| Format | Best For | Warning | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | .PNG | Web graphics, transparency, lossless compression. | File size large. | | .JPG | Photographs, small file size. | Generations degrade quality. Never re-save a JPG as a JPG. | | .GIF | Simple animations, flat color logos. | Max 256 colors. Banding will occur. | | .TGA | Game textures, 3D software. | Uncompressed. Huge files. |
"The Magic Wand selects the background behind my transparent image." Solution: Transparency is a color (alpha=0). Disable Overwrite Alpha or lock transparency on the layer. Alternatively, use Alpha Threshold in newer versions. Appendix: The Moral of Pixels Paint.NET will never manage your assets, non-destructively edit raw files, or render 3D text with a single click. That is not a failure. It is a philosophy: You control the pixels directly. paint.net user manual pdf
Version 5.0+ Published by the Open-Source Imaging Collective Chapter 1: The Philosophy of Raster Editing Paint.NET occupies a unique stratum between the spartan minimalism of Microsoft Paint and the byzantine complexity of Adobe Photoshop. It is a raster graphics editor, meaning it manipulates images as grids of individual pixels, not mathematical curves (vectors). | Format | Best For | Warning | | :--- | :--- | :--- | |