When a colleague of mine told me about a great new free image processor at par with Photoshop, I must confess I needed to see it with my own eyes to believe it. I've never been a great fan of Photoshop. I've always found it too fiddly and those layers drive me mental. To be sure it has a few features I've grown to love but if those were offered else where I'd probably never open Photoshop. Corel Painter yes, I swear by it, Fireworks, in my view pure genius. Welcome a new addition to the party and a FREE offering as well. Its called Paint.NET, and yes its a C# build on the .NET framework. Its seems to do all the stuff PS does for free and it takes a tenth of the time to initialize. Its an Open Source project so if you wish, (God knows I won't) you can go and ferret around in the code. Its all there.