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April 26, 2007
[ FREEBIES FOR THE PHOTOGRAPHER ]
IF YOU ARE A REAL COMPUTER VETERAN then you will remember the program Paint, introduced by Microsoft to a grateful world in Windows 3.1.
There wasn’t a lot you could do with Paint. Make some squares and circles and fill them with solid colour. Draw a squiggly line. And that was about it, for the simple reason that most of us didn’t have video cards and monitors with the necessary resolution and number of colours to process something as complex and subtle as a photograph. Anyway we didn’t have digital cameras, so what did it matter?
Believe it or not Paint is still with us in Windows Vista. And it doesn’t do much more than it ever did except that now we have the processing and video power to load photos into it and draw squares and circles and squiggly lines across the picture in solid colours. That’s progress?
Windows Vista incorporates a well-developed web browser, Internet Explorer 7, and a new email client, Windows Mail, so why no new image viewer and editor?
Well, it turns out that there is one. It is called Paint.Net and can be downloaded from www.getpaint.net. It is free and it is a big advance on Paint. Like Photoshop it uses Layers as its editing metaphor and it has the controls for Levels and Curves that are indispensable in image editing.
According to the blurb on the Paint.Net web site the program was developed “as an undergraduate college senior design project mentored by Microsoft, and it is currently being maintained by some of the alumni that worked on it.”
Paint.net was intended to be a replacement for MS Paint but for some reason it never happened. For those of us who like a good Microsoft conspiracy theory the reason is obvious – why give away something that then becomes a free competitor to another of the company’s programs for which it charges serious money.
Microsoft Works Suite 2006 contains the application MS Digital Image 2006. The suite costs about $170 and is good value for money because it contains a full version of Word 2003 and Encarta 2006, but the Digital Image component adds nothing.
Both Irfanview and XnView are free and are better image viewing and editing programs than Digital Image. XnView is a remarkably capable piece of software that could well be all that most people need for their post-camera processing. It includes Curves and Levels and other sophisticated functions that make it a stand-out in this type of software. Both Irfanview and XnView are much better than any of the automated software supplied with cameras and both are lightning fast image viewers that handle just about every file format known to science, including the manufacturer-specific RAW files.
What makes Paint.Net special is that the student authors obviously set out to create an alternative to programs like Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro for incorporation into the Windows operating system. Anyone who has used these commercial programs will delight in the clone-like interface and operation of Paint.Net. Perhaps someone at Microsoft decided that it was too complicated for the average user. Or, more likely, too good for them.
Paint.Net is free but future development is dependent on grateful users making a donation towards the work. In the meantime an international community of users is starting to create a library of plug-ins and add-ons.
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Posted by terry at April 26, 2007 06:11 AM
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