Paint.net: Like MS Paint, But Useful

Most small businesses need to use a photo from time to time, be it for a Web site, brochure, or presentation. But most businesses don't have an in-house art department to handle tasks like image editing, or the budget to spend a lot of money on a professional-level image-editing package like Adobe Photoshop.

But take heart: We found two downloadable applications and one online service that deliver the basics (and often more), with no money or previous experience required. Granted, these choices aren't as powerful as many of the pro-level packages, but they are usable, approachable and, best of all, free.

Paint.net: Like MS Paint, But Useful

Everyone's school project should turn out half this good: Paint.net began life as an undergraduate senior design project at Washington State University. Originally mentored by developers at Microsoft, the software was originally intended as a free replacement for the woefully underpowered MS Paint applet that comes as part of Windows.

Paint.net, now at version 2.72, is maintained by some of the alumni who originally wrote it. Designed to work with Windows 2000 or XP (and reportedly with the upcoming Windows Vista), this free download offers a wealth of painting and image-editing tools. Since there's no user manual, people familiar with other editing programs will be at an advantage. But even newcomers should be able to figure things out quickly enough to get basic jobs done.

As the name implies, the utility requires that Microsoft's .NET framework be installed on your PC. If it isn't, or if you aren't sure, the download page offers a choice that delivers both the program and .NET 2.0. Downloading the 48MB file takes just a few minutes over a broadband connection, after which you'll be prompted to install .NET (which takes five minutes) and then Paint.net itself (a two-minute install).

Paint.net offers a good range of image-editing tools, though more contextual help would be useful for the non-artist types among us.

The user interface is clean, though nothing revolutionary: Launch the program and you're presented with a blank rectangle surrounded by floating tool palettes marked Tools, History (which will list all of the actions you performed on an image), Layers and Colors (with a color wheel and grayscale bar). Hovering the mouse pointer over a tool gives the fairly descriptive tool name, but not a more complete description of how to use it as we've seen in other image-editing apps.

It was at this point we yearned for a quick-start guide or some piece of documentation. But it is the digital age, after all, so we opted for the good ol' Help choice from the top menu. A Tutorials choice led to the Paint.net forums, where people have posted instructions on how to create all sorts of nifty effects — glass orbs, glow effects, drop shadows, 3D text and much more. So we simply opened a photo and dove right in.

As in Paint, you can use the drawing tools to create a new image file, with various brushes, fill options, shape tools and so on. Or you can open an existing art or image file to edit (the program supports PNG, JPEG, BMP, GIF, TGA and TIFF formats). One annoyance shared with Paint: There is no "Close" choice in the File menu. To close a file you are working on and move to another, you choose "Open" and are then prompted to either save the current file or not.

When working with photos, there are plenty of canned effects to jazz up your images. For example, there are four different blur effects, four distortion effects, embossing, a frosted-glass effect and even an adjustable effect to make a photo look like an oil painting. You'll find cropping tools, naturally, as well as an effective red-eye removal tool. And unlike other entry-level editors, Paint.NET support layers, which lets you compose one final image from a "stack" of images that are blended together.

Novices will need a lot of trial-and-error to get the effects just right, as most let you choose the degree to which the effect will be applied. As you play with these, you'll come to appreciate the unlimited undo levels in the History palette, which makes it possible to undo recent changes sequentially (or scrap them all and go back to the original image).

While we would have preferred to see more contextual help, we were still able to get the results we desired with just a little playing around. Given the number of tools Paint.net delivers and the non-existent price, we won't complain.