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Paint.NETYou might have come across the Paint program that's been with Windows from day one. Paint has been fairly basic but it cna do some simple jobs. Now there's Paint.NET, a free program with many more features, one of the best being that it's free! Paint.NET is being developed by a group of university students as a project but don't let that hold you back from downloading and installing it. Along with Irfanview for simple jobs, you'll be able to do much more with Paint.NET. All the commercial programs allow the user to put different sections of a drawing onto different layers. A simple example of this feature is when you want to place some text onto one of your photos to describe its content. If you do this in Irfanview and then want to make a change to your text, you end up changing the actual photo. In Paint.NET, you create a new layer, enter your text onto this layer, and then you're able to make as many changes as you want without affecting the layer containing your actual photo. If you save your work as a PDN file, you'll be able to come back later to make more changes. It's not until you save as a JPEG file that all the separate layers are put together to make a single image. Paint.NET also has plenty of effects to apply, tools to make your photos look better (e.g., there's a red-eye removal tool), and the usual resizing and resampling features. Sadly Paint.NET is only available for Windows XP and Windows 2000/2003. After you've downloaded it and begin the installation, you may have to also download and install the latest version of .NET Frameworks, Microsoft's all-in-one program code environment. Space for photosMSN Spaces is the free blogging space for those with free Hotmail or .NET Passport accounts. Not everybody wants to write up their daily journal, diary or thoughts and opinions, but the photo album feature with 30Mb of space is a very convenient method to let others see your photos and download any they want. This can save you lots of time instead of emailing photos to family and friends. You'll notice that you can access MSN Spaces from MSN Messenger (version 7). It's simply to set up a new space for yourself and if you want to concentrate on just the photo album feature, use Customise to move the photo album to the middle of your page. There have been a couple of improvements lately so you can now edit one of your albums to remove photos. You might want to do this after you've enhanced a couple of photos in Paint.NET. Serif Page PlusPage Plus SE is a free desktop publishing program that has been available to Windows users for some years. If you'd like to delve into desktop publishing without spending lots on Microsoft Publisher, Page Plus is a good program to begin with. The download size may be a bit excessive for dialup users, but if you persist and install the program, you'll soon see how desktop publishing makes use of text frames to lay out pages, wraps text around images automatically and in general introduces you to page layout. Here are some sites to get you started:
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