Paint.NET: The Anti-GIMP?

Arno contributes a link to Paint.NET, a free-of-charge raster-graphics program for Windows XP machines. "Quote: 'Paint.NET is image and photo manipulation software designed to be used on computers that run Windows XP. Paint.NET is jointly developed at Washington State University with additional help from Microsoft, and is meant to be a free replacement for the MS Paint software that comes with all Windows operating systems. The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions.' It really seems like a nice tool. I definitely prefer its UI to GIMP's."

Mirror

[Anonymous Coward]

I managed to grab a mirror [dealsites.net] if needed. Site kinda seemed slow, especially for a .edu domain.

You would think..

[MadAnthony02 (626886)]

You would think Microsoft wouldn't let people mirror their software - after all, they always tell people that you can't trust software on mirrors [slashdot.org]. Huge security risk, you know.

Re:Mirror

[Llama_STi (745859)]

This [wsu.edu] is the working mirror.

You're welcome. ;)

Here it comes.

[Anonymous Coward]

Before we all do the obligatory "GIMP r0xx0rz, .NET sux", please try downloading this... after it's Slashdotted. Very nice product, it doesn't have the advanced image conversion GIMP does, but very useful indeed.

I wonder if they used P/Invoke so I can run this on Mono?

Re:Here it comes.

[stupidfoo (836212)]

Speaking of nice features: the lasso-select in this thing is pretty kick ass. Does any other software have similar real time highlighting of the selected area for the lasso?

Re:Here it comes.

[shokk (187512)]

Any reason why I have to reboot after installing a friggin Paint program? This is an app and has nothing to do with the core of the OS. There should be no rebooting for something like this!!

Re:here here

[benjcurry (754899)]

Ummm...I use the GIMP every day. I'm a website developer and graphic designer. I like Photoshop better than the GIMP, but other than some less-than-perfect GUI issues, I love the GIMP as well.

Re:here here

[picklepuss (749206)]

same here

Except, I'm starting to use the GIMP even more than Photoshop lately. I guess I'm just getting more comfortable with it.

I still don't understand why everyone has so many problems with the interface. Makes me think people are just re-hashing old horror stories from before 2.0. To me it behaves just like any other application.

Re:here here

[phasm42 (588479)]

Features are objective, what interfaces you like or don't like on the other hand seems to be very subjective.

There has been a lot written on this subject lately, and a strong case has been made that interface isn't as subjective as you think. Apple's design of the iPod is a common example. There is such a thing as a truely good interface. Paul Graham has written about it here [paulgraham.com] and here [paulgraham.com].

Re:Here it comes.

[EnronHaliburton2004 (815366)]

Why are we comparing a simple painting program to the GIMP? It's like comparing an apple to an orange tree...

This is just a simple painting program, it works great for simple quick tasks. The GIMP is designed for more complex graphical tasks...

Compare GIMP to Photoshop. That's a legit conversation.

Re:Here it comes.

[rynoski (682205)]

Comparing the GIMP to photoshop is like comparing an apple to an orange tree...

You are better off comparing the GIMP to PaintShop Pro.

"GIMP is also not meant to be like Photoshop"

[SimHacker (180785)]

Comparing GIMP to Photoshop is TABOO!

According to one of the GIMP developers, BigSven:

"GIMP is also not meant to be like Photoshop and we aren't trying to win PS users over. We are creating a tool that gets the job done. Some approaches of PS are worth to copy, others aren't. GIMP is not a Photoshop clone and it was never meant to be one." -BigSven

"Gimp was not written as a competitor to Photoshop." -mac[LAG]

Please do not compare GIMP with Photoshop, because that's a very sensitive point with GIMP fanatics, who go out of their way to ignore Photoshop, and wear their ignorance as a badge of pride.

-Don

Re:"GIMP is also not meant to be like Photoshop"

[IamTheRealMike (537420)]

I've not read such a load of bollocks in a very long time.

Do you really think the developers of the Gimp, who are in my experience universally reasonable and smart, have a "macho" attitude where they don't want the Gimp to be easy to use? You do? I guess you ignored all the usability improvements they made in each version released in the last few years then.

