Paint.NET 5.1 🚀 Discover new features in seconds!

Paint.NET 5.1 is now available for download! 🎉 This update brings new effects, support for HDR and Wide Color Gamut displays, and robust color management, among other improvements.

Paint.NET developers have been testing color management in the 5.1 beta since August, and now these and other new features are available in the stable release. With this, this free photo editing tool for Windows It becomes even more efficient for jobs where color consistency is critical. 🎨

Color management ensures that images maintain a consistent appearance, as long as all devices involved in the process support it. You want the colors in your photos in Paint.NET to look exactly the same as they did on the camera you used to capture them. Paint.NET 5.1 lets you apply built-in color profiles (ProPhoto RGB, sRGB, Display P3, and Adobe RGB), import new profiles, and use your display's color profile through a new option in the Image > Color Profile menu.

Color management goes hand in hand with another new feature in Paint.NET 5.1: support for HDR and Wide Color Gamut displays (you must first calibrate HDR in Windows 11 for it to work). Once set up, HDR photos taken with your smartphone will display in the app with the full color spectrum on your HDR-compatible monitor. On non-HDR monitors, Paint.NET continues to operate in sRGB mode as before, to ensure compatibility and consistent color reproduction. Please note that the Wide Color Gamut mode requires Windows 11 v24H2 or later. 🌈

Additionally, there are new canvas options, including a shadow toggle and the ability to adjust the background color (useful when using high-contrast themes). 🖌️

New blur options in Paint.NET 5.1 include Sketch Blur and Square Blur. The former applies artistic effects that make images look like impressionist paintings, while the latter creates a square-shaped bokeh effect with points of light. Additionally, the median blur (formerly the Noise > Median effect) has been rewritten to run up to 3x faster on the GPU and uses compute shaders.

In fact, all of the effects (without plugins) and tweaks in the Paint.NET application now run much smoother, as they've been optimized for the GPU, including Auto-Level, Curves, Levels, Oil Paint, Reduce Noise, Surface Blur, and Contour. 🔧

The only effects that remain CPU-dependent are Quantize and Red-Eye Removal. By offloading the heavier tasks to the GPU, Paint.NET has become significantly faster and snappier than before, the developers claim, with noticeable improvements in input latency and memory usage. 🚀

Can Download Paint.NET 5.1 from the official website. The update should download and install automatically for those who already have the application installed. Paint.NET is also available available in the Microsoft Store as a paid download.