Looking for a free and open-source Paint.NET alternative? Try LazPaint

by Kevin Roger
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Looking for a free and open-source Paint.NET alternative? Try LazPaint

Have you been looking for a more advanced program to edit your images, which, as you know, can get boring with an inferior program? LazPaint is definitely what you need.

If you are coming across this program for the first time, I’m very excited to guide you through this program and probably make you an expert at it!

What exactly is LazPaint?

LazPaint is an open-source image editor with cross-platform support and is by far the perfect Paint.NET alternative. Registered under the open-source license, this editor is written in the Free Pascal programming language. LazPaint is a top of the pack program coming with many options to help you edit your images like a pro.

Currently, there are tons of image editing tools on the web that you can use to edit and manipulate your images effortlessly. If you have been part of this hack before, you must have come across Paint.NET, an image editing program only available for windows.

Paint.NET is a useful tool that you can use to tackle basic editing tasks thanks to its several essential options. If you ask newbies what editors they use, Paint.NET will be somewhere on the list; the primary reason being, it is easy to use.

As mentioned above, Paint.NET is only available for windows and this locks out other systems users. LazPaint comes to the rescue of these people as it is available for Windows, macOS and Linux. This, plus its out of the box editing options, has revolutionized the art of image editing and manipulation. With all these features under one package, you can be assured that this is the perfect solution you have been waiting to meet all your image editing needs.

Truth be told, not all image editors use the windows system. For example, if you use Linux, does it mean you cannot edit your images at a click of a few buttons? With LazPaint, this is not the case anymore. This free but impressive open-source tool was made for you and other kinds of operating systems users.

With this said, let get to the features that this program offers and gauge whether it is worth the hype.

LazPaint features

If you have not used LazPaint to edit your images, you may not understand the definition of cool features. I agree you are just fine with the features you are used to, but you don’t have an idea of what you can achieve with LazPaint features.

This program comes with a great deal of features. Here is a compilation of the most important ones:

  • Files- With LazPaint, you can read and write major file-formats, including layered bitmaps and 3D files.
  • Tools- The program offers several tools capable of drawing on the layers, selecting parts of the image and manipulating the selection. Such tools include selection pen, select inversion and crop to selection.
  • Filters- Here, you will find a bunch of options that you can use to change the appearance of your image. Filters include motion blur, radial blur, custom blur, sharpen, smooth, sphere, contour and pixelate.
  • Image manipulation tools including rotate, flip, convert images to negative, transparency removal and image flattening.
  • Image resampling with various quality tools.
  • Advanced drawing and deforming options
  • Color manipulation options including gray scale, lightness, normalize and intensity.
  • Layer support with related management tools
  • Ability to enable and disable the toolbar
  • View- A variety of options, including layer stack window, color window and toolbox window.

The interface

This is not one of those programs that require a techie to operate. Most of the manipulations can be done with the toolbar. The zoom, a very important action, can be performed by using the magnifying glass, the zoom fit button, or the 1:1 button. If you are messy or not contented with the edits you have done, you can always click undo, save the copy and redo the manipulations before proceeding.

What are the most useful keys for this program?

  • Enter- Similar to a right mouse click, this key releases the active selection.
  • Ctrl key- Aligns image pixels and prevents angles with the rotation tool.
  • Space key- Holding down this key shifts temporarily to the move mode.
  • Backspace- Deletes the last letter in a text and the last point in a polygon.

Now that we have been talking about the Linux operating system, how exactly do you get the LazPaint program on your computer with this operating system?

The installation process

You can install LazPaint from your trusted and official sites. Also, your default manager can complete the installation process with no constraint. However, if you want to get the latest version, you should consider downloading the .deb file or compile it from its source on non-Debian distributions.

As mentioned earlier, LazPaint is also available for windows and Mac. The good thing with windows is that a portable version is available; hence the installation process is much simpler.

Final thoughts

I have not met a program that can match what LazPaint offers from my experience with image editing programs. Right from the installation, which takes very little storage space to running all the commands and actions, LazPaint is currently at the top of the pack program. If you want to take your image editing skills to the next level, try out the LazPaint editing program.

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