Microsoft, WSU Release Paint.NET 2.0

Apparently, Microsoft has a free alternative to Windows Paint, designed and built with MS's guidance by students at Washington State University. Paint.NET v2.0 (released today) is only a seven megabyte download, and represents one of the most professional alternatives to Photoshop I've seen. Not everyone can pay the enormous cost of Photoshop, and Paint.NET v2.0 has plenty of advanced features, including the most important one, layers. It also has unlimited undo, lots of effects (and you can download more, or even create your own using an API), ink support for Tablet PCs, red-eye removal, auto-leveling, and layer importing from other files. One cool design feature: Dialog boxes become transparent when laying on top of the image, so they don't block your view. I wish Photoshop did that! It's not going to challenge Photoshop for market supremacy, but its light-years ahead of Paint. A must for any Windows user. What a great product!


(via Rick Brewster's blog)