dyland

yes, its much harder to use, and by the way you can merge selected layers, well not exactly, you can merge visisble layers,

try gimp, its called smudge if i caught what your saying

wow Rick, your handing them a free program and all they do is complain, i feel for ya man.

i think i saw a drop shadow tutorial on the gradient tutorial page, take a look.

i saw this too then guessed this so yea awsome

try gimp, search gimp on google, it has the hotkey for chging forground to background colors by pushing x, im not sure if you can lock the transparency but ive never tried that, instead of soft paint brushes you can use the tool airbrush, which has the options of pressure and rate, not hard to make lines although tricky, you must use the path tool then stroke it... but still easy. sorry but you cant merge selected layers on gimp, but you can copy the layer then delete it, then merge them all then paste the layer. thats all i know, im sure ill get banned for dissin paint.net, it rocks but not enough tools for me, peace out have fun!