Some Lagniappe for You
By Tiny Ruisch
la·gniappe (lnyp, ln-yp)
n. Chiefly Southern Louisiana & Mississippi
1. A small gift presented by a store owner to a customer with the customer’s purchase.
2. An extra or unexpected gift or benefit. Also called regionally boot.
At last months meeting there was an excellent discussion about various graphics editing and manipulation tools. I thought I’d take a few minutes and tell you about one of my favorites. The program that I use most often for serious editing is Paint.NET, an open-source, free photo editing software program. It was originally created as a college undergraduate student project in 2004, funded by Microsoft and was designed to replace Microsoft Paint, which was included in Windows.
The program has a simple, intuitive interface that is easily learned. There is a large selection of tool that is easily and logically arranged. Many of the tools are contained within their own window. This allows users to set up their work space for their own convenience.
Paint.NET has many advanced features which include blurring, sharpening, the Magic Wand which allows for the selecting of regions of similar color and the Clone Stamp which is used for copying or erasing portions of an image.
Layers are another great feature of Paint.Net. They allow you to add a layer on top of the background that not only allows you to add new items on top of others, but to edit them independently of the other layers.
The program has a large number of special effects. These allow you to alter the appearance of your image. You can use blurs, sepia toning, color level altering, ink sketch transformations, anti red-eye, distortions such as bulging, denting and pixelation. The software has a huge following of users that are constantly creating and sharing other special effects and plug-ins.
If you’re like me, a great feature is unlimited history. You don’t have to worry about making errors while you are editing. You can make as many changes as want. If they don’t look good, just undo and do over as often as you like.
There is also an active online community and forum. They will give you any extra help that you might need. You can also find several tutorials and guides.
Did I mention Paint.NETs best feature is the cost? The price is free, although the authors will accept any donations. Give it a try. You might like it. You can download Paint.NET by clicking the link.
If you like the program, just tell everyone that you’ve got a SWLACUG extra, bonus perk; a little lagniappe.