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Pinta, the open-source, free and multi-platform image editing and drawing software, received a new major release after more than five years of absence.
Pinta 1.7 is now available and it looks like it’s a massive update to the open-source drawing and image editing application, which most of you probably forgot about.
Highlights of this release include support for tabs to make it more easy to switch between multiple images with the ability to dock them side-by-side or transformed in new windows, support for zooming and panning in the Rotate / Zoom dialog, which now rotates in-place.
Also new is a Smooth Erase tool that can be enabled when using the Type menu on the toolbar of the Erase tool, as well as support for JASC PaintShop Pro palette files and the ability to open images just by dragging and dropping an image URL from a web browser.
The Pencil, Move and Rectangle Select tools have been improved as well. The Pencil tool now lets you switch between different blend modes and the Move tool now supports scaling of images by holding the Ctrl key. On the other hand, the Rectangle Select tool now displays different arrow cursors at each corner of a selection.
Moreover, you can now rotate the transform tools in fixed increments by holding the Shift key. Also, to avoid accidental closing of the tool windows, Pinta 1.7 makes it possible to close them only from the View > Tool Windows menu.
Among other changes, Pinta 1.7 an AppData file to allow integration with various Linux app stores, improves the New Image dialog, makes use of Cairo blend operations rather than PDN’s managed blend modes, and changes the keyboard shortcut for the Intersect selection mode to Alt+Left Click.
If you’re new to Pinta, there’s also a brand-new user guide that will help you get started with the open-source drawing and image editing software in no time.
Under the hood, Pinta 1.7 bumps the requirements to Mono 4.0, though the developers highly recommend Linux users to use Mono 6.x with the new Pinta release.
More than 50 bugs were squashed in this major release to make Pinta more responsive, as well as to improve the overall performance of the app, especially when handling large images. More details on the bug fixes are available here.
You can download Pinta 1.7 right now from the official website. For Ubuntu and its derivatives there’s a PPA in place with detailed installation instructions. For other distros, you should get the tarball.
Thanks to Lucky for the tip!
Image: Pinta
Last updated 4 years ago
