PaintFE

Name: PaintFE — Download page. GPU-accelerated Raster image editor
Availability: InStock
Rating: 5 (1 reviews)
Author: kylejckson

PaintFE — Free Download. GPU-accelerated Raster image editor

PaintFE is a fast, lightweight raster image editor for Windows, built in Rust. It features layers, blend modes, GPU-accelerated filters, gradients, mesh warp, brushes, selection tools, adjustments, animated GIF/APNG support, and a built-in Rhai scripting engine. It ships as a single portable executable with no install required.

★★★★★

5.0(1 ratings)

Download PaintFE (Official links)

File size: 27.1 MB

The latest version of PaintFE is: 1.1.2

Operating system: Windows, Linux, MacOS

Languages: Spanish, English

Developer: kylejckson

Price: $0.00 USD

Layers and 25 blend modes. The program provides a complete layer stack with per-layer opacity and a comprehensive set of blend modes (multiply, screen, overlay, etc.). This enables non-destructive composition, allowing flexible and professional combination of image elements.
Full GPU acceleration. Compositing, gradient generation, liquify warping, and mesh warp displacement all run on the GPU via WGSL compute shaders through the wgpu API. This allows 4K canvases to be manipulated at interactive frame rates, with automatic CPU fallback when necessary.
Built-in Rhai scripting engine. Users can automate tasks and create custom effects using the embedded Rhai scripting language. The program includes a built-in script editor with live canvas preview and a headless CLI batch mode for processing multiple files without the GUI.
Comprehensive paint and retouch tools. A set of 23 tools is organized into groups: paint (brush, pencil, eraser, line, fill, gradient with a configurable tip library); warp and retouch (clone stamp, content-aware fill, color remover, liquify, mesh warp); and utilities (color picker, text, zoom, pan).
Extensive filters and adjustments. Offers a wide range of filters (Gaussian blur, motion blur, sharpen, reduce noise, median, pixelate, unsharp mask, emboss, edge detect) and adjustments (auto levels, desaturate, invert, sepia, brightness/contrast, curves, exposure, HSL, levels, color temperature). Several of these have GPU-accelerated paths.
Special effects. Includes effects such as vignette, glow, halftone, oil painting, crystallize, ink, perspective, distort (bulge/twist/wave/ripple), noise, scanlines, glitch, drop shadow, outline, and contour.
Animated GIF and APNG support. Can read and write animated GIF and APNG files. For animated export, each visible layer in the project is treated as a single frame, with configurable FPS, loop count, and GIF palette.
Advanced selection tools. Features selection tools including rectangle, ellipse, lasso, magic wand, move pixels, and move selection, with add/subtract/intersect modes. A color range selection function is also available.
Headless CLI batch mode. The program can be executed from the command line for automated file processing. It supports applying Rhai scripts, converting between multiple image formats (PNG, JPEG, WebP, TIFF, BMP, TGA, ICO), and adjusting parameters like JPEG quality.
Local AI background removal. Includes a feature to remove image backgrounds using ONNX models (BiRefNet, U2-Net, IS-Net). The process runs entirely locally: the user supplies the model and the ONNX Runtime library, and no data ever leaves their machine.
Performance optimization system. Implements several techniques to maximize speed: dirty-rect GPU readback (only reading changed pixels), a copy-on-write (COW) tile system for efficient undo/cloning, tiered undo (storing only changes), zero-copy casting of GPU memory, and CPU parallelism via the rayon library.

PaintFE was initiated by developer Kyle Jackson as a personal project to learn the Rust programming language. The first commit to the public GitHub repository was made on February 23, 2026, and the program is written entirely in Rust, using the 2024 language edition. The graphical interface is built with the eframe/egui framework, and GPU-accelerated rendering is handled through the wgpu 0.20 API.

PaintFE

Alternatives to PaintFE:

PixiEditor

ArtDesignStudio

Clip Studio Paint

PicsArt

PhotoSir

AliveColors

Affinity Photo

PhotoFiltre

Picture Window Pro