Paint.NET 3.20

Website: Paint.NET

This is the 32-bit version of the popular free image editing software, Paint.NET. It's not as advanced as something like Adobe Photoshop CS3 or Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2, but it does serve well for most image editing tasks.

We used the PDNBench script to test the processing times for a range of images and filters. The multi-threaded software also takes advantage of multi-core processors quite effectively.

For more information on what the benchmark script entails, please see this thread on the Paint.NET forums.





Paint.NET was marginally slower on SP1, adding five seconds onto the processing time here after installing the Service Pack.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0

For our Photoshop Elements test, we used a selection of 400 three megapixel photographs taken in a variety of surroundings using the batch file processing function in the Elements Editor. We performed all of the auto fixes, including Auto Levels, Auto Contrast, Auto Colour and Sharpen before resizing the image to 640x480 and saving as a high quality JPEG.


The older Adobe Photoshop Elements doesn't see the same problem as Paint.NET, and actually sees a very marginal two second performance improvement this time around.

Xvid Encoding

We tested video encoding performance using VirtualDub-MPEG version 1.6.15 and a multithreaded version of the Xvid codec, along with the LAME MT MP3 encoder for encoding audio. We did a two-pass encode of a 15-minute 276MB digital TV recording with a target file size of 100MB.


Our video encoding test sees no performance changes as a result of installing the Service Pack – one second over a several minute test is a nominal value you'll never notice. At least SP1 is again consistent here.