paint.net 4.0 Beta 1 (Build 5152) Now Available for Download

paint.net 4.0 Beta 1 (Build 5152), the first beta build for paint.net 4.0 is now available. Build 5152 comes with a number of improvements as well as bug fixes. To install paint.net 4.0 Beta, you can either:
  • Download directly at paint.net 4.0 Beta 1 (Build 5152)
  • For 4.0 alpha build user, you can use the built-in updater from a previous 4.0 alpha build.
  • For version 3.5.11 user, you can use the built-in updater from v3.5.11 if you have "Also check for pre-release (beta) builds" enabled.


Please Do NOT use this paint.net 4.0 Beta release on production machines. A paint.net 4.0 Beta release should be considered for evaluation and testing purposes.

Overview
The paint.net is free image and photo editing software for Windows users. 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. It is very simple and easy to use, and specially designed to be learned through intuition without assistance or manuals. paint.net features the tabbed interface where the tabs show a live thumbnail in place of a text. These thumbnails make it easy for users to see which images they need to open when work with multiple images.

paint.net has been compared to some of the commercial digital photo editing software packages such as Adobe Photoshop, Corel Paint Shop Pro, Microsoft Photo Editor, and The GIMP.

paint.net 4.0 comes with a brand new, asynchronous, fully multithreaded rendering engine. It also improvements to various tools and a tweaked user interface.

Here is some of the most prominent changes in paint.net 4.0:

A brand new, asynchronous, fully multithreaded rendering engine
  • Performance scales very well with respect to the number of CPU cores, whether you have 2, 4, 6, or even 16 of them.
  • Performance scales much better with large, or even huge, images. Rendering will slow down and you will see tiles "trickling" in as they are completed, but the UI will still be responsive to your changes and clicks.
  • The canvas now uses hardware acceleration via Direct2D, which also improves performance.
  • Memory usage is lower.

Selections have been improved in many ways
  • Antialiased selections. You may turn this on/off at any time from the toolbar.
  • Selection outlines are now rendered with the "dancing ants" animation.
  • Performance of selection rendering and manipulation (Move Selection tool) have been fantastically improved.

General UI
  • The functionality previously provided by the Utilities, Window, and Help menus has been simplified, consolidated, and moved to the top-right corner of the main window.
  • A brand new Settings dialog makes it much easier to configure all the tool and toolbar defaults, among other things.
  • The zoom slider and units selector have been moved from the toolbar to the bottom right corner of the window (into the status bar).
  • The image thumbnail list is now left-aligned and does not move around when you switch between certain tools.
  • The image thumbnail list can now be reordered with drag-and-drop.
  • Updated theming to a white, blue, flat motif.

You can find the full changelog here.

What's new in paint.net 4.0 Beta (Build 5152)?
Build 5152 comes with a number of improvements as well as bug fixes. Here are the changes between the previous build (5143) and this one (5152):
  • Added a "Finish" (aka commit) button in the toolbar. It looks like a green check mark. This makes it much easier to discover how you finish a shape and then draw another one, for instance. Most of the non-brush tools support this (e.g. Move, Gradient, Magic Wand, Paint Bucket, Text).
  • Added a choice between Light and Blue color schemes to Settings. The default on Windows 8/8.1 is Light, and the default on Windows 7 is Blue.
  • Fixed some artifacts in the Magic Wand when making a "Global" selection.
  • Fixed a crash in the Magic Wand tool that was causing people a lot of grief ("this.baseGeometry == null").
  • Fixed a crash in various tools (crash in ClickDragBehavior.cs line 270).
  • Fixed brush strokes being completely erratic over Remote Desktop.
  • Fixed some very broken UI rendering over Remote Desktop with Windows 8.
  • The icons in the top-right of the main window are now scaled correctly for high-DPI.
  • Fixed a crash if you clicked to undo multiple actions after committing a shape.
  • Fixed some performance issues whereby non-active images were still rendering stuff in the background.
  • Fixed many tools emitting a history item even if the image was unaffected (e.g. drawing a brush stroke outside of the canvas).
  • Fixed a leftover progress bar in the status bar after loading an image.
  • Fixed Ctrl+Arrow keys not moving the selection by 10 pixels (it only moved by 1 px) if you didn't first release the Ctrl key after you pasted with Ctrl+V.
  • Removed the dangling "Tool:" tooltip on the Tool selection button in the toolbar.
  • Fixed a crash when the language was changed if the new language's localized "paint.net User Files" folder already existed.
  • Fixed the dash style button in the toolbar being too skinny at 96 DPI (it worked fine at >96 DPI).
  • Fixed the main window's application icon being off by 2 pixels.
  • Fixed Ctrl+D reverting selection movement if it was pressed too quickly after using the arrow keys.
  • Fixed some missed thumbnail updates, especially for the Layers window.
  • Fixed the Width/Height text boxes in the toolbar for Fixed Selection not having an outline around them.
  • Fixed a visual styles related crash on some buttons in some cases.
  • Fixed the main installer not running after the .NET 4.5.1 installer if it required a reboot.
  • Fixed the installer seeming to disappear if there wasn't enough disk space to install .NET 4.5.1.
  • Shapes no longer finish/commit if you press the delete key.
  • Non-active images no longer update their thumbnails when you make changes in another image which affect them (e.g. if you leave an uncommited shape on image 1, then switch to image 2 and change the color).
  • Fixed a crash in the Text tool if you try to use a "bad" font (one which shows up in the font list as a yellow exclamation mark).

System Requirements
Minimum system requirements
  • Windows 7 SP1 or newer.
  • A dual-core (or more!) CPU is highly recommended.
  • .NET Framework 4.5 is now required, and will be installed if needed.

Note: Windows XP and Windows Vista are no longer supported.

Source:
paint.net 4.0 Beta Build 5152

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