Everyone has heard of Windows Paint. It’s very basic and really unusable in these days. Technology has moved on and so has Paint. This is where Paint.NET has grown to become one of the best and powerful free photo editing software around.
I was a fan on Macromedia Fireworks before Abode stepped in, this obviously being a paid for product. Open source software has alot of good things to answer for, Paint.NET being one of these good things.
I’ve tried various other free programs that offer photo editing but they always lack something. Having sued Paint.NET for a while I was quite taken back to find out about all the awesome plugins that are available. If you fire over to the community side of the Paint.NET website you’ll see that it is quite active.
There are literally hundreds of plugins that all do a variety of things. I have 5 plugins that I use quite a lot and thought I would share.
My Favourite Paint.NET Plugins
Madjik all in one Plugin
This plugin pack contains over 60 in one pack. Once installed the amount of options available to the user are dramatically increased.
Drop Shadow Plugin
Kris Vandermotten’s drop shadow plugin. Taken from the plugin download page : http://users.telenet.be/krisvandermotten/Downloads/PaintDotNetEffects.html
Effects per category:
- Drop Shadow: The “Drop Shadow” effect, under the Object effect menu. With offset, widening, blur, opacity and a color picker. Improved.
- Duotones: “Duotone Light” and “Duotone Ink on Paper” adjustments.Improved
- Monochromes: “Cyanotype”, “Sepia 2”, “Grayscale on Colored Paper” and “Monochrome Ink on Paper” adjustments.
- Blurs: “Average Blur” and “Smart Blur” effects, under the Blurs effect menu.
- Color Accent: “Color Accent” adjustment.
- FadeEdge: “Fade Edge” effect, under the Photo effect menu.
- Gradient: A four-color, non-linear “Gradient” effect with high quality color dithering, under the Render effect menu.
- Gridlines: Draws a grid with horizontal and vertical lines, under the render menu.
- Object Align: Aligns the object in the selection to the selection.
Stencil Plugin
http://forums.getpaint.net/index.php?showtopic=8408
This plugin allows you to transform photographs into monochome art. Like so:
Do you have a plugin for Paint.NET you’d like to share? Please comment below:
