It’s really difficult to talk about the Pinta Drawing and Editing Program without comparing it to Paint.net, in fact the Pinta website itself says it is modelled after Paint.net. In some ways this is unfortunate because in a lot of areas it hasn’t yet reached the level of functionality which is available in Paint.net.
It does have on major thing in it’s favour, it is available for Windows, Linux and OSX whereas Paint.net is Windows only. Other than that it lacks some of the major functionality which is available. The live editing available with the shapes tool, gradient tool, selections etc seems to be missing which is a shame because that was one of the things which really stood out about paint.net. There also seems to be a lot less effects than are available in the other program, especially when you take into account then number of plugins available in paint.net.
So that’s the rather negative things out of the way with. Ignoring comparisons to paint.net this is actually a very nice little graphics program which is certainly much better than a lot you can find, even some paid ones. It has all the basics you need to make graphics, write text, edit images / photos and more. The tools aren’t over complicated and it would certainly be suitable for a beginner or someone without a lot of experience with graphics. What it does it does well and all the controls are logically laid out. There is certainly nothing “wrong” with the program and, as it is still being actively developed, there is hope that some of the missing functionality will be added at a later date.
To be honest, if you are a windows users I can’t really think of a reason why you would use this rather than Paint.net unless you find its range of effect too complicated, in which case Pinta may be the answer. For Linux and OSX users this may be a good choice for a basic editor. The Pinta drawing and editing program will certainly do all the basic editing a general user should require.
As with all software we recommend you only install it from the official website. Pinta is available for Windows, OSX and Linux. You can download it here: http://pinta-project.com/download.ashx
We installed Pinta on a Windows machine and had a couple of issues. Firstly we downloaded the wrong thing 🙁 Next we downloaded the correct thing but the realised we had to install GTK# before we were able to install Pinta.