But it doesn't surprise me. I suspect you are not really a Gimp user, I suspect you are simply one of many Slashdotters who downloaded a Windows build, and went "eww no MDI" and then went back to using a warezd Photoshop copy you got from Kazaa.

Strangely, the Gimps interface works perfectly well on Linux which has decent window management.

There are hacks available to make the Gimp windows appear in one big container MDI-style on Windows, but they don't work very well. MDI itself doesn't work very well, actually, and GTK+ on Linux has never supported it and never will (because it's not needed).

I can tell you straight off that the reason the Gimp has the UI it does, is because this is the best UI for the job. It's developers are almost all Linux users, and the UI there is a good one. The reason they "reject" the standard crap that's thrown about in any story that mentions the Gimp is because it's just that - crap, which doesn't apply to the version of the Gimp they use, so why should they care? It's not like they get paid to take market share from Photoshop. I'd say that Gimp on Linux is for 90% of Photoshop users (I say users including all the random kiddies who downloaded it because they want to be "pros") an absolutely solid replacement. I know that in all the years I've used it for commercial web design, photo manipulation and UI development it has never yet left me wanting.

Re:"GIMP is also not meant to be like Photoshop"

[Ogerman (136333)]

I'd say that Gimp on Linux is for 90% of Photoshop users (I say users including all the random kiddies who downloaded it because they want to be "pros") an absolutely solid replacement. I know that in all the years I've used it for commercial web design, photo manipulation and UI development it has never yet left me wanting.

Exactly.. This is what most people seem to ignore.. Gimp is not Photoshop. But it does happen to meet the needs of probably 80-90% of Photoshop's target market. You would not believe how many wasteful copies of Photoshop are licensed in the corporate world because Joe Idiot says, "Hey, we need a photo editor.. go buy the best thing out there." And $699 later, there's the latest version of Photoshop. (And oops.. it's hard for newbies to use (just like Gimp), so go buy a copy of Photoshop for Dummies too) Sure, Photoshop is still the best thing out there (today at least), but most of the people using it would have been fine with PSP or Gimp.

And here's the real kicker: how fast would Gimp improve if those 80-90% that don't really need Photoshop contributed a few bucks each to the project? Granted that won't happen, but there are other ways to harvest this market. The Gimp folks need to take a look at how they can capitalize on what they've developed.

Re:Here it comes.

[Rei (128717)]

Gimp didn't take me hours to learn - once you figure out the whole right-click thing, what's so difficult? Honestly, while it seems that the slashdot moderators despise it (based on how every article about Gimp or another graphics tool is headlined), I love Gimp's interface, and will give people who use Photoshop a run for their money any day in photoediting contests (my main use of Gimp).

Now, learning scripting did take hours and I'm still not that great at it, but that's kind of expected.

Re:Here it comes.

[budgenator (254554)]

Considering that the basic keybindings are the same for GIMP as for Photoshop, anyone who complains that it took hours to learn GIMP, have not only not learned GIMP, but haven't learned photoshop either.
I would find it quite amuseing to watch you be the tar out of them after switching programs.

Re:Here it comes.

[John Hansen (652843)]

I don't understand this permanent woody for boxes in boxes, the non-Photoshop world abandonded that GUI a decade ago.

Even Photoshop never used that clunky interface originally. The Photoshop MDI originated from the fact that on the Macintosh, Photoshop looked a lot more like the GIMP -- except that the menubar was on top, mac-related stuff, etc. However, the Photoshop programming team didn't want to figure out how to do that on Windows, so they simply made a "container window" to hold everything.

Since then, a number of programs have emulated that, even though they never had to. It was simply a hack to get around a Mac-->Windows porting problem.

MONO?

[jj110888 (791178)]

So, um, isn't this the kind of thing we can run under mono without having to deal with wine regressions? Didn't M$ just help linux and windows users alike here by using .net?

Re:MONO?

[AstroDrabb (534369)]

On paper it is, but not in practice. First let me state that I like and use both Java and .Net daily. If MS intented .Net to be cross-platform, they would have made it so, just like Sun did with Java. Sun _made_ Java run on multiple platforms from the start and didn't do any features that favor Sun's platform. This is not the case with .Net. There are plenty of features that are MS Only on the GUI side. Also, did MS do any work toward cross-platform support? Nope.

