Paint.NET v3.5 released on November 6, 2009

This release focused on improving performance and reliability, reducing memory usage, upgrading to the latest .NET Framework version, and refreshing the user interface for Aero and glass (Windows  7 / Vista).

• New: Refreshed user interface with new icons and visual styling. On Windows 7 and Vista, it is enhanced for Aero and "glass".
• New effect: Blurs -> Surface Blur, by Ed Harvey
• New effect: Distort -> Dents, by Ed Harvey
• New effect: Distort -> Crystalize, by Ed Harvey
• New: Russian translation.
• Performance and memory usage have been extensively optimized throughout the entire program.
• .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 is now required, which has many built-in performance improvements.
• Disk space usage has been reduced by about 12MB by using NTFS compression on installation files related to staging (.MSI) and diagnostics (.PDB).
• Compression for .PDN images has been improved.
• Effect dialog responsiveness has been improved.
• Images open much faster, especially on single CPU systems.
• Startup performance on most systems will be better by about 20%.
• Memory usage has been reduced when more than one image is open.
• Rendering quality has been greatly improved when zoomed in.
• The selection outline is no longer animated. Instead of "dancing ants", a context-sensitive "XOR" stipple pattern is drawn. This has allowed for improved performance and lowered CPU consumption (and longer battery life).
• The font manager for the Text tool has been completely rewritten, which fixes many problems seen with crashes and missing fonts.
• On Windows XP, the Text tool has improved reliability and font selection (it uses GDI instead of GDI+).
• On Windows 7, the Text tool will use DirectWrite (instead of GDI) which gives better performance and greatly improved quality. On Windows Vista, you may install DirectX 11 to enable this feature; otherwise GDI will be used.
• The toolbar font list has improved usability, rendering quality, and significantly improved performance.
• The toolbar font list no longer requires an application restart to recognize newly installed fonts.
• When many fonts are installed, both memory usage and startup performance have been greatly improved.
• It is now drastically easier to move a very small selection.
• All installation prerequisites are now installed automatically, such as .NET and Windows Installer.
• Updates are now downloaded in the background, and installed after you exit the application. In previous versions, this was a foreground task and you could not use Paint.NET while the update was downloaded.
• Added a "Utilities" menu. Updates, Languages, and Plugin Errors have been moved there.
• Added a "Manage Fonts" command to the Utilities menu. This will launch the built-in Windows font control panel.
• Clicking the middle mouse button on an image thumbnail will now close the image.
• Improved the Unfocus effect.
• The DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) file type now allows you to select the resampling algorithm for auto-generated mip-maps.
• A processor that supports SSE is now required (almost all CPUs purchased this decade satisfy this).
• Fixed an issue with Gaussian Blur and its treatment of alpha values.
• Fixed a crash with the "Units" selector in the toolbar.
• Fixed a crash due to an overflow that prevented very large images from working (64-bit only).
• Fixed many other miscellaneous glitches and crashes.
• The Korean translation has been removed. Sadly, we were unable to find the resources to complete this.

Paint.NET v3.36 Released: August 26th, 2008

This is mostly a servicing release to make some small improvements and to fix a few important bugs.

• Improved: Effect rendering should be a little faster now.
• Changed: Implemented some changes to the "Add Noise" effect that were suggested by a forum member.
• Changed: The canvas background color is now always #c0c0c0.
• Changed: The auto-updater should now correctly detect .NET 3.5 and newer, which will help to save bandwidth when Paint.NET v4.0 is released (it will require .NET 3.5).
• Fixed: Paint.NET now works on a system that has the .NET 3.5 SP1 "Client Profile" installed.
• Fixed: When zoomed in and the cursor is to the top-left of the image (negative coordinates), the ruler is now highlighted in the correct area.
• Fixed: The effect rendering system no longer sets the "Tag" property on the configuration dialog.
• Fixed: Some incorrectly authored plugins would cause a crash when loading their support details (author, copyright, etc.).
• Fixed: There was a bug in the color wheel for IndirectUI that caused it to show the wrong values at initialization.
• Fixed: There was a performance problem for effects that used the IndirectUI color wheel control.
• Fixed: In some rare cases, Paint.NET would crash while shutting down.
• Fixed: When using the "Fixed Ratio" feature of the Rectangle Selection tool, it would crash if 0 was specified for both the width and height.

