The forum has been down for most of this week. So, to reward (?) everyone’s patience and understanding I have posted a public beta for Paint.NET v3.5.5 which I blogged about earlier. Things will be back up soon, and I promise it will be worth the wait.

This isn’t available via the built-in updater, and the installer isn’t even digitally signed. It’s a beta and has not been fully tested, so all the usual warnings and scare tactics apply. I’d really like to get everyone’s feedback on the performance improvements 🙂 If they all work out then I’ll make sure more of them get into future releases.

What’s new:

• Fixed the bug where saving as 8-bit PNG/GIF/BMP wasn’t always working. This often happened when “Auto” bit-depth was selected, and based on the color complexity of the image it would choose 8-bit (for a smaller file-size) and then fail with “error”. Usually this only happened with larger images. This was discussed here on the forum at http://paintdotnet.forumer.com/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=33944.
• Improved performance of Gaussian Blur by 30-40% depending on your CPU (Intel Core i7 seems to show the best improvement).
• Improved performance of all the layer blend modes by 15-30%, depending on your CPU (Intel Atom seems to show the best improvement).
• Improved performance of zooming with the mouse wheel on dual-core Intel Atom systems.

The download link is over at the forum.

Also, do note that while I say that either of those two Intel chips (i7 or Atom) shows the best improvement, please keep in mind that I haven’t yet benchmarked on any other CPUs (Core 2, Phenom, etc.). I just picked up the new Intel Core i7-980X and it screams (especially at 4 GHz!). Paint.NET is faster than ever, and thankfully so are my build times for Paint.NET v4.0.