Paint.net has been around for a while now, in fact I might have mentioned it before, but if you’re on windows and need a light-duty image editor it’s hard to find something superior to paint.net, and it’s free. While it’s not going to replace Photoshop any time soon, it can serve very capably for most user’s image editing needs – red eye removal, contrast, tone and color adjustment and so on. If you’re an amateur digital photographer on the PC and need something to work with images, and you’ve run into the limits of picassa, check out paint.net.

It’s also an interesting app in that it emerged out of student work at Washington State University, and successive classes of students have been adding features and squashing bugs. The only downside, depending on your outlook, is that it requires Microsoft’s .Net libraries. Chances are fairly good that you already have them; if not they’re free from Microsoft and easy to install.