Are you looking for a great image editing program with some Photoshop-like features, but you don’t want to tip the budget scales? Sure, The GiMP is out there, but it’s hard to use in my humble opinion. My development team introduced me to a great FREE program, and I want to share it with you – PAINT.NET. In fact, even though I do have Photoshop, I use Paint.NET for quick tasks like cropping and blurring. It’s just crazy fast.
Some of its benefits:
- Simple, easy to use interface
- Tabbed document editing, so you can see all the open images at once
- Photoshop-like capabilities, like blur effects
- Doesn’t take half a minute to load like Photoshop
- Fast
- No spyware!
Feel like trying it out? Go to Download.com and get it free.
Another tip: The folks at CNet’s Download.com "certify" their downloads as spyware-free. If a program has been recommended to you, try finding it there first, if you want to make sure you’re getting something reasonably safe.
Best,
-Auri
Auri's Blog 
I use this program and love it. Thanks for sharing this with everyone.
Hey.. Paint.net is an nice editor, like Photoshop equivalent. But who needs a client s/w small tricks.Recently I have developed a script to create polaroids-like image. Check out it too … It\’s a online free http://ankitjain.info/tools/polaroid/ photo creation. It\’s a grt tool for creating Polaroid in simply two steps.- ankit