Paint Dot Net is Free. It was designed as a University project, much like the C programming language itself. It was designed to be better than paint, not photoshop or paint shop. That said, it is getting better and better. It has always been easy to use. With plugins from the forum installed it gets a lot more interesting. Icon Export means I don't have to buy a seperate icon editor. Conditional Saturation plugin, I have never seen this anywhere else and is a valuable tool, use it to convert summer to autumn. It has become part of the install routine for any new computer I set up. There are, as far as I know, no viruses or spyware in this software, it is afterall endorsed by MS. Try it, it's free, don't uninstall it if you don't like it, you might just be able to use 1 effect or tool that no other program has, to get just the picture you need.