Paint.Net v4.1 Released (September 5, 2018) Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog Spoiler: Changelog v4.1 Improved: Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, and Radial Blur now render using the GPU and are significantly faster Changed: The following effects are now rendered using the GPU: Edge Detect, Pixelate, and Relief Changed: The following adjustments are now rendered using the GPU: Black & White, Invert Colors New Effect: Distort -> Morphology (uses the GPU) New Effect: Render -> Turbulence (uses the GPU) New: Bicubic resampling is now supported for the Move Selected Pixels tool. A CPU with 6 or more cores is highly recommended if you want to make it the default mode from within Settings -> Tools. New: Edit -> Copy Selection. This will copy the current selection's geometry to the clipboard as JSON text. New: Edit -> Paste Selection. This will apply the selection from the clipboard to the current selection. All 5 selection combine modes are supported. Changed: The Text tool now uses Points for font size measurement. You can also elect to use the old font size metric, "Fixed (96 DPI)" via the dropdown to the right of the font size. Fixed: The Text tool's recentering algorithm when typing reaches the edge of the viewport should be better New: Added +/- buttons to the Tolerance and Hardness sliders. Changed: Increased max zoom level to 6400% New: The mouse wheel may now be used to scroll a long menu, such as when a lot of effects are installed (thanks @toe_head2001!) Changed: For Windows 7 SP1 users, the Platform Update from 2013 is now required (it contains Direct2D v1.1) Fixed: The "Finish" button wasn't working if it was in an overflow container (thanks @toe_head2001!) Fixed: Opening certain large images and then zooming with the mouse wheel would sometimes result in the scroll position being completely wrong Changed: Hiding a layer no longer auto-selects the nearest visible layer. You can re-enable this in Settings, although this setting may be removed in a future version. New: For the Windows Store release, the paintdotnet: protocol can now be used to launch the app so that you can specify command-line parameters. For example, you can go to Start -> Run and type in paintdotnet:"path to file1.png" path_to_file_2.png then both images will be opened (even if Paint.NET is already open) New: Added Heptagon (7-sided polygon) and Octagon (8-sided polygon) shapes Fixed the high-DPI inset-text scaling for the Shape selector (e.g. Pentagon with an inset "5") New: Palettes are now also loaded from Documents/paint.net App Files/Palettes. This folder name is not localized so that installation scripts may easily make use of it Fixed: View -> Pixel Grid will now correctly adjust to dynamic changes in the theme (light vs. dark) Fixed: The background color for the Tolerance slider has been corrected for non-dark themes Changed: Removed shortcut keys for all built-in Adjustments except for Invert Colors (Ctrl+Shift+I). This is being done to free up shortcut keys for other functionality. New: Added a shortcut key to trigger a full .NET garbage collection: Ctrl+Alt+Shift+` (tick/tilde). This should only ever be needed for troubleshooting purposes. New: Battery Saver Mode in Windows 10 is now respected, whether enabled manually or due to low battery. UI animations will be disabled. New: Long file paths (>MAX_PATH) are now supported on Windows 10, as long as the group policy setting is enabled ("Enable Win32 long paths") New for plugin developers: The IndirectUI Color Wheel control now supports an alpha slider. To use this, set the range (min/max values) of the Int32PropertyControl to [Int32.MinValue, Int32.MaxValue] (thanks @BoltBait!) New for plugin developers: there is a new FileChooser property control type for string properties (thanks @toe_head2001!) New for plugin developers: there is a new BinaryPixelOp.Apply(Surface, Surface, Surface, Rectangle) method overload (thanks @BoltBait!) Changed: The IndirectUI text control now has a vertical scroll bar when multiline mode is enabled (thanks @toe_head2001!) Changed: Visual C++ and OpenMP runtimes are now only loaded from the "app local" copy (never from the system directory). This fixes a number of headaches, and also works around a compatibility issue with the Surface Go Fixed: Crash when drag-and-dropping images onto Paint.NET when a tool was active but with uncommitted changes Fixed a very old and nasty crash, "InvalidOperationException: ScratchSurface already borrowed"
