Here’s a great free and open source image editing software title I’ve been using for the last year or so:
Pinta: Painting Made Simple
In my day to day work, I need to do simple photo editing: crop, resize, add text, convert between formats, etc. I also need the ability to add layers to an image for enhanced editing ability, and I like to have tools like select, draw, erase, blur, color levels adjust, etc. I don’t need anything really more advanced beyond that; Photoshop would be overkill, MS Paint is not enough. I really do not like GIMP, the usual go-to photo editing software for Linux users. I don’t like GIMP’s complexity (or maybe I just don’t know how to use it correctly, idk). Pinta is the perfect middle ground for me. I particularly like magic wand select tool in Pinta. It’s similar to the same tool in Photoshop, and I find myself using it frequently.
I have been using Paint.NET for a long time on Windows and I really like the UI and tools it provides. Paint.NET is free but no longer open source. Pinta is based on Paint.NET, so the UI and tools are very familiar, but it is cross-platform, unlike Paint.NET. Pinta is available on Linux (.deb, Flatpak, Snap), BSD, Windows, and MacOS. Pinta also includes an extension system to support community-created add ins.
Last week was the Pinta 2.0 release and this is huge! The app was ported from Mono to GTK & .NET 6, and I have seen massive stability with this update on Pop!_OS 21.10 and Linux Mint 20.1. The app went from near unusable with frequent crashes to rock solid stability. Consider this app if you don’t need the features and pricetag of Photoshop, but need a capable image editor.
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