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