PAINT.NET - ( free and quite good )

[simon007]

PAINT.NET

Anyone else use it, I have and as for free open source
Photo Editors go you can't really beat it.

On it's own it's very decent but with the huge amount of of PLUGINS to download it's very good and you will not really need to worry about spending silly money on Adobe Photoshop 5 ( or 6 soon ). GIMP I have heard is another good free program but I don't see how it would offer more.

Adobe Photoshop 5 £ 587.98 $ 539.49
Corel Paint Shop Pro x4 £ 59.98 $ 43.27
PhotoPlus X5 £ 54.26 $ 59.00
( Photoplus 5 has got some bad reviews on AMAZON where as Photoplus4
is well liked and costs just under £ 20 or $ 13.94 )

I am finding on Amazon.com ( US site ) the software works out a lot cheaper.

So I am using Paint.NET for now but might spend a little and go for a more upmarket program.

So everyone what do you use and WHY?

Simon

[Iguanasan]

I use Gimp. Downloaded Paint.NET to try it out and it's pretty decent graphics editor. Layers without layer masks, however, does not seem very useful to me. 90% of the time when I am using a layer it's because I want to use a layer mask. If Paint.NET has layer masks, I can't find it. Also, with ufRAW installed in conjunction with Gimp I have RAW support for my images in a more seamless workflow.

Both Gimp and ufRAW are free and do much more than I can use so I see no reason to spend hundreds of dollars on software that can do more than I can do. I have to rely on getting it right in camera much more often as I really suck at post production. Google's Picasa lets me manage my images for free and provides basic photo manipulation if all I need is something very simple or if I'm not concerned about perfect quality for some "snaps".

[Gremlich]

GIMP is kinda clunky, though. I do not know how Paint.net is to use for comparison.