Alright, here we go: finally a new update to Paint.NET! Please note that this is a beta, and expires in 60 days on April 28th. You can get this update by downloading it from the website, http://www.getpaint.net/ (no need to uninstall your current version, it will figure it all out for you), or via the built-in updater. For the latter, go to Help -> Check for Updates… and make sure you are set up to receive betas by clicking on the Options button and ensuring that "Also check for beta relases" is checked. Then close the dialogs and click on Help -> Check for Updates… again.
The most notable features in this release are the ability to save PNG’s at 8- and 24-bit depth, and the integration of Ed Harvey’s "Fragment" blur effect. There are also a bunch of other minor things, bug fixes, and a new Italian translation.
List of changes:
- New: Ability to save PNG’s at 8- and 24-bit color depths.
- New: Ability to save BMP’s at 8-bit color depth.
- New: "Auto-detect" bit-depth option for PNG, BMP, and TGA file types. It will analyze the image and determine the lowest bit-depth that can still save the image without quality loss.
- New: "Fragment" blur effect, by Ed Harvey
- New: The "Polar Inversion" distortion effect has been enhanced to allow changing the rendering offset, and the behavior for "edge" pixels (clamp, reflect, or wrap).
- New: For developers, IndirectUI can now be used to write configuration UI for file types.
- New: For developers, IndirectUI has a new radio button control type for enumerations, and some new property constraint rules.
- New: Italian translation.
- Fixed: In some cases, an exponential property slider would get "stuck" at some values when using up/down keyboard keys. This mostly affects some effect plugins.
- Fixed: When using keyboard navigation, sometimes the File menu would scroll its items out of view.
- Fixed: Some crashes that were tracked down to out-of-bounds coordinate values in certain effects.
- Fixed: The installer would fail if Paint.NET had never been installed before, and was being installed to any non-default directory. This bug only affected version 3.22.
Enjoy!
paint.net blog 
I know this isn’t the place for it Mr. Brewster, but I’m typing as I’m thinking/using the software so please forgive me.
Can you please pad the zoom levels. When I move to the left most and right most coordinates of an image, currently the boundary of the graphic always sits under a toolbox in the furthest reaches of the window. Always. It’s just the way it’s set up to work, and the transparency ‘novelty’ wears pretty thin in these moments of editing frustration.
If there were Paint.NET ‘padding’ of an image canvas to take these docks into account, I could move up, down left and right on a canvas at any zoom level and the center point of my window would be able to reach the far regions of the graphic comfortably, allowing a user to edit a graphic at extreme focus right up to the corners without constantly slinging the floating tool boxes all over the place.
It’s essentially a very simple concept that takes into account the Paint.NET layout. But I can imagine it’s implementation in practice as being a huge relief to just about everybody who works with the software.
Please consider this in your ongoing development process. Keep up the good work.
Leon.
Also, when this new release is officially outed, do I remove the Ed Harvey plugin package that you previously plugged here?
I would thoretically end up having two ‘Fragment’ effects. The new core one AND the plugin. Side by side.
Leon.
L. Rawlins,
Scrolling past the edge of the canvas is one of the requests in the ‘Popular Feature Requests’ thread. Here’s what it has to say on the subject.
“Right now when you zoom in on the image, you can only scroll to the edge of the image. It can be inconvenient because then you have no space between the image and the scroll bars. Implementing this is dependent on some other “plumbing” work that should be done for the image canvas’ rendering, and this will be taken into account when that work is being done. No ETA though.”
Doesn’t look like that will happen until (hopefully) Paint.NET 4.x.