What image editing programs do other “part-time designers” (like myself) use? I don’t edit images every day. Heck! I don’t even edit every week!!! But when I need something, I need it *now* and it needs to have a fair amount of features. For instance, I typically: crop, resize the canvas, scale the image, add/edit text, adjust opacity, use filters, and use/abuse layers. Clearly, this rules out Microsoft Paint that ships with Windows 🙂 It does have some use, though, I suppose.
So… what does a person do? I’ve used Photoshop in the past, but when I finally got around to being “legal” with my software, I just couldn’t stomach paying hundreds of dollars for software that I use for personal projects. Also, Photoshop does a LOT more than I need it to. How about the GIMP? Truly another great product, and the price is right (free!). My main issue with GIMP? For starters, it loads pretty slowly — especially if you have a lot of fonts. Secondly, the interface is somewhate cumbersome. I get used to it when I’m using it regularly, but after a few weeks of “GIMP vacation” I find myself having to relearn some things. Well, as the title of this post suggests, how about Paint.NET??? Again… the price is right (free!!!) and it has a lot of great features. In fact, aside from the ability to edit text (after you’ve placed it), Paint.NET covers all of the uses that I’ve listed above. What’s even better is how fast it loads! It may seem trivial, but I don’t spend all day in a photo-editing app, so the load time is important to me. Waiting a minute or two for a program to load when I have a simply “resize” job to do is pretty annoying. Some of you will agree with me.
If you haven’t looked at Paint.NET lately, give it a download. It’s a paltry 1.6mb download (assuming you already have .NET Framework 2.0 installed), it’s free, and it *really* works well! In fact, I would venture that Paint.NET covers 99% of the functionality that most people need… and it does it all while still managing to look pretty cool!
Enjoy! 🙂
Yip
Y.I.P.C.A.N.J.O 
