the Paint.NET license prohibit and what Brewster's comment explains. If Brewster is getting this wrong, and "OSS" doesn't stand for what he prohibits, people should take him to task for misunderstanding what open source software means, and they not allow that name to be conflated with proprietary software. But as of yet, I see no followup posts to his spelling out any misunderstanding of his chosen terms (making Brewster's claim another instance of the pattern I described earlier). Brewster also uses the term "IP" (which I'm assuming means "intellectual property") which is a scam that carries a dangerous assumption and should only be used to point out how bad the phrase is.

paint.net

You didn't read their FAQ:

Q: Will Paint.NET ever replace Paint in Windows?
A: No. :-)

can't be installed in windows 10. Yeah!

Uh, it says right on the download page "Windows 10 recommended". Are you claiming that they are recommending it for an OS it can't be installed on?

Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for PCs that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

paint.net

To be clear, the correct url is http://www.getpaint.net/index....

There's already a better replacement available: Paint.NET http://www.getpaint.net/ This tool is almost equivalent of what Notepad++ can do compared to Windows Notepad.

My favorite example is "The Gimp". Aside from a ridiculous name that's not suitable for a professional environment (like a lot of FOSS). They over estimate their target audience. They assume their target audience is a non-existent Professional Photoshop Refugee group and not home users.

In the end Paint.NET is an easier to use, more performant piece of software for Windows. Though I still use my version of Paint Shop Pro 5 from 1998 cause it runs like mad on my i5.

This would be something to get upset about if GIMP wasn't shit, but it really is. In fact, it's something to despise because its idiotic name, terrible UI, incredibly slow speed (GIMP biggest and most overlooked problem), and brain-dead design steals the spotlight away from better choices

You know what's miles better than GIMP and also free? Paint.NET

Actually, I imagine piracy is a major reason why Adobe would do this. Photoshop is probably the most pirated app of all time. Gimp will probably have a windfall of new users soon.

More like paint.net will have a windfall of new users, since most workplaces will be using Windows PCs anyway [the Gimp is still king in Linux]. I don't know if the Gimp ever got away from that whole floating windows with no parent window / menu bar design, and I'd imagine neither does anyone else who has ever tried the Gimp and been put off by its UI. Paint.net's UI has very little learning curve for those coming from Photoshop.

Paint.NET fills the niche of people like me who need a quick-and-dirty image editor and find themselves thinking "I really wish MSPaint could do X". It makes the most sense from the perspective of people coming from MSPaint. I also have GIMP and other image-editing software for more advanced tasks, but for most of the simpler things PDN is unbeatable.

I should note that it's not free software. There is no cost for a license (even for commercial uses), but it is definitely closed-source. Free as in beer, as they say.

Going to jump in here.. even though it runs on Mono... I'd say Pinta is probably the best PS substitute for *most* people's needs.. it's not the all-in though... for windows, I'd do Paint.Net ... I used to be a Paint Shop Pro fan until Corel bought out Jasc. For now, if it's basic photo editing tasks, Paint.Net or even Picasa work well enough for me... If you need the 800# gorilla, Photoshop has no equal right now.

I love Photoshop. I know it well, and can do things in it far easier than I can in GIMP, largely because of experience, but I do not have the time to invest to learn GIMP well.

If I want to make a quick button for me website, or clean up a photo, or make a nice card from my girlfriend, it is the tool I go to.

I am not well off.

Graphic design is -not- my career, therefore I really only have need to use Photoshop once a month or less.

I am not going to pay $700 or more for software that I only use 6 or 8 times a year. That equates to about $100 per project/use.

Sounds to me like you should try Paint.NET. It's my goto software for little projects like that, it's licensed Creative Commons for non-commercial use, and it boasts a very robust user base, with an abundance of plugins, tutorials and extremely helpful forums. For the casual usage you describe, I'd try it out. I've been told that the interface is very Photoshop-esque, much like a 'Photoshop Lite' (can't confirm, never used PS).

Also, the GIMP interface has improved noticeably in recent years, especially the version helpfully precompiled for Windows, but I switched over to Paint.NET when Gimp was still being a PITA, and I haven't really found any compelling reason to switch back to Gimp yet. I try it out every couple of years, to see what's new, but wind up going back to familiar ground :)

IMHO, Pirating should be the last resort, not just the first convenient resort. I also disagree with Adobe's extortionate pricing scheme, so I simply avoid using their products. Similarly for MS Office (Libre Office is simply da bomb). If there were no viable alternatives available to me...well, I'd still have to take a close look at 'wants' vs 'needs' before searching out a suitable .torrent. Also, like mcgrew said, sometimes what you are looking for just isn't for sale by anyone, anywhere, but other fans have taken the time to preserve their favorite content and are willing to share, to keep the fanbase alive. In such cases, nobody is losing revenue, since no one is offering the content for sale, yet the show still benefits by being kept in the forefront of their fans' regard (and perhaps even by expanding their fanbase). If down the road the copyright holders do decide to release the content for sale, well, if they do it right then dedicated fans will still buy it for the extra features, and new-made fans will be motivated to check it out, ones who may never have had a chance to see the show on air.

