Software update: Paint.NET 4.2.6

Version 4.2.6 of Paint.NET has been released. This drawing and image editing program bridges the gap between the Paint supplied with Windows and expensive but very extensive programs such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Photo Paint. Today, the program is also available via the Windows Store offered, although a small fee is charged for that version. The following changes and improvements have been made in this release:

Added:

• A “Native pointer input” setting if a “pointer” device is available (pen, tablet, touch screen). Disabling this will cause any pointer device to be emulated as a mouse, which may be more compatible but at the cost of smoothness. Pointer devices are listed in Settings -> Diagnostics.

Greatly improved:

• Performance of layer thumbnails when switching between images

Improved:

• The input handling systems to use WM_POINTER, which enables glitch-free drawing when using a pen or stylus (eg Surface Pen, Wacom / Ugee tablet) (see here). This will also be the basis for adding pressure sensitivity in a future release (v4.3).
• Performance of Move Selected Pixels, Shapes, and Gradient tools when releasing the mouse button at the end of drag-and-drop gesture. Previously, anything rendered between the last mouse “move” and “up” events was re-rendered, resulting in the appearance of a delay / lag.
• Handling of the dreaded “NoHardwareDeviceException” crash: The user will be notified of how to fix this. It happens only on 2nd generation Intel Core systems with NVIDIA “Optimus” GPUs (GeForce or Quadro) when the NVIDIA Control Panel is set to force apps (or just Paint.NET) to use the NVIDIA GPU. This is a bug in the NVIDIA driver and / or in DirectX.
• The image list at the top can now be scrolled by clicking the arrow buttons and holding the mouse down, just like a regular scroll bar button. (Previously you had to click repeatedly). This improves usability, but was also noted as being important for accessibility.
• Smooth scrolling animations have been removed from the image list and layers list due to them just not working very well.
• Window chrome / theming when the app is running in Remote Desktop on Windows 10

Updated

• Bundled WebPFileType plugin to v1.3.1.0
• Bundled DDSFileTypePlus plugin to v1.9.8.0

Changed:

• The size of the default / initial image (“Untitled”) is now scaled exactly by system DPI setting (previously scaled by integer / floor of DPI setting). So at 150% DPI scaling this image will now be 1200 × 900 instead of 800 × 600.
• SSE2 is now required for 32-bit / x86 systems (prevously, only SSE was required). See this blog post.

Fixed

• Some high-DPI layout bugs with the Layer Properties dialog, while also preparing this UI for future additions
• A crash (OutOfVideoMemoryException) on systems with hybrid GPU setups that are configured wrong. This seems to be a bug in Windows and DirectX. A “hybrid GPU” setup is an Intel iGPU or AMD APU paired with a discrete GPU in a laptop.
• Images being pasted incorrectly from Outlook 2016/365. This is actually a bug in Outlook: it puts PNGs on the clipboard that are arbitrarily cropped and scaled for some reason, and specifies they are the preferred format to use when pasting. This completely boggles my mind, it’s just really weird, I can’t imagine why it’s done this way.
• Some clipboard image handling for plugins (regular Copy / Paste is unaffected)

Removed

• The “Fluid mouse input” setting because the use of GetMouseMovePointsEx () has been removed (it’s a very buggy and broken API). This finally fixes a number of weird issues related to erratic or “scribbly” drawing.