Techreluctant.com

After I upgraded to Vista, I found that a lot of my software no longer worked on it. That inluded my very old version of photoshop. But I fiddle with photos a lot and need to resize them and stuff for webpages so, what’s a girl to do? On a complete shot in the dark I googled for a free photo editor, expecting lots of garbage programs full of spyware and God knows what else. To my happy surprise, I found a little gem called Paint.Net. It is completely free, although paypal donations are accepted if you find you really like it and use it a lot. Originally developed to be a replacement for Windows’ Microsoft Paint, the developers (as part of an undergraduate college senior design project) went on to create this “powerful yet simple image and photo editor tool”. I’ve loved using it. If you’re not sure about how to use it, there are great forums to help you with your questions and a web-based help section, both accessible from the Paint.Net’s Help section. I use it mostly for resizing and you can do that by going to Image–> Resize. But there is plenty more you can do with it. And best of all, it’s free. The one caveat is that you need to have the .Net framework installed on your computer. If you have Vista, don’t worry about it, it’s there already but if you have an earlier version of Windows, you can find the installation for most Windows version at Microsoft’s website. There is more about that at Paint.Net’s website and much more on their blog.