FWIW, I was the same way about the ThunderCats :) We had pretty much the entire series on tape, with the commercials edited out (do you know what a PITA that is on VHS?), then dutifully backed up to digital storage once that was generally available. Regardless, when they finally released the DVD version a couple of years ago, I think I was the first in line to buy them :)

Can I point to apps like Acorn and Paint.Net and Pixwlmator and Krita and others instead? These are all apps that were started long after GIMP was, and yet have managed to support things like 16 bit colorspaces, and other things.

While they might not all be FLOSS, I would argue that all of them are better than GIMP because they are far more usable, have far better support for colorspaces and high bit depth, were developed AFTER the GIMP was (and in less time), and don't have insulting names. I am not kidding about the latter btw, the GIMP folk have drawn a line in the sand when it comes to the name, but they are simply wrong there (like they are on so many things). It is childish, it is insulting, and it is unprofessional.

But that isn't why I avoid GIMP, it is because of the glacial pace of development, the horrible usability, the utter lack of non-destructive editing, and so many other factors,

As the list at the start of this post, small teams can produce high quality tools. The GIMP team has been spinning its wheels (and arguing what color they should be) for years and years, and after they release 2.8 (sometime this decade?) it will still pale in comparison to Photoshop 7. And that was released a decade ago.

In the mean time I rarely open Photoshop, unless I have something really hardcore to do. 95% of the time the aforementioned Acorn does what I need. I can't say the same about GIMP.

Paint.NET is free and Paint Shop Pro X4 is $50. Both are objectively better than GIMP. There are lots of other free and inexpensive raster graphics programs for Windows, as well as the high end stuff like Painter and Photoshop.

I tried and tried to make gimp work but it's just (interface-wise) a total POS. Maybe this new version will fix things. I happen to be on Windows and if you're in the same boat, I'd suggest anyone interested take a look at this program: http://www.getpaint.net/

Free (as in beer) also, and made it so much easier for me to take care of basic graphics activities than gimp. FWIW.

Have you tried Paint.NET?

I know, it's not open source, and it's only available for Windoze, but it's pretty darn flexible and there's tons of user support and user-created plugins. And the interface is much simpler than GIMP, I find...

No, but Paint.net doesn't suck too bad. It's a much better Paint, and it's free.

These guys for one. Or these folks. And these people. This is supposed to be very good. Also, these guys. Seriously, you could have just said you don't know anything about the capabilities of .NET in the first place. Or you could have just said nothing at all.

Try http://www.getpaint.net/ as an alternative to Photoshop.

It is very nice and free (as in beer).

Includes more detail about the algo
- Developed with researches at Princeton
- Demo'd at SIGGRAPH in Aug. 2009
- Old spot-healing tool tried to find one match for the hole; new tool copies multiple patches from the surrounding BG to fit into the hole, as well as finding & copying surrounding patterns

How is is different from the Patchworks project from MS Research (published 2003, implemented in MS Digital Image Suite)?

Is there any chance of having something like that as a Paint.NET plug-in?

Your correction needs a correction.

It's www.getpaint.net.

If you're going to be annoyed by someone's mistake, try not to annoy others with your mistake.

- not annoyed.

It's www.paint.net. Annoying.

I also use Paint.NET and while it certainly is no Photoshop (can we please have some more layer lighting options in the base program, pretty please?) I agree that it is much better than Paint. In fact, Microsoft could do a lot worse than simply ditching Paint and including Paint.NET instead as the default graphics editor for Windows. This would achieve a dual purpose: it would improve the default photo editing experience in Windows AND it would promote the .NET platform to a wider audience who might then be more willing to try other .NET apps after having a good experience with Paint.NET.

Paint.net for Windows is a decent, free*, semi-powerful program for image editing. As a casual user, it does everything I've needed and more. And it advertises itself as a MSPaint replacement.

It started as a college project that did get backing from Microsoft. http://www.getpaint.net/

It's too bad, really. I like GIMP because it shows users that unlike Windows, which comes with a bunch of widget apps at best, that Ubuntu comes with serious productivity software, equivalents of which on Windows can cost hundreds or thousands of dollars.

