![]() No doubt are they of a vast utility to the professional artist, the fractal-drawing genius or other people who have a very clear idea of what they're doing. If one is drawing cartoons, being able to copy and then rotate already-drawn objects, is also extremely useful.Īnd then several other features, not to mention all the extra Plug-Ins. I can now finally create ellipses whose axes are not horizontal/vertical. For a mathematician, this is immensely satisfying. Whereas selected objects could previously only be moved around and stretched, they can now be rotated as well (although it took me some time to figure out how). Paint.NET, however, doesn't mind you clicking and drawing outside the box, and this facilitates drawing enourmously. Also, if you dragged an object partly out of the canvas, so that only half of it was visible, the non-visible part would cease to exist, and thus be unrecoverable. If for instance you want to split the canvas in two, you had to start your line very close to one border, or there would be a gap through which colours could 'escape'. This is something that has frustrated me more than a few times in MS Paint. Like most features mentioned here, this isn't anything unique to Paint.NET, a lot of other modern programs have this kind of tool, but it is such a refreshing alternative to the original Paint's way of choosing colours. The real improvement is the new colour palette: in addition to the pre-defined colours, there is a coloured disc from where it is possible to quickly colour combination, and then manually lighten/darken it, or even add transparency. First, there are the fancy Gradient backgrounds as you can see on the left side of the first picture, but to me, that is more like a little extra feature that has been placed there to be used and abused by people who like pretty colours and shiny objects. Drawing curvy lines is no longer something you need to dread. Also, a subtle but nevertheless important improvement is that the endpoints can now be moved, meaning that if the line isn't exactly on the right spot, you don't have to start all over again. And from being a moody and unpredictable object that never quite looked the way you wanted it to look, the Curvy Line has now become simple and intuitive to draw. The Straight Line Tool and the Curvy Line Tool has merged into one. Also, layers can be used to "photoshop" (for lack of a better word) pictures and have two Alexanders in the same picture, for example. More generally, clothing stickmen has become delightfully easy with Paint.NET. The layers are independent and do not interact with each other, so removing, say, the helmet in the above picture, can be done without damaging the head. With the addition of layers, moving things on top of each other has become a trivial task. In Microsoft Paint, it was possible to use the Selection tools to place on object on top of another, but once that had been done, it was next to impossible to seperate the two objects again, unless you were prepared to clean up the operation afterwards with a careful and tirsome application of the Paintbrush. Anti-aliasing can be enabled and disabled at will. I didn't immediately notice, and when I did I wasn't expecting it to change much, but the final picture is a lot more pleasing to the eye. More precisely, the lines no longer go directly from black to white, but pass through intermediate stages of grey. As you can see in the above image, the lines on the left-hand side look "softer" than those on the right. To give you an idea, I shall go through the different things that make Paint.NET so much better than its ancestor. ![]() But before soon, I realised how many nice features had been added to this newer version, and I started enjoying myself. Some controls were different from the original version, and there suddenly was a lot more to take into account before you could start drawing. Initially, I wasn't pleased with Paint.NET. I then spent several hours today playing around with it, and I now feel confident enough to compare the two in a reasonably objective manner. Now, yesterday, I decided to download Paint.NET, an "updated", version of Paint, developed in 2004, and available for free on the Internet. It's very old, and has remained virtually untouched since Windows 95, so in some senses the editing is quite primitive for example, once a line has been drawn, it is impossible to edit it in any way, like you can in Photoshop. I've drawn these using Microsoft Paint, the free software that comes with every Windows OS. As Vincent and other loyal readers may have noticed, I sometimes accompany my posts with a picture I've made.
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