http://www.gimp.org/

I'm not having a go, that's actually what it's called 😀 I use it and it works pretty well.

i've heard cool things about Paint.net

i'd never recommend gimp as a PSP clone

I never got used to Gimp so cannot comment. Paint.net is good but compared to PSP X (last version I used [extensively]), it's quite basic. A couple of things that spring to mind: text handling is poor (not exactly a strength of PSP either but it's better than PDN), selections are very limiting too.

http://getpaint.net

I use PSP7 and paint.net ...

GIMP hands down!

Bring out the GIMP

+1 GIMP here too.

The only real downside is that if you're very accustomed to some other product (thinking Photoshop mainly), then GIMP's workflow and tool placement can seem weird.

But eh, you get used to it.

Can't say i'm a fan of the GTK file selector and the window order bugs...

I vote for GIMP and Paint.net too. I don't like GIMP interface but GIMP is quite good and powerful.

Yes, Gimp is good, the gtk interface is not the best but being an old cross platform program that's what you have to live with.
Paint.net wasn't advanced enough for my needs when I was still on Windows (2-3 years ago).

Looks like the latest version from a couple of months ago finally added a single-window mode.

There was a fork called "GIMPshop" which tried to improve the interface, but apparently it is now many years out of date. Wikipedia also mentions GimPhoto.

thanks for the advice folks! i tired paint.net and it was good. i will give gimp a go too! many thanks!

Personally, I didn't care for GIMP that much. I admit that I didn't really study it, but my impression of it was that it would be quite hard to do any precision work in it. For example, I wanted to smooth part of a scanned page. However, I only wanted to smooth an irregular image in the center of the page. Trying to outline the image with the entire page visible on the screen wasn't very precise, but once you zoom in and start a freehand selection, there's no way to scroll the window to select a larger portion of the image than what's currently visible. Also, the selection and erasure methods seem pretty limited. It does have a good selection of filters and color operations though.

For actually editing images, I prefer Ultimate Paint, which is available in both shareware and freeware versions. The only thing missing from the freeware version are a bunch of the image filters. You can get it here;

http://www.ultimatepaint.com/

Think of it as Deluxe Paint for Windows.

Things I like: For all tools, left button draws in the foreground color, right button erases to the current background color. You can instantly cut out a brush and draw with it, no messing with COPY or PASTE menu commands. +/- on the numeric keypad change the zoom level, no need to click icons to do it. Screen can be scrolled or the zoom level changed without interrupting the current operation. You can change the 'handle' on a clipped brush between the center and all four corners by pressing the "5" key on the numeric keypad. You can add or subtract pixels from all four edges of the canvas if you find you need more room or want to get rid of unused space. Most all the features just seem to work like you'd expect them to.

Things I don't like: There's no transparent fill! Holding down the Shift key to constrain movement to the horizontal or vertical doesn't kick in right away, pretty much negating its usefulness. If you zoom into a window, switch to a different window with a different zoom level and then switch back, the first window will reset to the upper left corner of the image and you'll have to scroll back to where you were working. There's a transparency setting for brushes, but it's really only good for stamping down a single copy. As soon as you move a brush in drawing mode, it instantly becomes 100% opaque because it interacts with the color it just painted.

Despite the few negatives, it's my graphics program of choice. It may not replicate drawing on rice paper with colored chalk, but in my opinion, you can't beat it if you want pixel-level control over your image editing.

Ultimate Paint doesn't have palette support AFAIk

Your all wrong the Ultimate Paint is Dos Neopaint 😁 or VGA-Paint-386 😁

I'm still using PSP7 and PhotoShop 7. I have Gimp as well but I don't use it much for some of the reasons stated above. Never tried Paint.Net. But I'm going to.

And I think the best DOS art tool is Deluxe Paint 2.

GIMP is good and powerful. It does much,much more than my simple, occassional editing/resizing needs. But my only gripe with it is that it takes so long to load initially. Opening images also takes some time. It's noticable even in my corei7 systems. Either that, or I didn't configure something properly.

I also don't like the floating toolbox layout - can't close the box.

But it's free.

@MusicallyInspired:

yep, I still use PSP7 too! LUCKILY it runs fine under win7/x64 😀
Jasc should be ashamed they butchered PainShop and Corel for making it a lame photo-retouching prog.

keropi wrote:

@MusicallyInspired:

yep, I still use PSP7 too! LUCKILY it runs fine under win7/x64 😀
Jasc should be ashamed they butchered PainShop and Corel for making it a lame photo-retouching prog.

Same here but I have 9.0, Hopy Cow they acquired Roxio 😳 🤣