Paint.NET v3.35 Released: July 7th, 2008

This releases introduces a new Posterize adjustment, a new Intersect selection mode, dramatically improved performance for selection editing, and several small bug fixes.

• New: Posterize adjustment, by Ed Harvey.
• New: Intersect selection editing mode.
• Improved: Dramatically improved selection editing performance for the Add and Subtract modes (and also for Intersect). The performance used to be dependent on image size, and thus was often unusable on images larger than 1024x768 pixels. It is now dependent only on selection complexity (number of polygon edges) -- the improvement is generally between 3x and 1000x.
• New: When holding Ctrl or Alt for a selection tool, the cursor now has a plus or minus indicator.
• Changed: The canvas background is now a solid color instead of a gradient. The gradient was causing certain tone misjudgments related to bright versus dark colors.
• Changed: Shortcut key for Sepia is now Ctrl+Shift+E. The shortcut for Posterize is now Ctrl+Shift+P.
• Changed: Hotkeys for selection modes are now Left click for Replace, Control+Left click for Add (union), Alt+Left click for Subtract (difference), Ctrl+Left click for Intersect, and Ctrl+Right click for Invert (xor).
• Changed: When using a selection mode other than "replace", it will now draw the selection outline so that you can see both the original and resulting selection areas. Before, it would only draw the resulting selection area outline, which made modes such as Intersect hard to use.
• Fixed: The Resize dialog had some rounding errors with the "Maintain aspect ratio" feature, which caused a few discrepancies and even a spurious "out of memory" error.
• Fixed: Some quirks with the Color Wheel control for IndirectUI-based effect plugins.
• Fixed: Several miscellaneous and rare crashes.
• Fixed: The installer would display a bizarre error if a "blank" install folder was attempted.
• Fixed: The installer now only accepts absolute path locations, instead of relative ones. This fixes an ambiguity between where Paint.NET believes it is installing itself to, and the directory that Windows Installer actually uses.
• Fixed: Sometimes pasting would result in a crash when certain types of malfored data were on the clipboard.
• Fixed: It was possible to get around some of the protections imposed by the IndirectUI system. This was causing instability with some effect plugins such as "Fern Fractal".
• Fixed: There were some issues with the implementation of "linked" sliders for effects based on IndirectUI.

Paint.NET v3.31 Released: May 1st, 2008

This is mostly a servicing release to fix a few important bugs.

• New: Enabled integration with Window Clippings, which is a high quality screen capture utility by Kenny Kerr.
• Fixed: Fixed a crash with the Open/Save dialogs if the Documents or Pictures directories were either inaccessible or if the user did not have certain file system permissions.
• Changed / Fixed: The hotkey for Adjustments -> Levels is now Ctrl+Shift+L instead of Ctrl+Alt+L. This was preventing certain characters, such as the Polish 'ł', from being typed.

3.30 Released: April 10th, 2008

This release adds an Italian translation, a new "Fragment Blur" effect, and the ability to save PNG images at 8- and 24-bit color depths. For developers, the IndirectUI system has some new controls, some new constraint rules, and can now be used for file type plugins.

* New: Italian translation.
* New: Ability to save PNG's at 8- and 24-bit color depths.
* New: Ability to save BMP's at 8-bit color depth.
* New: "Auto-detect" bit-depth option for PNG, BMP, and TGA file types. It will analyze the image and determine the lowest bit-depth that can still save the image without quality loss.
* New: "Fragment" blur effect, by Ed Harvey
* New: The "Polar Inversion" distortion effect has been enhanced to allow changing the rendering offset, and the behavior for "edge" pixels (clamp, reflect, or wrap).
* New: For developers, added a Color Wheel control to IndirectUI for use in effect plugins.
* New: For developers, added ability to customize certain properties of the effect configuration dialog via IndirectUI.
* New: For developers, IndirectUI can now be used to write configuration UI for file types.
* New: For developers, IndirectUI has a new radio button control type for enumerations, and some new property constraint rules.
* Changed: Most effects and adjustments, including plugins that use IndirectUI, have been visually refreshed. The new look is cleaner and more compact. These changes are shown in more detail at http://blog.getpaint.net/2008/03/10/cleaning-up-the-ui-for-paintnet-v330/
* Fixed: Various UI issues with the Levels adjustment.
* Fixed: When pasting text into the Text tool with Ctrl+V, it would hide the nub for moving the text.
* Fixed: If the startup tool was set to the Zoom or Pan (Hand) tool, then the toolbar would render incorrectly.
* Fixed: Thumbnails for PDN images now include transparency, which improves their appearance in Windows Vista.
* Fixed: In some cases, an exponential property slider would get "stuck" at some values when using up/down keyboard keys. This mostly affects some effect plugins.
* Fixed: When using keyboard navigation, sometimes the File menu would scroll its items out of view.
* Fixed: Some crashes that were tracked down to out-of-bounds coordinate values in certain effects.
* Fixed: The installer would fail if Paint.NET had never been installed before, and was being installed to any non-default directory. This bug only affected version 3.22.

Release Candidate 1 Released: April 7th, 2008

This release adds a new "Fragment Blur" effect, as well as the ability to save PNG images at 8- and 24-bit color depths. An official Italian translation has also been added.

• Fixed: Various UI issues with the Levels adjustment.
• Fixed: When pasting text into the Text tool with Ctrl+V, it would hide the nub for moving the text.
• Fixed: If the startup tool was set to the Zoom or Pan (Hand) tool, then the toolbar would render incorrectly.
• Changed: Enabled some compiler settings which improve security via support for DEP (/nxcompat), and Windows Vista's Address Space Layout Randomization feature (ASLR) (/dynamicbase).

Beta 1 Released: February 29th, 2008

This release adds a new "Fragment Blur" effect, as well as the ability to save PNG images at 8- and 24-bit color depths. An official Italian translation has also been added.

• New: Ability to save PNG's at 8- and 24-bit color depths.

• New: Ability to save BMP's at 8-bit color depth.
• New: "Auto-detect" bit-depth option for PNG, BMP, and TGA file types. It will analyze the image and determine the lowest bit-depth that can still save the image without quality loss.
• New: "Fragment" blur effect, by Ed Harvey
• New: The "Polar Inversion" distortion effect has been enhanced to allow changing the rendering offset, and the behavior for "edge" pixels (clamp, reflect, or wrap).
• New: For developers, IndirectUI can now be used to write configuration UI for file types.
• New: For developers, IndirectUI has a new radio button control type for enumerations, and some new property constraint rules.
• New: Italian translation.
• Fixed: In some cases, an exponential property slider would get "stuck" at some values when using up/down keyboard keys. This mostly affects some effect plugins.
• Fixed: When using keyboard navigation, sometimes the File menu would scroll its items out of view.
• Fixed: Some crashes that were tracked down to out-of-bounds coordinate values in certain effects.
• Fixed: The installer would fail if Paint.NET had never been installed before, and was being installed to any non-default directory. This bug only affected version 3.22.

