About

Paint.NET is a freeware raster graphics editing program for Microsoft Windows, developed on the .NET Framework. Originally created as a Washington State University student project, Paint.NET has evolved from a simple replacement for the Microsoft Paint program, which is included with Windows, into a powerful editor with support for layers, blending, transparency, and plugins.

Overview

Paint.NET is primarily programmed in the C# programming language, with small amounts of C++ used for installation and shell-integration related functionality. Its native image format, .PDN, is a compressed representation of the application’s internal object format, which preserves layering and other information. Excluding the installer, text, and graphics, Paint.NET is released under a modified version of the MIT-like License. It was initially released as completely open source, but due to breaches of license, all resource files (such as interface text and icons) were released under a Creative Commons license forbidding modification, and the installer was made closed-source.

Version 3.36 was initially released as partial open source as described above, but the sources were later removed by the developer. The developer no longer makes the source freely available for download. In version 3.5, the license was altered to reflect this, and users are now prohibited from modifying the software. However, as free licenses cannot be revoked, developers can still legally develop forks based on version 3.36 and earlier. Unlike most proprietary software licenses, however, the new license allows users to decompile and reverse engineer the software, provided they make no modifications.

Plugins

Paint.NET supports plugins, which add image adjustments, effects, and support for additional file types. They can be programmed using any .NET programming language, though they are most commonly written in C#. These are created by volunteer coders on the program’s discussion board, the Paint.NET Forum. Though most are simply published via the discussion board, some have been included with a later release of the program. For instance, a DirectDraw Surface file type plugin, (originally by Dean Ashton) and an Ink Sketch and Soften Portrait effect (originally by David Issel) were added to Paint.NET in version 3.10. Also, a plugin called CodeLab, originally written by Tom Jackson, allows the everyday user of Paint.NET to try their hand at making their own plugins, and if wanted, to compile them into their own plugin files.

Hundreds of plugins have been produced ; such as Shape3D, which renders a 2D drawing into a 3D shape. Some plugins expand on the functionality that comes with Paint.NET, such as Curves+ and Sharpen+, which extend the included tools Curves and Sharpen, respectively.

Examples of file type plugins include an Animated Cursor and Icon plugin and an Adobe Photoshop file format plugin. Several of these plugins are based on existing open source software, such as a RAW plugin that uses dcraw and a PNG optimization plugin that uses OptiPNG.

Support for non-Windows operating systems

Paint.NET was created for Windows, and has no native support for any other system. With its previous open-source nature, however, the possibility for alternate versions was available. In May 2007, Miguel de Icaza officially started a porting project called paint-mono. This project has partially ported Paint.NET 3.0 to Mono, an open-source implementation of the Common Language Infrastructure on which the .NET framework is based. This allows Paint.NET to be run on Mono-supported platforms, such as Linux.

Source : Wikipedia