Paint.Net v4.1.2 Released (October 22, 2018) Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog Spoiler: Changelog v4.1.2 Improved startup performance if "a lot" of effect plugins are installed. More optimizations are coming in the next update. Fixed: Pixel grid no longer draws some dots darker than others at some zoom levels, as reported at https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/112794-pixel-grid-rendering-problems-when-zooming/ Fixed: Radial Blur was not handling alpha correctly Fixed: IndirectUI ColorWheel swatch is now rendered correctly (without the fading alpha gradient) Fixed: The tooltip describing the shortcut key for tools now indicates how many times to press the key (e.g., press S four times for Magic Wand selection) Fixed: Pressing Escape to deselect now works with all tools (this bug was introduced in v4.0) Fixed: Images with variable alpha were not displaying correctly at some zoom levels. They were "too dark" in translucent regions. Reported here: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/112184-some-zoom-levels-display-alpha-as-extra-opaque/ Fixed: For the Store release, launching with the paintdotnet: protocol no longer shows an error if no parameters are provided (thanks @Bruce Bowyer-Smyth!) Fixed a crash for some effects that were rendering too quickly Fixed a bug in the Image>Resize dialog where the asterisk and the note about which resampling mode was being used, e.g. "* Bicubic will be used," weren't going away or updating correctly New: Added a /set:SETTING=VALUE command-line parameter. This is specifically useful for disabling hardware acceleration if the app won't start or you can't reach the Settings dialog. This is also necessary for the Store release whose virtualized registry cannot be edited. To launch the Store version with hardware acceleration disabled, go to Start -> Run and type in "paintdotnet:/set:UI/EnableHardwareAcceleration=false" (without quotes) and press OK New: Added detection for when "Diebold Warsaw" is causing Paint.NET to crash. The error message will indicate this cause. Fixed: Addressed CVE-2018-18446. Credit goes to Bruce Bowyer-Smyth. Fixed: Addressed CVE-2018-18447. Credit goes to Soroush Dalili from NCC Group.
Paint.Net v4.1.5 Released (December 4, 2018) Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog Spoiler: Changelog v4.1.5 Improved: Image -> Rotate should now complete almost instantly (thanks @Bruce Bowyer-Smyth!) Improved: Optimized a portion of the rendering engine for newer CPU instruction sets (SSE2, SSSE3, AVX2). Depending on zoom level, CPU type, and other factors, rendering throughput has been improved by 10-50%. Improved: Some performance optimizations for code that uses the indexers on the Surface class, which should improve effect plugin performance (thanks @Bruce Bowyer-Smyth!) Fixed: Shortcut keys for the Adjustments menu weren't working until after you opened the menu for the first time Fixed: Canvas checkerboard, used to indicate transparent regions of the image, now scales with DPI Fixed some of the more rare cases of the SEHException/AccessViolationException crash caused by Direct2D Fixed: A bug in IndirectUI was resulting in a crash when using @BoltBait's Level Horizon plugin Fixed: Per-user fonts no longer cause a crash for the Store version New: The paintdotnet: protocol now works for the Classic version Fixed: The paintdotnet: protocol should now work properly with paths that have spaces in them Fixed: Hardened security for loading Custom Shape plugins via XAML (thanks @Bruce Bowyer-Smyth!)
Here's what 2019 holds for Paint.NET December 27, 2018 https://betanews.com/2018/12/27/paint-net-2019/
Paint.Net v4.1.6 Released (March 18, 2019) Announcement Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog Spoiler: Changelog v4.1.6 New: Completely redone high-res icons throughout the app which match the Microsoft Office style guidelines, with native support for up to 400% scaling (384 DPI) New: File -> Save All (thanks @Bruce Bowyer-Smyth!) New: Turkish language New: Move Layer commands are now present in the Layers menu, not just on the Layers window New: Layers -> Rotate 180 (thanks @null54!) New: Plugins can now use the UIScaleFactor class, which simplifies making decisions about DPI and scaling Improved: Image thumbnail list at the top of the main window now reacts to horizontal mouse wheel or trackpad swiping Improved: The Text Tool's "Font Size Metric" button now has a tooltip explaining it Improved: When many images are open, Paint.NET now closes significantly faster (thanks @bruce Bowyer-Smyth for the fix!) Improved: File -> Open Recent now has up to 10 images (up from 8 ) Changed: Ctrl+Shift+F6 and +F7 will now also reset the floating window sizes for History and Layers, respectively (same if you Ctrl+Shift+Click on the button at the top-right of the main window) Changed: (for plugins) EffectFlags.SingleRenderCall is deprecated. Plugins should use the new EffectRenderingSchedule.None option instead. Changed: Settings -> Plugin Errors now shows up even if there are no plugin errors. This ensures consistency, especially with the newly asynchronous nature of plugin loading (otherwise there's no way to distinguish "no errors" from "not done loading plugins"). Fixed: Items in the File -> Open Recent menu will no longer get bigger or smaller when moving between monitors with different DPIs Fixed: An icon handle was being leaked every time a dialog was opened (thanks @null54 for the fix!) Fixed a crash when running GPU effects (e.g. Black & White) on very large, very tall images Fixed: "Bad" plugins can no longer ruin the undo system by rendering outside of the selection (thanks @BoltBait for helping out with this!)
