NPS Image Editor is a freeware painting, drawing and image editing tool. The developer says the program aims to offer high end editing tools with the simplicity of the original Microsoft Paint.

The program looks much like a simplified version of Paint.NET: tiny drawing toolbar on the left, palette on the right, menu bar at the top, details of the current image on the status bar.

The core operations work as you'd expect. Drag and drop to open an image, hold Ctrl and spin the mouse wheel to zoom in and out, resize/ rotate/ flip/ mirror the image, adjust colours or apply effects. If you've ever used another image editor you'll be immediately exploring the program's abilities.

It doesn't take long to spot issues. The program doesn't have a tabbed interface (it can sort-of open multiple images, but each one appears in a different NPS window). There's no layer support yet (it's in beta as we write). The toolbars are fixed and relatively basic, with few options to reconfigure or move them around.

Keep looking, though, and you'll find many features which deliver more than you'd expect.

Colour Selection is via a powerful colour picker which supports RGB, HSV, HSL, HCL(ab), Lab Colour, CIE XYZ, YUV and CMYK mixing, as well as storing "favourite" colours in your own panel, or picking a shade from the screen.

Selection tools include a freehand option, all selections support multiple transparency modes (opaque, keyed, fully transparent), and you can resize a selection in place, rotate, invert or crop it on demand.

You're able to paint with multiple brushes, including animated brushes which change shape as you draw. All brushes can be edited, or you can add your own.

The "Rotate" tool doesn't just support 90 degree increments. You can specify any angle you like, automatically enlarge the canvas to match, fill this with transparency or a colour, and use bicubic or bilinear interpolation with prefiltering for the best possible quality.

There's also support for Bezier curves, transparency editing, text smoothing, watermarks, scripting and more.