I’ve been working slowly* on what I’m currently calling version 3.20, but in the meantime I decided to put out a small feature-based release. It will be called Paint.NET v3.10, and will include a few new effects, support for a new file type, and of course a few bug fixes. This is the first time that a Paint.NET update will be incorporating code from the community, and I’ve got high hopes for this release. Here’s what’s planned so far:

Megan Fox and Mandy Moore guest star in this blog post. Here are the original images for the modified ones that are shown below:

Soften Portrait – This is based on the “Portrait” effect originally written by BoltBait (aka David Issel). Its implementation is inspired by the Orton Effect that has been popular in photography for quite some time.

Ink Sketch – Again, another effect by BoltBait. I haven’t finalized the icon for this one yet. I’d really like a good quality “ink pen” graphic but haven’t really been able to find one yet!

DDS file type support – This is basically a straight bundling of the DDS File Type Plugin by Dean Ashton. DDS is short for “Direct Draw Surface” and is a file format used by many games and also by the XNA SDK for the XBOX 360. It will install as a few separate DLL’s in the FileTypes directory. This way Dean still has the ability to issue his own updates independent of Paint.NET’s updating schedule.

I have also made some performance tweaks to some of the other effects, with about a 5-15% increase for Oil Painting, Frosted Glass, and Gaussian Blur.

Paint.NET v3.10 should be in beta soon, with the final release by mid-August.

* Hey even I have to take things easy once in awhile J

Beta on Tuesday, final on Friday … the Internet is great 🙂

This is mostly a service release that fixes some bugs, while also improving keyboard / accessibility cues for some dialogs. Get it via the built-in updater, or from the website: http://www.getpaint.net/

The change list is the same as it was for the 3.08 beta release

This is mostly a service release that fixes some bugs, while also improving keyboard / accessibility cues for some dialogs. Get it via the built-in updater, or from the website: http://www.getpaint.net/

Fixed: Pasting an image from Office 2003 applications now works (e.g. Excel 2003 graphs).
Fixed: Some dialogs were not indicating which command button was the default. These buttons now have a highlight to indicate which one will be activated if the user presses Enter or Space.
Fixed: Some minor keyboard navigation issues with task dialogs
Fixed: Performance issue with the File->Acquire submenu taking a long time to appear
Fixed: Window activation issue when the Print wizard was finished / closed
Fixed: Crash when there was 1 image open and the user pressed Ctrl+Q and then Ctrl+W
Fixed: Minor performance issue if the user had 1 modified image open and then canceled the “Save changes?” dialog
Fixed: Misbehaving filetype factory implementations (plugins) will no longer cause a crash

This is mostly a stop-gap release to fix some bugs before work begins in earnest on the next release with some cool new features. Stay tuned!