Paint.Net v4.2 Released (July 13, 2019) Announcement Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog Spoiler: Changelog v4.2 New: Support for loading and saving HEIC images (Windows 10 v1809+ and codec installation is required). Please note that the "Quality" slider when saving is limited to a value of 90 (out of 100) while Microsoft investigates and fixes a crash in their codec. New: Keyboard shortcuts for changing the current layer. You can see these in the Layers menu with the "Go to ..." commands. Alt+PgUp/PgDown will go to the layer above/below, and Ctrl+Alt+PgUp/PgDown will go to the top/bottom layer. Fixed: Optimized rendering engine to remove huge lag spikes (30+ seconds) when zooming or panning very large images (e.g. 32K x 32K pixels). Improved: BMP now supports saving in 32-bit (with alpha!) and 8-bit indexed. Improved: Added DIB and RLE file extensions to the BMP file type. Improved: PNG, JPEG, and TIFF now support loading and saving of much larger images. New: PNGs can now be saved as "interlaced". Improved: JPEG now has configuration for the chroma subsampling mode (4:4:4, 4:2:2, and 4:2:0). The default is now 4:2:2 instead of the unconfigurable 4:2:0 of older versions. This may result in larger file sizes, but higher quality, as compared to previous versions. Improved: TIFF now supports saving at 24-bit and 8-bit color depths. Improved performance of saving for file types where "Auto" bit-depth is supported but is not the current choice. Improved temporary memory usage when saving images at 8-bit color depth. Improved: TGA images now load about 4x faster (thanks @null54!) Fixed: 8-bit TGA images should now load correctly (thanks @null54 for the fix!) Fixed: Some 32-bit TGA images were showing up as completely transparent due to their use of an obscure alpha channel type (thanks @null54 for the fix!) Improved: Added error reporting to the Save Configuration dialog. Instead of just saying "Preview: (error)", you'll also get the standard error dialog that includes the exception which can used for troubleshooting. Fixed a number of performance issues in the Save Configuration dialog. Especially with large images, it should now be much faster to change options and to click OK/Cancel. Fixed flickering in the Save Configuration dialog when changing options. Fixed: Windows Explorer thumbnails for some image types (PDN, DDS, TGA) were not rendering their alpha (transparency) correctly, resulting in color skew. You may not see the effect of this fix for a particular image until that image is resaved or you clear Explorer's thumbnail cache. Fixed: Mouse cursors now scale appropriately for non-integer UI scales (e.g. 125% or 175%) Fixed: AltGr should now work correctly with the Text tool. It will not trigger shortcuts like File->Save All, or Edit->Paste into New Image. (thanks @bruce Bowyer-Smyth for the fix!) Changed: Image->Resize supports Super Sampling again, and favors this over Fant when using Best Quality. Fant is still available, but is no longer chosen automatically. Changed: Holding Ctrl when starting to move a selection with the Move Selected Pixels tool will no longer leave behind a copy of the selected area Fixed: Bicubic resampling in the Move Selected Pixels tool was not correctly handling the alpha channel in some cases. This fix has required a reduction in performance. Improved: When using Edit->Copy, a 32-bit BGRA bitmap in the DIBV5 format is now placed onto the clipboard so that other apps can read the alpha channel. Improved: When using Edit->Paste, DIBV5's are now supported if they have an alpha channel. If they don't, then the regular DIB loader is used which has some heuristics for detecting an incorrectly defined alpha channel and correcting for it. Improved: When using Edit->Paste, PNG is now the highest priority format. This maximizes the ability to maintain alpha/transparency, but it does mean that images coming from Microsoft Office apps will appear larger than they used to. This is either a bug or a feature of Microsoft Office. For some reason it places PNGs on the clipboard that are 25%+ larger than the DIB/DIBV5 bitmap that it also places on the clipboard (but which don't have alpha/transparency). Fixed: DIBV5 bitmaps should now work with Edit->Paste, which improves alpha channel handling. (thanks @null54 for the fix!) Fixed: Top-down DIBs should now work correctly with Edit->Paste. (thanks @null54 for the fix!) Improved CPU usage for thumbnail updates (layers and image tabs) in many cases. Improved: Slightly increased the size of the Settings dialog to reduce the need for scrolling in a few important situations Fixed: Simple message boxes can now be closed with the ESC key Fixed: Magic Wand now works on very large images (e.g. 65535 x 65535 pixels) without an error. New: Plugins that use IndirectUI can now use a UriProperty with a LinkLabel control (thanks @null54!) New: Effect plugins can now more easily make use of the clipboard via the IClipboardService. It will handle all of the tricky clipboard issues such as threading, native data marshaling, and avoiding security vulnerabilities that exist in the standard WinForms and WPF clipboard APIs. New: FileType plugins can now specify separate lists of extensions for loading and saving. Blocked the WebP FileType v1.1.0.0 plugin due to instability. An update is already available. Blocked the ImAgif FileType v0.12.0.1084 plugin due to incompatibility. An update will hopefully soon be available
Paint.Net v4.2.1 Released (August 7, 2019) Announcement Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog Spoiler: Changelog v4.2.1 New: JPEG XR file type support (Windows 8.1+ required) Fixed: Holding Ctrl when dragging a selection with Move Selected Pixels will again leave a copy behind (but only with the mouse) Fixed crashes when saving DDS images Fixed VTF file type plugin. It was not working in 4.2 except for images that were an exact power-of-2 size on each dimension. Fixed: .BMP files can be opened even if they’re not actually BMP images (they still need to be a valid WIC-supported file type such as PNG, JPEG, etc.) Fixed very bad performance when opening large images with embedded rotation metadata Fixed various crashes, such as when using File->New or Image->Resize, that sometimes happened if the previous update needed a reboot but either 1) it didn’t tell you that, or 2) it did but you didn’t reboot Fixed the problem that was causing the need for the aforementioned reboot in the first place (string resources file was locked by the thumbnail provider shell extension) Fixed: Text tool will no longer draw tiny text when an image uses dots-per-centimeter instead of dots-per-inch Fixed menu ordering of effect plugins that have duplicate names Fixed: The mouse wheel may now be used to scroll the Palettes menu in the Colors window (thanks @AndrewDavid for the suggestion and @toe_head2001 for the fix!) Fixed metadata handling that was preventing some images with EXIF tag 330 from being able to load Fixed metadata preservation for old images that pad EXIF string values with null terminators Fixed title bar text color when using certain custom accent colors in Windows 10 Fixed title bar accent color when Tablet Mode is enabled
Paint.Net v4.2.2 Released (September 18, 2019) Announcement Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog Spoiler: Changelog v4.2.2 New: AV1 (*.avif) images can now be opened (saving is not supported). Windows 10 v1809+ and Microsoft's AV1 Codec are required (download: https://www.microsoft.com/p/av1-video-extension-beta/9mvzqvxjbq9v ) New: DirectDraw Surface (*.dds) support has been greatly improved due to bundling @null54's DDSFileTypePlus v1.9.6.0 plugin. All DX10/DX11 formats should now be supported (e.g. BC4, BC5, BC6H, BC7), and encoding (saving) will make use of the GPU to greatly improve performance. Note that it's no longer necessary to use the ".dds2" file extension. New: 4-bit saving is now supported for PNG, BMP, and TIFF New: The palette selection menu will now indicate which palette is currently active (thanks @null54 for the implementation!) Improved: The maximum image size is now 262,144 x 262,144 pixels, up from 65,535 x 65,535 pixels. This is mostly for accommodating very tall or very wide images. Improved: Startup performance has been improved for multi-core CPUs Improved: Startup performance has been improved when a lot of custom shapes are installed Fixed: EXIF metadata of type Float and Double are now supported. This ensures GeoTIFF metadata is preserved. Fixed: Opening an image should no longer flicker due to the transparency checkerboard being drawn first Fixed: TGA images that are 16-bit with 1-bit alpha with a zero'd out alpha channel are now treated as opaque. This allows images from 5CC Map Maker (for Close Combat modding) to work. Thanks @null54 for the fix! Fixed: JPEG XR's file extensions (*.jxr, *.wdp, *.wmp) are now registered with Explorer Fixed: Pasting images that use RGB pixel ordering should now work (this affects PaintTool SAI) Fixed a crash when manually typing in a very large number for the zoom level in the status bar