Paint.NET 3.20

• Rectangle Select tool can now draw selections based on a Fixed Size or Fixed Ratio
• The selection combination mode is now accessible from the toolbar (Replace, Add (union), Subtract, Invert (”xor”))
• The “flood mode” for the Magic Wand and Paint Bucket tool are now accessible from the toolbar (Continuous, or Global)
• Reorganized the Effects menu so that all effects are classified under submenus named Artistic, Blurs, Distort, Noise, Photo, Render, and Stylize
• Improved rendering quality for the Motion Blur effect
• Enhanced the Radial Blur effect so that the center of blurring can be chosen, as well as the quality
• Enhanced the Zoom Blur effect so that the center of zooming can be chosen
• Enhanced the Bulge distortion effect so that the center of “bulging” can be chosen
• Enhanced the Frosted Glass distortion effect in several ways: 1) performance has been improved from between 1,000% to 10,000% depending on image size and property settings, 2) the scatter radius can now be set up to 200 pixels, 3) a “minimum” scatter radi
• Enhanced the Tile Reflection distortion effect by adding a Quality property
• Enhanced the Twist distortion effect by 1) allowing counter-clockwise twisting, 2) allowing the size of the twisted area to be configured, 3) allowing the location/center of twisting to be chosen
• Enhanced the Add Noise effect by adding a “coverage” property
• New Mandelbrot Fractal and Julia Fractal render effects
• New IndirectUI system for plugin authors so that they can develop much more sophisticated effect configuration dialogs with a fraction of the amount of work that used to be required
• If an effect plugin crashes, it is much more likely that Paint.NET will be able to recover from the error. The option to restart Paint.NET will then be provided as a recommended course of action

Paint.NET 3.10

• New: Soften Portrait effect
• New: Ink Sketch effect
• New: DirectDraw Surface (DDS) file format support
• New: "Paint.NET Search", available from the Help menu (shortcut key is Ctrl+E), allows you to search for Paint.NET help, forum posts, tutorials, plugins, and other related material: http://searchpaint.net
• Improved: Visual fit-and-finish for the Layers window
• Improved: Visual fit-and-finish for the close / 'X' button on image thumbnails
• Improved: Small (about 5-10%) performance improvements for some effects such as Oil Painting,Frosted Glass, and Gaussian Blur
• Improved: Increased max brush size to 500, as per forum members request
• Improved: Expanded list of available font sizes up through 288
• Changed: The keyboard shortcut key for the Color Picker is now 'k'. This makes it so that the toolbar option, "After click: Switch to previous tool", is not useless for those using the keyboard shortcuts
• Fixed: In some cases, undoing an action that removed a layer would result in the un-removed layer not showing up until you resized the Layers window ("ghost layers")
• Fixed: Pressing F1 from the main window no longer launches the online help in two browser tabs
• Fixed: Adding a new layer now adds it above the currently active layer, instead of at the very top of the layer list
• Fixed: Merge Down now activates the merged layer instead of the one above it
• Fixed: In Vista, clicking on a URL link from the installer will no longer launch the web browser with inherited, elevated privileges

Paint.NET v3.0

This major release is scheduled for a final release in February 2007 and is set to include the following major features:

• Simple and intuitive tab-based multi-document user interface
• More intuitive and more powerful toolbar
• User-definable color palette (as opposed to just the color wheel)
• Gradient drawing
• "Merge Down" layer command
• New effects: Clouds, Median, Unfocus, Outline, and an improved Sharpen

Please note that Windows 2000 is no longer supported. Paint.NET v3.0 will not install unless your operating system is Windows XP SP2 or newer. If you would like to use Paint.NET on Windows 2000, you will need to install Paint.NET v2.72 or earlier.

v3.0 Release Candidate 1: January 19th, 2007 - Download

This is the seventh public test release for v3.0. Since Beta 3, the following changes have been made:
New: New default color palette (you may have to use "Reset to default palette" to see it)
Finished: Help file is now up-to-date for 3.0.
Finished: UI translations for Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portugese, and Spanish. Note: Help file is still English-only.
Fixed: Status bar was not displaying help text for tools on first click
Fixed: "Rotate Image" was hanging
Fixed: Crash in installer when /createMsi was used
Fixed: "ScratchSurface already borrowed..." crash fixed in several places
Fixed: Spacebar was not activating command link buttons
Fixed: Zoom dropdown was not always working when set to "100%" in some specific cases

v3.0 Beta 3: December 22nd, 2006

This is the sixth public test release for v3.0. Since Beta 2, the following changes have been made:

