Software Update: Paint.NET 4.3

Version 4.3 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. Version 4.3 includes the switch to .Net 5, there is an Arm64 build and performance has been significantly improved. The complete changelog looks like this:

Changes since 4.2.16:

• New: The app has been migrated to .NET 5, and performance has been greatly improved as a result.
• New: ARM64 is now natively supported, which improves performance on devices such as the Surface Pro X.
• New: .NET no longer needs to be installed on the system because the app now uses self contained deployment.
• New: Portable ZIPs are now available. Please note that portable installations do not currently update automatically.
• Improved performance of most effects and other compute-intensive tasks by about 20% on average, due to .NET 5’s improved code generation (JIT).
• Improved startup performance for the Microsoft Store release. Previously, .NET Framework’s NGEN was unavailable for Store apps, but now .NET 5 enables self-contained deployment along with ReadyToRun + crossgen, which serves the same purpose.
• Improved performance: Many areas of the app have been optimized to use SIMD (SSE2/3/4.1, AVX2) on x86/x64:
  • Drawing on an image with a large number of layers is faster
  • Drawing with the Gradient Tool’s alpha mode is faster
  • Drawing with the Recolor tool is faster
  • Drawing with the Eraser or Clone Stamp tool is faster when using a color whose alpha value is less than 255
  • Drawing with the Overwrite blend mode is faster
  • Drawing with the Shapes tool is faster, due to improved compositing performance
  • Drawing with a brush tool without antialiasing is faster
  • Tile compression has lower overhead due to being optimized for SSE2 and AVX2
  • Working with complex selections is faster
  • Many other optimizations all throughout the application and rendering engine
• Improved performance of loading custom Shapes by ~16x on 2nd and subsequent app starts.
• Improved performance of the Magic Wand tool by a substantial amount.
• Improved performance of the Paint Bucket tool by a substantial amount.
• Improved performance of the Paint Bucket when changing the color or certain other toolbar settings by not recalculating the stencil buffer for the filled area. Changes should now be visible immediately.
• Improved performance of Polar Inversion by 3x, mostly as a corollary to fixing a bug that was causing hangs, and a little bit due to .NET 5.
• Improved performance on systems without HyperThreading by reserving 1 core for the UI. Performance is also improved on systems with it by utilizing more of the logical cores.
• Improved performance while installing or updating the app, due to no longer needing the “Optimizing performance for your system” stage (NGEN has been replaced with ReadyToRun via crossgen).
• Improved memory usage when custom shapes are installed so they don’t litter the heap with hundreds of thousands of boxed value types (eg floats and points).
• Improved selection antialiasing quality by using a 4×4 super sampling filter instead of a 3×3 super sampling filter. The code has also been optimized to use SSSE3 on x86/x64.
• Improved: Effect and File Type plugins can now be organized into folders. The plugin loader will recursively search for DLLs up to 1 folder deep.
• Fixed a bug when saving with “Auto Detect” bit-depth which was causing fidelity loss on some images that already had 256 colors or less.
• Fixed: There were some issues with zooming in/out using the keyboard, where the anchoring point was not calculated correctly, causing the canvas to drift in the wrong direction.
• Fixed the inability to use middle-mouse panning after using a selection tool and pressing delete before releasing the mouse button.
• Improved: Plugins are now loaded into isolated AssemblyLoadContextswhich improves stability and resiliency to various problems with versioning, loading dependencies, plugin bugs, and incorrect plugin installation.
• Fixed a crash when trying to draw a fixed-size rectangle selection that was larger than the image.
• Fixed a bug with the Tolerance slider where both 58% and 59% would be displayed as 58%, due to a rounding issue. The correct value was actually being used, it just wasn’t being displayed correctly.
• Added a /disablePlugins command-line argument to aid in troubleshooting various issues with app startup and incorrect plugin installation.
• New: Additional directories can now be specified for plugin discovery, which (eg) enables the use of OneDrive for storing plugins. see here for more info.
  • Note that this does not work with the portable version of the app, but you can install plugins next to the app so it isn’t necessary.
• Updated the bundled AvifFileType plugin to v1.1.15.0, which includes support for multi-layer AVIF files, and adds native support for ARM64. see here for more information.
• Updated the bundled DdsFileTypePlus plugin to v1.10.10.0, which adds native support for ARM64. see here for more information.
• Updated the bundled WebPFileType plugin to v1.3.7.0,which adds native support for ARM64. see here for more information.
• Changed: FileType.IsReflexive() is now deprecated via [Obsolete], and is no longer honored. However, the Save Configuration dialog will no longer try to generate previews for FileTypes that do not specify any file extensions for loading, which is what this method was being used for.
• Known Issue: Due to crashing, GPU accelerated effects (Gaussian Blur, Motion Blur, Radial Blur) on ARM64 will actually use the CPU for rendering.