Software Update: Paint.NET 4.2.9

Version 4.29 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 offered 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:

Changes since 4.2.8:

• Reduced overall memory usage (commit size) by up to 1/3rd by eliminating the per-image scratch buffer
• Greatly improved performance when finishing actions of most tools by employing a shared cache between the render and commit code paths
• Reduced memory usage when working with many tools by consolidating homogenous tiles (those that are comprised of a single color value)
• Significantly improved performance of most history actions (commit, undo, redo) by switching from NTFS compression to multithreaded LZ4 compression for history files
• Significantly improved performance of undo/redo with very complex selections (eg from the Magic Wand tool)
• Improved performance of Image -> Flatten (also affects flattening when saving)
• Improved performance of the Invert Colors and Desaturate adjustments by disabling hardware acceleration for them (too much overhead in copying tiles to the GPU for such trivial rendering kernels)
• Improved performance when saving by moving thumbnail rendering for the File -> Open Recent menu to a background thread
• Reduced memory usage when printing, and removed a rare crash that was related to its use of the (now removed) scratch buffer
• Improved performance of effect rendering when a complex selection is active (improved caching)
• New: Added a “busy spinner” to the canvas when using the Magic Wand and Paint Bucket tools
• New translation: Hebrew (HE)
• New translation: Slovak (SK)
• Fixed a really goofy crash that required drawing with the paintbrush and, without letting go of the mouse button, moving the mouse into the toolbar and then using the mouse wheel to change the brush width
• Fixed a layout bug with the image list button
• Fixed an error that prevented saving some images as JPEGs if they had EXIF ​​Interop metadata (PropertyNotFoundException)
• Fixed a crash when running on a CPU that supports AVX but with an OS that is configured to not support it (via bcdedit /set xsavedisable 1)
• Fixed a crash when pressing the spacebar after switching to a tool but before it has received any mouse input events
• Fixed a rare crash when opening the Levels adjustments with certain types of selections
• Fixed a crash when checking for updates with an expired alpha/beta build
• Fixed a crash (FileLoadException) when DLLs are not updated correctly by the updater
• Updated WebPFileType plugin to version 1.3.2
• Updated DDSFileTypePlus plugin to version 1.9.9. This adds support for X8B8G8R8 and R8G8B8 formats, and fixes a visual glitch when previewing cube maps in some formats.