I guess I can see where they're coming from. I do agree that double-clicking on a picture shouldn't launch a full-fledged photo editor like GIMP, but I liked that it was easily accessible without having to do anything extra. Couldn't the same argument be made of OpenOffice.org? Are they going to replace it anytime soon with a scaled-down Wordpad equivalent? What about Compiz? Those also take up space, aren't needed for basic computer use, and could be installed with trivial effort.

Image editing is still way behind Windows and Mac OSX, where you have Photoshop for power users and also Paint Shop Pro for less power users, but who still like a full image editing suite.

Actually, for most users, I'd suggest GIMP on Windows, or for lighter-duty work, Paint.NET. I gave up on Paint Shop Pro after Jasc sold out to Corel. It's gotten more expensive and now they're playing games I hate that other mainstream commercial software is. (There's now a more expensive "Paint Shop Pro Ultimate" edition...). Too bad, too. Years ago, Paint Shop Pro was one of the first shareware programs I ever bought.

Fail, it doesn't appear to be available for ubuntu!

"Paint.NET is free image and photo editing software for computers that run Windows." http://www.getpaint.net/index.html

Plus it's written in shitty .NET, so it will probably never be available for Ubuntu and it's going to be slow and horrible to use.

Plus plus the gimp's better anyways!

Secondly, the documentation is typically better on commercial software than FOSS (there are some expections, mostly badly documented commercial software rather than well documented FOSS). Again, writers, proofreaders and editors want to get paid for their work.

I really noticed this when I was working with LWJGL. There's no comparison to the official javadocs. For one thing, some of the classes and packages don't even exist. Method names are incorrect and have to be guessed, and there's no description, or the description is completely incorrect for what a method does.

In short, no docs would almost be better.

I've submitted corrections, but they never made it in. When I submitted corrections to Sun, the javadocs got fixed, evidenced when I re-downloaded a few months later.

I've found many FOSS projects have poor communication with users. It seems to be the rule, actually. Deluge, a semi popular torrent client for linux, has swaths of bugs. I submitted no less than 15 reproducible ones, that plagued me after a week of use. Unfortunately, none got fixed. Plenty of new releases, though... introducing new bugs.

I also submitted bugs for Transmission. Gave up on that one after 3 months of no fixes.

Closed source really doesn't matter if the program has all the features required and has a good UI. A perfect example is uTorrent. I prefer the slightly older, more simplistic UI, but it still basically has a minimalistic UI. It's snappy(responsive), doesn't really hog CPU, and doesn't make logic errors because some coder is a newbie.

The best linux torrent client I found is qBittorrent. However, the version in the Ubuntu repository has the strange bug of removing torrents that are being downloaded, if it crosses the ratio. So if I set it to remove at 1.5, and it downloads horribly slow by freak chance, then it'll remove the torrent part way into downloading. Brilliant.

My overall impression of FOSS isn't very good right now. It was better back before I had tried Ubuntu. :P

Firefox really is the shining light in the FOSS world. Most FOSS software lacks essential UI elements, or has other bugs, and there's no easy way to add or fix something. To help with a FOSS project, you have to have some serious devotion. Figuring out how to submit a patch for the first time is a nightmare, and for most of us, not worth our time. Many people seem happier with extensible, stable frameworks, so you can completely go around everyone in your way, and deliver a solution in a few short hours without any learning or big obstacles. Firefox extensions are the perfect example - other programs going this route have also been very successful. Now, if only Mozilla would fix the bookmarks.

Install Mono and use PAINT.NET. There is a Linux version already available for Mono-enabled Linux distributions. Since it is written entirely in Microsoft.NET you can not only use the program but also the plugins for it.
http://www.getpaint.net/

He removed the source completely from the download page now, I think you might still be able to ask him for it. But like they said in the forums, for the most part it was a single developer who made the source available.

http://www.getpaint.net/download.html#src

http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=12&t=30838&p=274324

It's not GPL; it has been released under a slightly tweaked version of the MIT licence I think. I'm think that's an OSI/FSF approved FOSS licence but I'm not completely certain.

Here's the detail:
http://www.getpaint.net/doc/latest/en/License.html

If you are on windows, give Paint.NET a try. It doesn't cost anything, so make sure to use the official download (there are 'opportunists' that charge for it):

http://www.getpaint.net/download.html

Not as feature laden as Photoshop, but a lot more similar to Photoshop than the Gimp (there are silly redundant path tools right on the default toolbox).

Now, let's say you know you want some sort of drawing program. You don't quite know which one, you just want something. In Ubuntu, you head over to the Applications thing (can't recall what it's called, always use synaptic), browse to the right category, check the short descriptions for something that seems interesting, double click. How would this process go in Windows?

