Paint.NET, the free Windows photo editing tool, just got a major update with new editing features and performance upgrades. The new Paint.NET version 5.1 adds better color support, new blur effects, and makes the overall app experience smoother.
Every good image editing tool needs color management support. When you’re working with an image, you want to make sure it looks exactly within the app as it did in the camera or as the original creator wanted it to look. The color space of the source and the editing app have to match to visualize the colors and dynamic range correctly. Up until now, Paint.NET had little to no color management. The new update adds full support that lets you pick from four popular color profiles: ProPhoto RGB, sRGB, Display P3, and Adobe RGB. You can also import custom profiles. You can see it in action from the below screenshots.
From there, you can either add that profile to the image’s metadata or apply it to the image. The editor can also use the color profile of your display, including HDR and Wide Color Gamut support. You’ll have to calibrate the feature manually though.
We also get two new blur effects: Sketch Blur and Square Blur. The sketch blur makes pictures look like impressionist paintings. Square blur creates a bokeh effect with squarish points of light. The entire effects and adjustments library, including two new blur effects, have now been optimized to run on the GPU. You can also use the new Canvas tab in the Settings menu to tweak how the canvas appears.
The updated Paint.NET introduces loads of performance improvements, including in the portable version of the app. Since the entire effects library is now GPU-enabled, it reduces CPU memory usage load, making everything smoother and faster. Input latency is also lower now, which makes the new version snappier and more responsive.
You can download the beta release of Paint.NET 5.1 from GitHub. If you want a stable experience, though, you might want to stick to the current 5.0.13 release until the new update is fully ready.
Source: Paint.NET