• More complete translations, especially for German
• Fixed: All known high-DPI scaling and layout issues. The UI should work great at 96, 120, 144, and 196 DPI screen resolution settings.
• Fixed: Some toolbar layout issues
• Fixed: Thumbnail renderer had a race condition in its renderer thread which prevented proper shutdown in a few rare cases
• Fixed: Crash when shutting down the system
• Fixed: View->Grid did not work right
• Fixed: History and rendering problems when typing text with the Text tool and then using Image->Flip
• Fixed: Some selection text reporting a "0 x 0" selection when it shouldn't have been
• Miscellaneous tweaks and fixes

v3.0 Beta 2: December 11th, 2006

This is the fifth public test release for v3.0. Since Beta 1, the following changes have been made:

• Fixed: Tablet PC startup crash
• Fixed: Application not starting again after it was closed quickly due to an abandoned mutex and process
• Fixed: Some plugins were crashing in non-English because of a bug in the resource manager
• Fixed: Pressing ESC was not deselecting
• Fixed: A few small UI inconsistencies
• Fixed: Toolbars in Choose Defaults dialog were overflowing in some languages
• Fixed: Several rare crash bugs
• Fixed: Portuguese is now properly called "Portuguese (Brazil)"

v3.0 Beta 1: December 1st, 2006

This is the fourth public test release for v3.0. Since Alpha 3, the following changes (and more) have been made:

• New effect: Clouds
• New menu command: Edit->Fill Selection (shortcut key: Backspace). This will fill any selected area with the primary color.
• New toolbar item / hotkey: The brush size may be manipulated with +/- buttons in the toolbar. Hotkeys for this are [ and ], and you may hold Ctrl to increment or decrement by 5.
• New translations: They are not complete yet, and in fact some have just been started. They are mostly in place right now in order to get the code correct: Chinese (Simplified), French, German, Japanese, Korean, Portugese, and Spanish. You will have the ability to choose one of these languages during installation, and from the Help->Language menu, but the text will still be either mostly or completely English. Complete translations will be finished by February.
• Added left-handed shortcut keys for Cut (Shift+Del), Copy (Ctrl+Ins), Paste (Shift+Ins)
• Upper-left coordinate of selection is now displayed in the status bar
• When moving text with the Text tool, the anchor point coordinate is now displayed in the status bar
• Fixed: In high-DPI mode (120dpi), the color swatch would translate the mouse location to the wrong color palette entry
• Fixed: Alpha-channel handling for bicubic and super-sampling image resampling methods
• Fixed: Very slow download speeds for updates in Vista
• Fixed: In Vista, the updater would relaunch Paint.NET with the same administrator privileges that the installer executed in. Now it will relaunch Paint.NET with the pre-elevation user and privilege level. Note that this fix will not be apparent until the next update to Paint.NET.
• Fixed some layout and rendering issues with the floating tool windows in Vista
• Fixed a rendering issue with the font selection dropdown list
• Fixed a performance issue with the font selection dropdown list in Vista
• Right-clicking on a color in the palette will now set the secondary color
• Palette files now allow comments to be placed after color values
• Fixed: If Edit->Paste in to New Image was pasting a bitmap with transparency (from Paint.NET), it would have a white background instead of a transparent background.
• Fixed: Right-clicking on a .PDN file in Explorer and then selecting "Print" would not work if Paint.NET was already open
• Fixed over 10 user-reported crash bugs
• Fixed several out-of-memory crashes
• Fixes for many other miscellaneous, mostly minor, bugs

v3.0 Alpha 3: November 6th, 2006

This is the third public test release for v3.0. Since Alpha 2, the following changes (and more) have been made:

• New effect: Outline
• New effect: Blurs->Unfocus
• New effect: Blurs->Median
• Improved: Sharpen effect uses a totally new algorithm, which looks better and performs faster
• Improved: Rendering performance of certain gradient types was slightly improved
• Improved: Most file types now use less memory when saving
• Improved: Gradient tool's transparency mode is more intuitive
• Improved: Gaussian Blur's maximum radius is now 200 (instead of 100)
• Improved: Some icons were improved / changed
• Changed: Gradient tool now uses opposite mouse button for moving both nubs instead of Ctrl. This is for constency with the selection tools.
• Changed: In Vista, the floating tool windows no longer have glass frames and heavy drop shadows
• Changed: Layers->Import from File no longer spams the user incessantly asking them to expand the canvas size
• Changed: Delete button was removed from Colors window
• Changed: Ctrl+F4 now closes a tab in addition to Ctrl+W
• Fixed: 18+ crash bugs reported by users
• Fixed: Rendering inconsistency with Move Selected Pixels when 'pixelated' quality was selected
• Fixed: When opening multiple images via Explorer, some of them might have been skipped over
• Fixed: Crash when pressing Esc while drawing or adjusting a gradient
• Fixed: Finishing a gradient w/ reversed colors would end up with non-reversed colors
• Fixed: Viewing a layer's properties was setting the image's dirty bit, which would cause errenous "Do you want to save?" questions
• Fixed: Right-click dragging on an empty canvas with the Move tool was moving instead of rotating
• Fixed: If the 'x' button was clicked on the dialog for importing vs. opening layers as a result of drag-and-drop, the operation was not cancelled
• Fixed: Application icon in Vista was not scaling up to 256x256, it was only going up to 48x48
• Fixed: The crash log writer was crashing, causing double-crashes
• Fixed: History control hot tracking / highlighting glitch

v3.0 Alpha 2: October 23rd, 2006

This is the second public test release for v3.0. Since Alpha 1, the following changes (and more) have been made:

• New: Gradient Tool supports linear, radial, diamond, and conical gradient modes.
• New: Merge Layer Down command in Layers menu and Layers window
• Changed: A version of the Unsaved Changes dialog is now also shown when closing just 1 unsaved image, instead of the old fashioned Yes/No/Cancel MessageBox
• Changed: Alpha Blending and Anti-aliasing buttons are now split-buttons, with different icon and some descriptive text
• Changed: Shortcut key to open the MDI overflow list is now Ctrl+Q, instead of Ctrl+Space
• If an important installation file is missing, Paint.NET will try to repair the installation instead of crashing
• 256x256 icon format is now compressed, dropping EXE size by 150K
• Fixed: a bunch of crashes that users were reporting
• Fixed: "Load from toolbar" in Choose Defaults dialog did not pick up the active tool

v3.0 Alpha 1: October 13th, 2006

This is the first public test release for v3.0. Since version 2.72, the following changes (and more) have been made:

• Brand new Multiple Document Interface (MDI) with tabs that show thumbnails for all the opened images.
• Colors window now supports a color palette, along with the ability to manage multiple named custom palettes
• Colors window now uses value sliders that more clearly show how the color is being manipulated
• Floating windows now better support docking and snapping, and remember their positions across sessions
• Brand new icon and logo, including full 256x256 icon so that it looks great on Vista
• Toolbar is context dependent: only the toolbar items relevant to the current tool are shown
• Tolerance control moved to the toolbar
• Ability to choose default values for toolbar items, as well as the tool that is selected at startup
• Ability to draw with "smooth" or "sharp" text. Smooth text is good most of the time, and sharp text is good for when 'smooth' doesn't look good (sometimes for small text), or for doing GUI mockups
• UI for update checking, downloading, and installing is better
• "Edit -> Paste in to New Image" replaces "File->Acquire from Clipboard", and is accessible with Ctrl + Alt + V
• Updates and Language commands moved to Help menu
• History window now uses much less memory and significantly fewer User/GDI handles
• Session temporary data is now compressed if the file system is NTFS. This results in less disk I/O and thus higher performance
• Font list dropdown loads much quicker
• .PDN file thumbnails upgraded to 256x256 (used to max out at 96x96), which looks great in Vista
• Color Picker gives you the ability to choose what happens when you click: it can be set to switch to the Pencil tool
• Move Selected Pixels tool allows you to choose between bilinear and nearest neighbor resampling
• For expired pre-release builds (alphas and betas), you are now given the ability to check for and install the latest version from within the UI instead of having to go to the website
• Various misc. UI tweaks and refinements
• Eraser tool now takes into account the alpha value of the primary color
• Selected area is no longer removed after flattening the image
• Gutted and refactored large amounts of the code
• Dropped Windows 2000 support
• Dropped Itanium support