The fourth beta build for paint.net 4.0 is now available!
To install, you can either 1) use the built-in updater from a previous 4.0 build, or 2) use the built-in updater from v3.5.11 if you have “Also check for pre-release (beta) builds”, or 3) download it from the forum at: http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?/topic/28562-paintnet-40-beta-build-5268/
- The Line/Curve tool is now back, and the Line and Curve shapes have been removed from the Shapes tool
- Improved rendering quality of the Line/Curve tool, especially when antialiasing is disabled
- The rectangle shape now draws using an “inset” brush stroke. This helps prevents blurriness with odd-sized brush widths
- Shapes tool now lets you commit by clicking outside of the bounding box of the current shape. (you can also start drawing a new shape via clicking and dragging, of course)
- Improved rendering quality of brush tools when antialiasing is disabled
- Improved performance of Shapes and Line/Curve tools on most systems (e.g., less than 8 CPU cores)
- Improved rendering quality of Image->Resize when using Nearest Neighbor
- Fixed the Palette chooser in the Colors window, which was going away when you tried to move the mouse to click on one of its items
- Fixed some broken clipping when using Paste and “Expand Canvas”
- Intel-based GPUs now default to having hardware acceleration disabled. You may still force it to be enabled from the Settings dialog.
- When pasting, the PNG format now has a higher priority than CF_DIB, which allows easier access to transparency (alpha) from other applications
- Tools no longer incorrectly commit when clicking on the currently active layer in the Layers window
- The layer’s opacity was being ignored while drawing if it was the lowest (index zero) layer
- You can now copy a file from File Explorer and Paste it into Paint.NET (regression from 3.5)
- Fixed the canvas scroll bars occasionally being incorrect after maximizing the main window and then restoring it
- Fixed radio button group tab processing
- Fixed many small miscellaneous crashes
- New language: Czech
I’m summarizing and consolidating the bug list here a little … there are 52 fixed bugs since the last public beta 
paint.net blog 
Thanks for all your hard work Rick!
This is awesome, thanks!
What’s going on with Intel based GPU’s? Are they buggy and that’s why the option to use them is off by default?
I guess that it was a combination of both: Intel integrated GPUs aren’t as powerful as dedicated ones from other makes, and also don’t have all the features of their bigger cousins, so the (small) performance penalty wouldn’t justify chasing the bugs. But this is just an educated guess…
They’re buggy. I’ve been getting a lot of reports of graphical corruption which is solved by disabling hardware acceleration. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
VERY buggy. I completely disabled support for Intel GPU’s in some software that I’m working on myself… instead of trying to find work arounds for them, I ust have the program gracefully exit and tell the end user that their graphics hardware simply isn’t up to the task.
I enumerate all adapters via DXGI and if any of their descriptions have the word “Intel” in their name then I default to having hardware acceleration disabled. I’m sure I could spend more time figuring out a white list of names, e.g. “Intel HD Graphics” versus “Intel Graphics Media Adapter” or whatever, but I don’t have a good way to test all that.
I can’t download the update via the built-in updater. It just returns 404 error stating that the download link cannot be found.
Fixed!
Thanks
Great job Rick!
Is there chance to enable again the abilitity of rotate line/curve after they drawing? Now it turned to the past when after drawing line/curve we could only change the position and breakpoints in line/curve… :(((
Thanks for the work. Is there a way for “Rounded Rectangle” to define a different radius then the default one?
When Paint.net will finally have BLUR and FEATHER tools out of box? Lack of Blur tool (not the whole image blur effect) makes Paint.net quit uncomfortable for drawing,
Drawing tools can be improved as well, even PAINT from Win 7 has better drawing tools that kinda simulate some real way of drawing things.
Use the Hardness setting in the toolbar.
Hey Rick! paint.net 4 is coming along nicely, but I did run into a few issues today while working on an image:
1) Selection box is… awkward… when zoomed in: http://imgur.com/1tTQRXe (Marching ants are drawn centered on pixels and only on the top-left sides of the selection)
2) Highly zoomed error when using the line tool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eZmUlLzIqU
I’m not sure if the second one was present in older alphas, but it is odd and very jarring. Also, some basic info:
Windows 8.1 x64, Intel Core i7-3820, 8GB RAM, Nvidia GTX 760, Driver v337.88
1) Selection outline’s offset is fixed for the next update. It was a goof in prepending vs. appending the matrix transform (image vs. screen space).
2) Weird … I’ll look into that …
Some more bugs (I’m so sorry, Rick. I know you work hard on this!)
1) Opening any image seems to cause Paint.NET to ‘lag’ really heavily. CPU usage doesn’t spike, but pdn ceases to respond momentarily, then finally loads the image. All this time the mouse cursor goes into ‘molasses mode’, and plays out my mouse movements in slow motion.
2) This: http://youtu.be/oTQqrhwzOis It had the same mouse-slowing as loading an image, then the Resize dialog was slow to load and process, and a lot of UI flickering… Seemed to be problems with the non-client extensions?
Hmm seems to be a set of problems specific to your computer, unfortunately. If your mouse cursor is going in “slow motion,” then that indicates some driver issue. It happens when DPCs or ISRs get jammed up.
Great job! I was thinking a future feature might be to have a good text tool allowing separate editing of inside, outside colors, gradients and shadows would be great. But someone probably filed that already the official way. Thanks for all you work. @afellowcsharpdeveloper
Unable to update I keep getting this message: Error opening file for writing: C:\\Users\DEBDTE~1\AppData\Local\Temp\PdnSetup\SetupShim.exe
Is there anything else I can do?
Go to the Temp folder (type %temp% in Explorer’s address bar) and delete the PdnSetup folder. If you can’t, try killing any suspicious process (like SetupShim.exe) or rebooting, and try again deleting the folder.