HeliosPaint is a freeware paint program for creating and editing images. It runs on Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix and is written in Sun Microsystem´s Java programming language.

Tools and features in HeliosPaint currently include:

• Pencil for editing pixels.
• Freehand and straight lines with choice of width, dash pattern, line joint and line end.
• Paint Brush with sizeable head.
• Spray Can with sizeable head or global spray option.
• Paint Can with local and global replace. Colour bleed sensitivity allows nearby similar colours to be painted.
• Shape tool for creating freehand, regular polygon, star, moon and heart shapes.
• Text entry with choice of font, style, underline and rotation.
• HSB/RGB/contrast/gamma adjustment of image.
• Image invert, gray, colour filter, blur, sharpen, edge detection, oil painting effect, emboss.
• Image colour and transparency adjustment by flat, round, rectangular and ´fit to shape´ gradient patterns. This allows areas of the image to be darkened, brightened and colour enhanced.
• Image flip, scale up, scale down, rotate, shear, perspective view.
• Full colour pallet with adjustable transparency and colour grabber.
• Zoom in/out with optional zoom grid.
• Text and image paste from clipboard. Image and image segment copy/cut onto clipboard.
• Scissors, lasso and wand for selecting and moving image segments. Sensitivity of lasso and wand is adjustable. Transparency of overlaid segments is adjustable. Scissors can cut out various shapes including regular polygons, stars and hearts. When part of the image is selected, all paint operations apply only to that area.
• Saving selected areas as transparent gif or transparent png files.
• Undo and redo.
• Printing with auto fit to page.
• Reads and writes image file formats: bmp, gif, jpg/jpeg, pct/pict, pcx, pgm, png, ppm, psd, ras, tga, tif/tiff, xpm.
• Supports images up to 12 megapixels in size (a high end computer is recommended for working with very large images).

Download HeliosPaint for Linux and MacOS.

Requires Java Runtime Environment. Get It Here.

What's New in version 1.4.1:

• New image filters.
• Greater line width support.
• New selection tool.