If MS wanted this to really be cross-platform, why didn't the do what Sun did with the GUI side and have it work on other platforms. The only thing MS did was give us the C# language (which is nice) and a reference C# complier. That is a far way off from being cross platform. What really matters are the class libraries. Sun made theirs cross-platform and implemented them on multiple platforms, MS did not. Sun did not tie anything into just Solaris, MS tied the GUI end of .Net into just MS Windows.

If you write a .Net GUI app, it will not be cross-platform by default. You have to use some other class libraries like GTK#, QT# or wxWindows#. With Java, when you write a GUI app, it _is_ cross-platform.

Re:MONO?

[AstroDrabb (534369)]

they just didn't actually implement it on multiple platforms

And that is the hardest part and the one that requires the most resources and time.

Any group can make a new language and submit it for ISO standardization. Yes that would allow possible cross-platform implementations. But that is a far cry from actually being cross-platform.

Sun made Java when they were the largest Unix server platform and one of the largest server platforms (MS doesn't have server monopoly). Sun could have made Java only run on Solaris and just submit specs for anyone else. They didn't do that. They _wrote_ the code for multiple platforms so that Java could be cross-platform.

.Net will never be cross-platform until you can take a program using the native class libraries and have it run on other platforms. Thanks to Mono, you can do that with ASP.Net applications written in C# or VB.Net. But you cannot do that with .Net GUI applications.

I just finished a C# GUI application (for personal use) that connects into Coast to Coast AM [coasttocoastam.com] with a StreamLink userName and Password and downloads the daily MP3's of the most recent show (or any date you pick). This app doesn't run on Linux or any other platform. If I had written it in Java, it would run out-of-the-box on those other platforms, that is cross-platform.

I's so Anti-Gimp

[Anonymous Coward]

This program is so Anti gimp that it can walk and has full use of all it's limbs.

A replacement for MS Paint

[Pacifix (465793)]

If it's meant to be a replacement for MS Paint as the blurb states, I don't think the Gimp should feel threatened. The chasm between Paint and Gimp is lightyears wide. It's unlikely this program could attract the OSS devotion necessary to become really big, especially what with its association with MS and the sometimes irrational dislike this inspires in some of us.

Nothing irrational at all

[FreeUser (11483)]

especially what with its association with MS and the sometimes irrational dislike this inspires in some of us.

Based on Microsoft's behavior past and present, its effect on the industry and emergence of technology in general (quite negative), and their publicly stated intentions with respect to Linux, software freedon in general, and freedom to innovate vis-a-vis software patents and ligitagion in general (of which their funding of the SCO debacle is but a precursor), I'd say there is absolutely nothing whatsoever "irrational" about the dislike an association with Microsoft inspires in any of us.

Now, the expression of that dislike can sometimes take irrational forms, just as the expression of anger can on any subject, but that by no means belies the entirely rational, indeed very justified, anger and dislike being felt.

Finally, given Microsoft's long history and ongoing policy of customer lock-in, and their stated strategy of leveraging .net towards those ends, avoiding any .net project like the proverbial plague is not only wise, it is critical to the self-preservation of any software developer wishing to work in an environment free of Microsoft's coercive control, be it Apple OS X, FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Palm OS, Solaris, or anything else.

I do agree that this program is no threat to the GIMP. Its licensing is more restrictive, it requires .NET, and, as you say, it addresses a different niche of users.

good job /.

[the right sock (160156)]

75gb

dev, with mirror link: http://blogs.msdn.com/rickbrew/

A few questions about it..

[suso (153703)]

• Is it open source?
  
• Does it work on anything besides windows?
  
• How is this program different from the 100 other free paint programs for windows?
  
• Why is this on slashdot and why are they saying this is the anti-gimp?
  

Re:A few questions about it..

[TheAwfulTruth (325623)]

1) Yes.
2) No.
3) It's open source.
4) See #3 and because all /. headlines have to have inflamitory and misleading headlines to attract attention for some reason.

Re:A few questions about it..

[suso (153703)]

4) See #3 and because all /. headlines have to have inflamitory and misleading headlines to attract attention for some reason.

Yes exactly, I think it would have been better and more helpful to have a headline like "Paint.NET, an open source alternative to MS-Paint". I suppose slashdot has fallen into the same pit that all other mainstream media is trapped in where it must scare its audience into submission.

