Pinta 1.0 Released, Looking Good

Pinta is a newer image editing tool that has been described as falling in between Xpaint and GIMP. Initial releases appeared February 2010 and 0.5 was released early November 2010. Jonathan Pobst said, "After roughly 16 months of development, Pinta is proud to join the ~1% of open source projects that make it to version 1.0!"

He further stated, "I am extremely pleased of how Pinta has turned out." This latest release saw lots of bug fixes such as several crashes, issues with filenames in Windows, and quit problems. Pinta is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux as well as source. It does require Mono which some still do not want on their systems.

Once dependencies are installed, Pinta compiles and installs quite easily. The interface is tidy and attractive, and it has several nice features I like. One of the handiest is the history pane which I like because it eliminates the need to go into the menu to "Undo." One function I find myself using more than any other in GIMP is scaling images. Pinta has Resize in its Image menu that opens a child window with sufficient options for that. I'm used to the procedure in GIMP but Pinta's procedure is much simpler and it works fairly well. Another is the free-hand select lasso. I prefer Pinta's implementation over the GIMP's method. Another handy feature is that Pinta seems to always use an alpha channel for transparency by default. The adding text is easier to use. There are photo tools included too such as red-eye reduction.

Resizing images seems to blur too much, huh?

I did have a few issues though. During the first run of Pinta several of the tools and effects in the menu crashed, but those disappeared with subsequent runs. Maybe I'm just blind, but I couldn't seem to locate a smudge tool - I got to have smudge. After changing to the Magic Wand Select, the cursor wouldn't change back to normal. The open dialog doesn't have a preview pane. When pixelizing or sharpening, for example, there's no preview - one needs to complete the action to view the results.

Otherwise, Pinta 1.0 seems stable and functions fairly well. If Mono isn't a problem and the GIMP is a little complicated for you, then you'll probably like Pinta. Every operation has been simplified and a lot of people will like the all in one window presentation. All in all, it's a nice program to have around for quick edits.