Paint.NET is free image editing and photo manipulation software for computers that run Windows. It features an intuitive and innovative user interface with support for layers, unlimited undo, special effects, and a wide variety of useful and powerful tools. An active and growing online community provides friendly help, tutorials, and plugins.

This release adds two new effects originally written by David Issel ("BoltBait"), support for the DDS filetype originally written by Dean Ashton, as well as many small bug fixes and some visual fit and finish.

• Note: For the beta, the new features are only presented in English. The final release will have complete translations for the other supported languages.
• New: Soften Portrait effect, by David Issel
• New: Ink Sketch effect, by David Issel
• New: DirectDraw Surface (DDS) file format support, by Dean Ashton. Improved from the original source code by optimizing the DXT compression library ("Squish") to take advantage of multiple cores or processors.
• Improved: Visual fit-and-finish for the Layers window.
• Improved: Visual fit-and-finish for the close / 'X' button on image thumbnails.
• Improved: Small (about 5-10%) performance improvements for some effects such as Oil Painting, Frosted Glass, and Gaussian Blur
• Changed: The keyboard shortcut key for the Color Picker is now 'k'. This makes it so that the toolbar option, "After click: Switch to previous tool", is not useless for those using the keyboard shortcuts.
• Fixed: Pressing Ctrl+[ no longer cancels out of drawing a line/curve, but instead decreases the brush size by 5 as expected.
• Fixed: Ctrl+clicking on the brush size +/- buttons now changes the brush size in increments of 5
• Fixed: Save Configuration dialog would "creep downward" from its last position every time it was opened again
• Fixed: TGA codec now saves the # of alpha bits to the image descriptor byte. This was causing some other applications to load TGA files saved with Paint.NET as solid black images.
• Fixed: Clicking the 'X' to close the Layer Properties dialog was not reverting changes made to the layer while the dialog was open.
• Fixed: Installation will not proceed unless Paint.NET is closed, and will also not allow Paint.NET to be opened until installation is completed. This helps to ensure a fully coherent and complete installation or update.
• Fixed: In Vista, it was possible to crash the Save As dialog by typing a filename that was too long.
• Fixed: In Vista, it was possible to crash the updater if you let the UAC prompt time-out.
• Fixed: It was possible to crash Paint.NET on some systems by clicking on a tool in the Tools window while the "Save As" dialog was open.