Re:A few questions about it..

[agraupe (769778)]

It only sucks for those who use photoshop extensively before switching to the GIMP. I remained free of Photoshop long enough that now I am completely used to the GIMP's interface, and I don't see why it is any better/worse than Photoshop's. I agree, it doesn't have some of Photoshop's features, but we need to stop complaining about the UI. Just because it is different doesn't mean it is bad. As I see it, we shouldn't try to convert the professional full-time users of Photoshop, but rather the people who pirate it. Piracy is a bigger threat to Free Software than it is to entrenched industry standard software, IMO.

google cache

[k3v0 (592611)]

http://64.233.167.104/search?q=cache:M2DW9zE1bnIJ: www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/+&hl=en/ [64.233.167.104]

Coral Cache file:

[Neophytus (642863)]

Much faster [nyud.net] than either of the mirrors listed.

Looks like it's Open Source. Cool.

[stephenb (18235)]

BSD-like License: http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net/legal.html [wsu.edu]

wow this is SLOW

[hsmith (818216)]

try drawing with the fat brush

i am running a 3.0+ ghz and 2GB ram dell and the graphics painting sucks

they may want to work on speed a bit if they want to be taken seriously

Re:wow this is SLOW

[geekster (87252)]

Yeah really. The requirements are 800 Mhz and 256 Mb ram. Which are exactly my specs.

It was painfully slow. It stopped responding for about 5-10 seconds in the middle of a brush stroke and completely froze when i tried to exit throught the file menu.

Re:wow this is SLOW

[Anonymous Coward]

As the original author and team leader of this project, I insist that you shut the fuck up and get dual Xeons like I have.

Not Anti-gimp

[tsetem (59788)]

I'd say, just like the article, it's intended to be a replacement for MS-Paint. It doesn't appear to have anywhere near all of the advanced features of Gimp.

It has layers, and an effects API, but that seems to be where the similarity ends.

The interface appears to be simple like MS Paint's, but I think it's seriously overstating that it's a Gimp competitor. Heck, sounds like the project has only been around for 2 semesters. How mature could it be compared to Gimp or Photoshop?

OSS

[fozzmeister (160968)]

"In the spirit of all this freedom, we welcome any suggestions, as well as provide the source code free of charge for anyone who wishes to tinker with it. Please explore this website, download the software and try out many of the things you would do on those expensive commercial applications."

and the license
" Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
"

Well fuck me, MS is sponsoring not just free software but Free software, Very interesting! Oh and can we take this and shove it on Linux?

Heretic.

[Saeed al-Sahaf (665390)]

The programming language used to create Paint.NET is C#, with GDI+ extensions.' It really seems like a nice tool. I definitely prefer its UI to GIMP's.

Heretic. Turn in your Linux / Open Source badge and exit the building. Get out.

See the trap?

[jmorris42 (1458)]

I see several interesting things here. Note how they had to use a GDI+ 'extension'? And someone is reporting sluggishness anyway, even on hardware that is fairly new. Tells me .net suffers from Java's Disease along with any other emulated environment and that the move to add in native hooks is already well underway. And of course it is in Microsoft's interest to make sure that .NET is 'multiplatform' in the hype but Windows only in practice.

Let this be an object lesson for all you Mono fetishists, .net and all it's works are nothing but a trap for the unwary. And will never live up to the hype anymore than Java did, although there is now hope for Java to become useful by jetisoning the emulation and making it just another object oriented language that GCC will grind down to ELF executables.

after a quick look...

[Atilla (64444)]

ok, so.....

layer support sucks. only very few basic layer modes.

to work on multiple images, you basically have to start another instance of the program. functional but not efficient.

it is incredibly slow. i'm running it on a 1.8 GHz P4, 1 gig of RAM. I apply an effect on a decent size image, and go get a cup of coffee.

oh, try the "re-color" tool, if you've got nothing to do for a while.

can't get anti-aliasing to work right.

interface flickers quite a bit as you navigate through the menus. not critical, but rather annoying.

color picker does not display the color in hex, which makes it harder to use for web graphics.

on a good note, the interface is vaguely familiar to the ubiquitous and expensive software that we all love so much.

how is this anti-GIMP, anyways? it's not cross-platform, it's quite a bit slower, and is targeted at a totally different audience. I agree that it's better than MS Paint, but shit, MS Paint should have been retired years ago.

Re:Interesting

[a_karbon_devel_005 (733886)]

You should care because one of the nicest features of GIMP, and indeed all cross platform OSS is that it DOES work on Windows. It's a major help to development to have that user base. If GIMP gets dropped for Paint.NET on windows ( which I'm not saying/seeing it will, but it DOES apparently have MS's interest ) then GIMP will lose "hands at the wheel" for development/testing and that will contribute to it losing a bit of steam, even if YOUR only concernt is linux. Ask not for who the bell tolls, sir, it tolls for thee.

Re:Interesting

[roca (43122)]

The fact is that the GIMP UI sucks and the developers don't care. Therefore it's inevitable that GIMP will eventually be replaced by something whose UI doesn't suck. It might be some evolution of Inkscape, or it might be a port of Paint.NET, but it must happen, and the sooner the better as far as I'm concerned.

Re:sad to say, but GIMP does lack

[Alan (347)]

I think what he's trying to say is "I am scared to bring my hax0red version of photoshop to work" :)

Re:BitTorrent!

[whysanity (231556)]

torrents are fun [homedns.org]

Re:Bandwidth problem?..... download slow

[stupidfoo (836212)]

FYI:
Program also works on Windows 2000 with .NET 1.1 installed.
First impressions: sure beats MS Paint :)

Re:It's a .NET product. Ewwww...

[Adhemar (679794)]

Why should I install more badly designed MS software then I have too?

You don't.

First of all, the .NET framework is not badly designed. It's one of the best-designed products Microsoft ever came up with. The reason Microsoft released so much crap over the years, is probably because all their best programmers were working on .NET.

Secondly, their exist free (as in free software) alternatives. Mono [mono-project.com] is the best-known one, an other is DotGNU [dotgnu.org] Portable.NET [dotgnu.org]. But they're not 100 % complete yet, so I don't know if this Paint.NET will work.

Re:Windows XP Only?

[tagevm (152391)]

The XP requirement is due to the use of GDI+, which is included with XP.

However, GDI+ can be installed on NT4,W2K,Win98,ME see http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url= /library/en-us/gdicpp/GDIPlus/GDIPlus.asp

As Linux doesn't have GDI+ I doubt very much that it will work with Mono.

Re:I have to clear this up!

[IdntUnknwn (700129)]

The UI is fine if you make an effort to learn to use it.

I believe thats exactly what everyone is complaining about. I'm sure the GUI is certainly usable once you learn it, the problem is that there is an enormously steep learning curve involved that turns the majority of potential users away.

If I replaced your car's steering wheel with joysticks, I'm sure that once you learn it you'll drive just fine. But you'll still curse me for forcing you to learn to drive that way. Most people will probably just give up. At the same time, I'm sure that there will be someone out there who will indeed be willing to learn it and say to everyone else "put some effort in, you whiny idiots."

Re:Mono.

[Nachtfellen (67655)]

I don't think there is anyone specifically working on this yet, but I'd like to see it.

I downloaded Paint.NET a few days ago to see what it would take to convert it to run on GTK# with mono (much the same way the MonoDevelop guys ported SharpDevelop). The first issue I hit was that it seems to be tightly bound to Ink (the TabletPC SDK).
Nonetheless, I plan to do some more experimenting with it over the next few days. If anyone else is working on this, I'd really like to hear from them.

Joseph Hill (jhill AT arcfocus.com)

Senior programmer?

[melted (227442)]

Have you heard of page sharing and copy-on-write? Most of these 80MB is shared between two instances of the app. At the same time fore each of the processes it looks like it has 80MB of code and data loaded. In reality both processes have the same thing, except for pages that differ. So code DLLs are mapped to the same areas of physical RAM and data segments are only in physically different locations if they've been written into.

Yet windows task manager shows 80MB anyway, because that's what individual processes see.

Re:I mod this story...

[rzebram (828885)]

Since they say that Paint.NET is the Anti-GIMP, if I install both this software and The GIMP at the same time, will my laptop explode?