Paint.NET 5.1 is now available for download. The update includes new effects, support for HDR and Wide Color Gamut displays, and robust color management, to name a few.

Paint.NET developers tested color management in beta v5.1 since Augustand now this and other new features are available in the stable version. Thanks to it, Windows’ free photo editing tool is now a little more powerful for jobs where color consistency is essential.

Color management ensures a consistent appearance of images, provided that all devices in the pipeline support color management. You want the colors of your photos in Paint.NET to be exactly the same as those of the camera you used to take them. Paint.NET 5.1 supports applying built-in color profiles (ProPhoto RGB, sRGB, Display P3, and Adobe RGB), importing new profiles, and using your display’s color profile via the new option to Image menu > Color profile.

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 this work). Once done, HDR photos taken on your smartphone will be rendered in the app in the full color spectrum on your HDR-enabled monitor. On HDR monitors, Paint.NET still works in sRGB mode as before to ensure compatibility and consistent color reproduction. Keep in mind that Wide Color Gamut mode requires Windows 11 v24H2 or later.

There are also new canvas options, including a toggle for drop shadow and adjusting the background color (useful when using high-contrast themes).

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

In fact, all effects (without plugins) and adjustments in the Paint.NET app now work much smoother because they have been optimized for the GPU, including auto-level, curves, levels, hand-painting. oil, noise reduction, surface blur, and Preview.

The only effects that are still CPU dependent are quantization and red-eye removal. According to the developers, offloading the heavy lifting to the GPU has made Paint.NET much faster and more agile than before, with notable improvements in input latency and memory usage as well.

You can download Paint.NET 5.1 from the official website. The update should download and install automatically for those who already have the app installed. Paint.NET is also available via the Microsoft Store as a paid download.

Source: Painting.NET