Paint.NET 5.0 is a new major version of one of the best free image editors for windows which can be used by the common user. And it comes with interesting news to convince other users who don’t know it.

Paint.NET began as a university project overseen by Microsoft. Although it started out as a clone of the classic Windows Paint from 1985, years of development have made it much more. And without the Microsoft umbrella. Although the current license is freeware, it still retains the open source release under the original MIT license. As far as we’re concerned, the program continues completely free.

Paint.NET 5.0

Microsoft has revamped its Paint for Windows 11, but the changes are cosmetic and usability rather than feature-rich: it’s still a basic, easy-to-use editor. For users who need more, there are a dozen free applications that can be used as intermediate solutions to the most complete ones in the industry, Photoshop if we are talking about ads, or Gimp if we are looking for free and open source software.

Paint.NET 5.0 is part of this group. A fairly complete graphics editor that allows photo editing, manipulation, editing and even drawing tools, which have been enhanced in this version. In addition, it has a large user community, a fairly active online forum with a large number of tutorials, and extensive support for other plugins.

You can see the release notes here. As a summary, they mention performance improvements to an application that is already very fast (nothing to do with Photoshop); support for pressure sensitivity when using touches on touch screens; completely redesigned brush motor and path smoothing, which automatically smooths the brush stroke.

Another significant improvement over version 4.x is Enhanced GPU support to improve performance and reduce CPU usage. Several UI components now use the GPU, including the Layers and History windows, the Ruler, the Image List, and the Curves and Levels UI. On hybrid systems, the application will now automatically use the fastest graphics card, usually the dedicated one, that the computer has. In any case, in Settings > Graphics, you can manage the hardware acceleration for the user interface and canvas and select the rendering device.

Available on its website, Paint.NET 5.0 only officially works on Windows 10 and Windows 11 64-bit versions. If you use it, you will already be convinced. If you don’t know it, we highly recommend the test.