Paint.NET — The Complete Guide: A Fast Windows Image Editor for Preparing Report Photos
Paint.NET is an image editor for Windows that sits halfway between basic Paint and professional editing software. It is fast, easy to learn and enough for almost everything an engineer does with images: crop, mark up, hide details and prepare them for a report.
Paint.NET
dotPDN
A fast, simple image editor for Windows with layers — for cropping, marking up and preparing photos and figures for reports.
Get it from the vendorWhat you get
- Layers — mark-ups on a separate layer that you can fix without touching the photo.
- Unlimited undo — go back to any step of the edit.
- Selection tools — select areas to crop, copy or blur.
- Effects and filters — sharpening, brightness correction and blur.
- Plugins — many community plugins.
Uses and licence terms
Crop site photos, add arrows and numbers pointing to a crack or a construction detail, blur faces and number plates and shrink images for a report. Paint.NET is free, closed-source software that may be used in any environment — including business, commercial and government — but you may not modify or sell it. The Microsoft Store version is paid and supports the developer; the version from the website is free. It runs only on Windows and is not aimed at professional colour work for print.
Related tools
For advanced open-source editing on any operating system — GIMP. For vector graphics and technical illustrations — Inkscape. For screenshots with quick annotation — Greenshot.
GIMP
GIMP team
Advanced image editing — site photos, perspective correction, marking defects and preparing images for reports.
Get it from the vendor
Inkscape
Inkscape project
Vector graphics editor — schematics, technical illustrations, report figures and SVG, PDF and DXF editing.
Get it from the vendor
Greenshot
Greenshot team
A lightweight Windows screenshot tool with arrows, highlights, blurring and export to file, printer or Office.
Get it from the vendorShareX
ShareX team
Screenshots and screen recording for Windows — annotate with arrows and labels, and extract text with OCR.
Get it from the vendorThe bottom line
If you work on Windows and need a simple, fast image editor for reports, Paint.NET gives you the right tools — free, even in the office.