Paint.net For Basic Graphics

I'm no graphic artist, but because of Second Life and Flickr, I've become more interested and involved in graphic/texture manipulation. In Texturing Tools for Second Life: Break Out The Gimp, I wrote a bit about the Gimp as an alternative to Photoshop. In my reading on the web, I stumbled across Paint.net and was intrigued enough to download it and play with it a bit. Over the weekend, I was making some pants for men (coming out soon at the Y2P store) and alternated a bit with the Gimp and Paint.net on the Windows machine.

Paint.net has an intuitive interface - more so than the Gimp. It is relatively easy to do basic things using Paint.net, and for the average user who is manipulating photos or doing some cookie-cutter sort of stuff, Paint.net is fast to learn as very fast for making some quick changes on tga files. This ease of use makes it a good 'starter' application for textures in Second Life, I think. The Gimp, and Photoshop, can be intimidating for people new to playing with graphics on their machine. And the price is excellent - no cost (but toss the developers there a few bucks if you like it.)

I've found using it for some quick alterations works well, and doesn't drive me nuts (as the Gimp sometimes does). If you're new to graphics and are interested in playing with textures on your own - check out Paint.net. It might be what you need, or it may get you closer to working with graphics so that the Gimp is more easy to understand.