Paint.Net v4.2.3 Released (September 19, 2019) Announcement Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog
Paint.Net v4.2.4 Released (September 20, 2019) Announcement Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog
Paint.Net v4.2.5 Released (October 1, 2019) Announcement Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog
Paint.Net v4.2.6 Released (November 21, 2019) Announcement Download / Windows Store Roadmap and Changelog Spoiler: Changes v4.2.6 Changes since 4.2.5: Improved the input handling systems to use WM_POINTER, which enables glitch-free drawing when using a pen or stylus (e.g. Surface Pen, Wacom/Ugee tablet) (see here: https://forums.getpaint.net/topic/1...eehand-line-are-straight-when-using-a-tablet/ ). This will also be the basis for adding pressure sensitivity in a future release (v4.3). Added a "Native pointer input" setting if a "pointer" device is available (pen, tablet, touch screen). Disabling this will cause any pointer device to be emulated as a mouse, which may be more compatible but at the cost of smoothness. Pointer devices are listed in Settings -> Diagnostics. Removed the "Fluid mouse input" setting because the use of GetMouseMovePointsEx() has been removed (it’s a very buggy and broken API). This finally fixes a number of weird issues related to erratic or "scribbly" drawing. Improved performance of Move Selected Pixels, Shapes, and Gradient tools when releasing the mouse button at the end of drag-and-drop gesture. Previously, anything rendered between the last mouse "move" and "up" events was re-rendered, resulting in the appearance of a delay/lag. Greatly improved performance of layer thumbnails when switching between images Improved: The image list at the top can now be scrolled by clicking the arrow buttons and holding the mouse down, just like a regular scroll bar button. (Previously you had to click repeatedly). This improves usability, but was also noted as being important for accessibility. Improved: Smooth scrolling animations have been removed from the image list and layers list due to them just not working very well. Improved window chrome/theming when the app is running in Remote Desktop on Windows 10 Changed: The size of the default/initial image ("Untitled") is now scaled exactly by system DPI setting (previously scaled by integer/floor of DPI setting). So at 150% DPI scaling this image will now be 1200×900 instead of 800×600. Fixed some high-DPI layout bugs with the Layer Properties dialog, while also preparing this UI for future additions Fixed a crash (OutOfVideoMemoryException) on systems with hybrid GPU setups that are configured wrong. This seems to be a bug in Windows and DirectX. A "hybrid GPU" setup is an Intel iGPU or AMD APU paired with a discrete GPU in a laptop. Improved handling of the dreaded "NoHardwareDeviceException" crash: The user will be notified of how to fix this. It happens only on 2nd generation Intel Core systems with NVIDIA "Optimus" GPUs (GeForce or Quadro) when the NVIDIA Control Panel is set to force apps (or just Paint.NET) to use the NVIDIA GPU. This is a bug in the NVIDIA driver and/or in DirectX. Fixed images being pasted incorrectly from Outlook 2016/365. This is actually a bug in Outlook: it puts PNGs on the clipboard that are arbitrarily cropped and scaled for some reason, and specifies they are the preferred format to use when pasting. This completely boggles my mind, it’s just really weird, I can’t imagine why it’s done this way. Fixed some clipboard image handling for plugins (regular Copy/Paste is unaffected) Changed: SSE2 is now required for 32-bit/x86 systems (prevously, only SSE was required). See blog post: https://blog.getpaint.net/2019/10/14/paint-net-v4-2-6-will-require-sse2-on-32-bit-x86/ Updated bundled WebPFileType plugin to v1.3.1.0 (thanks @null54) Updated bundled DDSFileTypePlus plugin to v1.9.8.0 (thanks @null54!)
