14 DAY TRIAL // The first alpha build for Paint.NET image editing package has been released over the weekend. Rick Brewster, author and developer of the program, announced a slew of significant changes covering system requirements, user interface, tools and rendering engine.
Starting this build, Paint.NET works only on systems running Windows 7 SP1 or later and requires .NET Framework 4.5.
The rendering engine powering the application is fully multi-threaded and asynchronous. This allows the program to behave better with very large images as responsiveness in the UI remains unaffected while the picture is rendering.
In order to push performance to new limits, the developer included support for hardware acceleration via Direct2D and made the necessary optimizations for less memory usage.
The user interface has been simplified by eliminating some of the menus: Utilities, Window and Help. Their functionality, however, has not been removed as access to their entries is available from the top right part of the application window.
As far as tools are concerned, the improvements should be quite visible. Brushes now have support for hardness; drawing tools do their job with a blending mode that can be configured from the tool bar.
Additionally, the Magic Wand and Paint Bucket can sample from the current layer or the entire image and allow adjusting the Tolerance and the Origin after committing the change.
The list of new features and changes is impressive, but keep in mind that this is just an early look at the new version of the application and there is plenty of work to be done in order to refine stability and functionality.