Those users, and everyone else who is looking for a lightweight image editor, might want to take a closer look at Hornil StylePix. The free program is available as a portable version and installer. And with a setup size of less than two Megabytes it is a lightweight application by all means.

The features it offers appear to be very similar to those of comparable image editors like Paint.net. I have to admit that I have not used image editors for anything but basic tasks like resizing images, batch processing or filters, which makes me an amateur dabbler at best when it comes to image editing programs.

Experienced users who need more than that find a large assortment of tools, from histograms and layers to objects.

Hornil StylePix supports JPEG, PNG, GIF, TIF, TGA, BMP and TSP image formats. PSD is unfortunately not supported.

Hornil StylePix Features:

• Tabbed image browsing – You can open multiple images in tabs in the interface and switch between them at anytime. The keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Tab can be used to switch between open images as well. It displays thumbnail previews of all open images.
• Slideshow – You can watch picture slideshows
• Histogram and waveform
• Multi-layer & grouping support
• Selection tools – Everything is supported, from automatic range selection to square, circle, polygon and lasso selections.
• Image filters – More than 50 image filters to work with.
• Drawing tools – The usual assortment of drawing tools are supported, brushes, lines, fills, shapes or gradients for instance.
• Text tool – You can add text to images. The tool supports font, size, width, color and other selections.
• Transform images – Change orientation or alignment, among other options.
• Enhance and restore tools
• Crop tool
• Batch Processing – Supports sizing, rotation, renaming, formats and filters.

I suggest you look at the overview page at the developer website for a detailed feature list.

You can also watch this video introduction which showcases some of the image editor’s features (unfortunately without sound).

The program has been translated into 53 different languages. It will run on all versions of Windows from Windows XP on.

Windows users can download Hornil StylePix from the developer homepage.

The new version fixes several performance issues that include a memory leak which adds to the program’s stability.

• All font face variants (e.g., Arial vs. Arial Narrow) are now available with the Text tool in Win7/Vista with DirectWrite.
• Bitmap font types (e.g. Courier, Terminal, Fixedsys) are now available with the Text tool in Win7/Vista.
• Fixed some bad text kerning with the Text tool at small font sizes when antialiasing was turned off.
• For the Image->Resize function, the quality, correctness, and performance of Bilinear and Bicubic sampling modes have been improved. Super Sampling also has some performance improvement.
• Improved the rendering quality for the Hue/Saturation adjustment. Also made a new icon for it.
• Fixed many subtle rendering issues with the Move Selected Pixels tool. These were apparent when flipping or rotating a selected area.
• Fixed: The Line/Curve tool was applying pixel snapping to the curve nodes, which caused lines to “bend” when using the Shift key to constrain the angle.
• Fixed some extraneous CPU usage related to unnecessary or redundant thumbnail updates.
• Fixed a few dialogs that looked wrong with Aero glass with Remote Desktop or Virtual PC.
• Fixed a nasty memory leak with Flatten followed by Undo.
• Fixed some issues related to effects that took awhile to cancel. As it turns out, drag-and-drop was enabled at this time, which easily lead to crashes or hangs.
• Some Win7 systems could not detect that .NET 3.5 SP1 was installed, even though it was. A fallback detection function has been added.
• For plugin authors, the Effect class now has a pollable IsCancelRequested property. This can be used to improve responsiveness for expensive OnSetRenderInfo() implementations which are otherwise non-interruptible.
• For plugin authors, the Surface.FitSurface() method is now optimized to use multiple threads, which improves performance.

The Paint.net 3.5.2 update can be downloaded from the developer’s website. The software itself should pick up the update through its automatic update option as well if the feature is activated.

Is it comparable to Gimp or Adobe Photoshop? I honestly cannot say so and do not care the least. It allows me to do the image editing things that I need to do which are basic image manipulations, e.g. resizing, copying, pasting, and basic editing.

Paint.net 3.5 final was released today. Users who are interested in the changes in this release can take a look at the post over at the official blog to find out more about them. Those that do not care about that can download the latest version of the image editor from the developer’s website where it is available for all supported operating systems (Windows XP, Windows Vista and Windows 7) and languages. Paint.net, as the name suggests, requires the Microsoft .net Framework 3.5 SP1.

The Paint.Net developers have now announced the first beta of the upcoming Paint.Net 3.5. Users who are using a previous version of Paint.Net like the last official release Paint.Net 3.36 can update to the new beta from within the program. All that is needed is to click on the Check for Updates button under (Help). Paint.Net will by default only search for official release versions (which the beta is obviously not). A click on the options button in the window makes it possible to turn that feature off so that all versions of Paint.Net are considered for upgrades.

