Paintbrush is a free and open source program that’s available only for Mac, and was originally intended to be a replacement for MacPaint – an archaic image manipulation software that was last released almost three decades ago back in the late ’80s. If that’s making all you Mac-owners feel a little left out, here’s one that you should try if you’re looking for a basic, free image editor and annotator for Macs. So we’ve taken a look at quite a few free and open source software for Windows and Linux, but only a few of them are available for Mac. Pinta is hosted on Github and is under active development, although, Probst is no longer associated with the project. However, for the most part, Pinta comes with its own original code, with only the adjustments and effects code borrowed from Paint.NET.

The original creator of Pinta, Jonathan Probst, has gone on record saying that his software was inspired by Paint.NET, which itself was intended to be an open source replacement for MS Paint. Although it’s technically only available for Windows, it can also be run on Linux under Wine and on Mac using WineBottler. It is free for non-commercial use, and comes with a wide variety of third-party plugins for image, video and sound formats that can be added to the program to extend its already long list of functionality even further. Released in 1996 for Windows 95 by developer Irfan Skiljan, IrfanView is yet another feature-filled yet easy-to-use image editor that has gotten extremely popular over the past couple of decades. MyPaint is basically a free and relatively more basic alternative to Corel Paint, so as you’d expect, it comes with support for pressure sensitive graphics tablets like the ones from Wacom or Huion. MyPaint supports all the major file formats, has support for layer management, as well as an ‘unlimited canvas’, which means you won’t have to preset the image size before starting off on your painting.

It comes with dynamic brush library that simulate pencil, charcoal and ink, but advanced users can also create their own customized brushes to suit their needs. The program focuses more on the painting aspect rather than image manipulation and, comes with a boatload of features that belies its simple user interface. Unlike Paint.NET, MyPaint is a free and open source (FOSS) alternative to MS Paint that is available on Windows, Mac and Linux.

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