Depends. For most people, it involves a trip to Best Buy. The rest usually open up a browser, type in "piratebay.org" and hit enter, then type in "Photoshop" because it's the only drawing program they know of.

Slightly off-topic side note 1: I think Photoshop's piracy rate would plummet if more people knew about http://www.getpaint.net./ I still haven't found a Linux drawing program I like as much. (Suggestions gladly accepted)

Slightly off-topic side note 2: Ubuntu's "Applications thing" you mentioned is actually labeled "Add/Remove Applications" Kinda like the one under Windows, except this one really can add programs.

depending on what you do, Paint.net is a decent low end alternative. I compare it to the slightly older versions of Paint Shop Pro, but they've supposedly added a lot of functionality in the last few versions, closing the Photoshop functionality gap a bit. It's native to windows, and having tested both GIMP and this, has a much less steep 'getting used to it' curve.

And even they suck when compared to open source/freeware alternatives such as Speedcrunch, Notepad++, and Paint.NET.

Note that the MIT license is permissive, which wouldn't require Microsoft to actually share the source upon distribution (also note that Microsoft used to include a BSD licensed networking stack).

However while looking at the exceptions noted on that licensing page it looks like Paint.NET's license isn't compatible with Section 6 from the Open Source definition.

* Exception 3: Although the Paint.NET source code distribution includes the GPC source code, use of the GPC code in any other commercial application is not permitted without a GPC Commercial Use Licence from The University of Manchester. For more information, please refer to the GPC website at: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/~toby/alan/software/

You'd have to replace the GPC library it includes.

Except that Paint.Net is Open Source (MIT License). We'll see how well that goes over (er, doesn't) with Microsoft.

How much decent Net software is there out there anyway? Is it all in-house so we never see it? I've only seen VB shareware quality stuff no matter what I've had to pay for it.

Not really a killer app, but pretty nifty nonetheless: http://www.getpaint.net/ (paint.NET)

http://www.koffice.org/krita/
http://www.inkscape.org/
http://www.gimpshop.com/
http://www.getpaint.net/

You can even get an Alpha of Krita 2.0 for Windows these days. All of those are free.

Who needs Photoshop Express when we have Paint.net? http://www.getpaint.net/ It's open source and a very good alternative to Photoshop. It even has a plugin that lets you code new filters and effects in C# within Paint.net.

Paint.NET http://www.getpaint.net/ is an excellent free alternative.

If your on a windows system why not use Paint.net http://www.getpaint.net/

...or, you could do something like this.

Paint.NET isn't your traditional GPLed software (it's MIT-licensed, actually), but it's free, and the source is free (barring some recent changes to keep people from making backspaceware out of it). The author seems to be making a decent bit of money from it.

Thanks for recommending Paint.NET. Just tried out out, and it seems a lot easier for Photoshop users to switch to than the GIMP (even GIMPshop). Coupled with Inkscape and Kompozer, I now have a reasonable combination of apps to replace Adobe's Creative Suite (except for Flash).

Picasa was OK the last time I tried it, but has some issues. Mostly, I felt like the software was in control and I was not.

The GIMP gives you a ton of control, perhaps too much in some areas, and not enough in others. For example, I couldn't figure out how to turn an image to black and white in the GIMP, but I could separate the color chanels w/o trouble. This just seems wrong. For Photoshop, you can convert to b&w with an option that's on the menu, while in the GIMP, I had to really hunt for it.

In Photoshop, I feel at least, they much better balance the level of control that the user has vs the control the software just takes, then builds many tools with different levels of control, depending on what the user feels comfortable with. But its expensive. I'd like to use PS, but don't want to spend the money which could go into a new scanner, or camera piece.

Personally (I do photo editing on Windows b/c it has the tools I need), I use GIMP and Paint.NET. Both are good tools for the job, and Paint.NET is very simple to use - but not nearly as powerful as something like GIMP, Photoshop, etc. I personally find the crop tool and rotation tool in Paint.NET superior to GIMP, but that's just my personal feelings. Also, Paint.NET has some very good tutorials in their forum section. The only down-side to Paint.NET is that its based on the .NET framework, so versions for Mac/Linux are probably never going to happen.

-CPM

Use Paint.NET instead... http://www.getpaint.net/

No, GIMP is unintuitive to all windows users. (Linux users don't give a damn about application look & feel consistency anyway).
Actually gimp (for windows at least) is not even the best free image editor... because Paint.NET blows it away in every aspect.

Sure, it looks good and it's consistent in it's appearance (unlike java) but think of it like a user does - he sees the slow load time for the application, which I would argue is UI related. And yes, you read that right - slow load times.