When William Aicher first told me about getpaint.net, I was pretty skeptical. “Free” doesn’t always mean “good” in my book, and free software tools are kind of hit-and-miss. I downloaded it anyway, thinking I’d give it a shot, and headed straight to their getpaint.net forums for some tutorials and how-tos.

It’s been years since I’ve worked in Photoshop or any other advanced sort of image editor that uses layers, and it’s one of those things that has been high on my list to learn. So I started by finding an image I wanted to modify through Flickr’s advanced search, looking for kitten photos in Creative Commons. This picture was taken by Andreas Solberg.

Using the layering functionality, I separated the kitten from the background and enhanced each layer separately to come up with this:

No, it’s not “perfect” and this was my first go-around, but it helped me get a feel for how easy getpaint.net is to use. I say “very easy” for photos, if you want to do something more advanced like blending and whatnot, then head over to the tutorials.

Like I mentioned earlier, it’s been 1,000 years or so since I first used graphic design and advanced image editors, so I’ll be looking for something a bit different out of this software than you might.

Do you have any other free software tips or programs to share?