If you thought there’s nothing in between the terrible old paint program that comes shipped with Windows and expensive, bulky programs like Adobe Photoshop, think again.

Based on the flexible .net platform, developer Rick Brewster has done our digital world a true favor by creating paint.net. It is a blazingly fast versatile photo editing program (even on relatively old computers), which makes it the first choice if you’re not planning on updating hardware any time soon. Currently in version 3.5, it has been revised well enough to be highly stable and reliable.

Paint.net includes all common features for image/photo editing, such as layering, advanced color editing, typesetting, working with selections, smart resizing and more. It uses very few resources, especially compared to the large photo editing suits. It is ideal when working at the airport using only a small notebook.

But there’s more. A quick search yields plenty of extremely interesting plugins that you can simply copy to your plugin directory. Such plugins include different renderers for geographical shapes, clouds, 3D transformation, advanced blurring/distortion, file format conversions. Even in the hands of a novice computer user, paint.net can become a powerful tool for swiftly designing a logo, a custom background, or overlaying and watermarking your photos.