Pinta

What Pinta does

Pinta is a desktop image editor in the tradition of Paint.NET, whose 3.0 version it set out to recreate for Linux and other systems. It sits between a basic paint program and a full photo editor: you can draw with brushes, pencil, shapes, gradients and text, select areas with rectangle, ellipse, lasso or magic wand tools, retouch with the clone stamp, recolor and red-eye tools, and work across several layers with blend modes. A history panel keeps every step, so undo is unlimited.

The effects and adjustments menus are a large part of its appeal. Levels, curves and color adjustments sit next to artistic and distortion effects such as dithering, Voronoi diagrams, vignette, outlines and feathered edges, and each effect shows a live preview while you change its settings. A configurable canvas grid, including an axonometric option, helps with pixel art and technical drawings.

Files and add-ins

Pinta opens and saves the usual raster formats, and uses OpenRaster (.ora) to keep layers in a file that other painting programs can also read. When you save a layered image to a single-layer format, it asks before flattening. Add-ins can extend Pinta with extra effects and formats through a built-in add-in manager; version 3.0 restored this after it had been disabled in 2.0.

Installing Pinta

Pinta is a desktop application for Linux, Windows, macOS and BSD. It is distributed on Flathub and the Snap Store, through Linux distributions, as a Windows installer (which can install without administrator rights) and as a macOS app. Version 3 ported the interface to GTK4 and libadwaita, with a dark or light theme, and the development branch now requires .NET 10. There is no server component; the project states that the program does not send information over the network unless the user asks it to.

The project releases regularly. Version 3.1 arrived in December 2025 with a rewritten canvas, followed by bug-fix releases in January and March 2026, and the changelog for the next version lists many more tools, options and fixes.

Hosted version

None. Pinta runs only on your own computer.

Limitations

Pinta is a raster editor. It has no vector tools, templates, components or collaboration, so it does not replace Figma, Canva or a whiteboard. The project describes itself as a simple paint program, and it is not built for professional photo retouching workflows. The official user guide was written for version 1.6 and no longer matches the current interface.

Who it suits

Pinta suits people who want a quick, approachable editor for screenshots, simple graphics, pixel art and basic photo fixes, especially on Linux where Paint.NET is not available. For painting, including painting together with others, see Drawpile; for vector graphics, Graphite and SVGEdit.