DrDoc - 6:48 pm on Mar 5, 2007 (gmt 0)

Paint.net is ... not ... that ... great
Sure, with some (read: a lot of) work you can accomplish certain things ... but it really sucks for creating advanced graphics.

Things that I personally look for:
* ability to create advanced selections, adding and removing selected areas, moving the selected area, inverting the selection, ability to save a selection for later re-use
* layer masks, layer grouping, layer effects that can be hidden if needed
* text transformation such as rotating and skewing while keeping text editable and crisp, ability to edit the text at any time
* miscellaneous features: rulers; the ability to move layer contents without creating a selction, thus allowing for out-of-canvas areas to come into play again; advanced features for color matching, hue changes, color balance etc.

Paint.net has none of the above. Photoshop has it all. Not sure about Gimp.