The changelog lists a few important changes and addition. Paint.Net 3.5 requires the Microsoft .Net Framework 3.5 SP1 which should be beneficial to the program’s overall performance. This could become obvious when opening images on single cpu systems. Computer memory usage has been optimized when multiple images are loaded into the image editor. Startup performance and effect dialog responsiveness has been optimzed as well.

The full changelog:

* Now uses and requires .NET 3.5 SP1, which has many built-in performance improvements.
* New effect: Blurs -> Surface Blur, by Ed Harvey
* New effect: Distort -> Dents, by Ed Harvey
* New effect: Distort -> Crystalize, by Ed Harvey
* Effect dialog responsiveness has been greatly improved.
* Images open much faster, especially on single CPU systems.
* Selection outline is no longer animated. Instead of “dancing ants”, an antialiased and stippled “XOR” outline is drawn.
* Startup performance on most systems will be better by about 20%.
* Memory usage has been greatly reduced when more than one image is open.
* The font system for the Text tool has been completely rewritten, and problems with missing fonts and crashes should be a thing of the past.
* On Windows XP and Vista, the Text tool has improved text rendering quality (it uses GDI instead of GDI+).
* On Windows 7, the Text tool will use DirectWrite (instead of GDI) which gives even better performance and quality.
* The toolbar font list has improved usability, rendering quality, and significantly improved performance.
* The toolbar font list no longer requires an application restart to recognize newly installed fonts.
* When many fonts are installed, both memory usage and startup performance have been greatly improved.
* Installation prerequisites are now installed automatically, such as .NET Framework and Windows Installer.
* Updates can now be downloaded in the background, and installed automatically once you exit the application.
* General rendering quality has been improved when zoomed in.
* Added a “Utilities” menu. Updates, Languages, and Plugin Errors have been moved here.
* Added a “Manage Fonts” command to the Utilities menu.
* Clicking the middle mouse button on an image thumbnail will now close the image.
* Improved the Unfocus effect.
* The DirectDraw Surface (.DDS) file type now allows you to select the resampling algorithm for auto-generated mip-maps.
* A processor that supports SSE is now required (almost all CPUs purchased this decade satisfy this).
* Fixed an issue with Gaussian Blur and its treatment of alpha values.
* Fixed a crash with the “Units” selector in the toolbar.
* When zoomed in, it is now much easier to resize a very small selection.
* Now includes a Russian translation.

Paint.Net 3.5 can be downloaded from the official Get Paint website.

Paint.net is not compatible with Adobe Photoshop psd files by default which can be quite troublesome if you need to work with psd files occasionally. The psd plugin for paint.net adds support for Adobe Photoshop psd files to paint.net. It does not implement all features of the psd file though, only those that are needed to convert the image in the image editor and those that have a paint.net counterpart. Below is the list of support features:

• Layers
• Masks (only loading see To do list)
• RAW or RLE compressed files
• The following color modes are supported for loading an image: Gray scale, Indexed, 32 Bit-RGBA, CMYK (lossy conversation), Multichannel CMY (lossy conversation), Duotone (as gray scale), Lab (lossy conversation)
• For saving an image only 32-Bit RGBA is supported

The psd plugin comes as a single dll file that has to be placed into the filetypes folder of the Paint.net installation. The association of psd files with paint.net has to be created manually. This can be done by right-clicking a psd file on the computer system and selecting Open With > Choose Program from the context menu. Paint.net has to be selected as the program to open psd files and the checkbox “always use the selected program to open this kind of file” has to be ticked.

So instead, I gave Paint.net another go, an application which I have tried before, but gave up because I heard GIMP was so awesome. Paint.net is a graphical application just like Photoshop, but without many of its fancy tools. If you just need some cropping, resizing and positioning action for images in your blog, Paint.net will be great. At around 6Mb in size, it doesn’t take a toll on your system either.

For me it works quite well for basic web design too, simple gradients, some web 2.0 style reflections, nothing too complex. The two things which I miss most about Photoshop though is the text capabilities and vector graphics. Text capabilities in both GIMP and Pain.net are shabby compared to PS, and Paint.net doesn’t really have great pen tools either. If you need way more power than the simple Windows Paint, but way less than Photoshop, Paint.net is a solid, well built, lightweight image editor for you.