Windows comes with a paint program of its own – Microsoft Paint that everyone knows about. But sometimes, you have to test some other open-source or third-party drawing programs too to find out all the options and possibilities. An open-source program called jfPaint falls in that category – it is a Java based picture drawing program that can export the drawings into JPEG, PNG and BMP. It works on Windows PC but recently they have also added support for macOS.
As mentioned earlier, it is based on Java and will refuse to run properly without Oracle Java installed on your system. You can easily download Oracle Java for your system from https://www.oracle.com/java/technologies/downloads/.
jfPaint offers a user interface that looks like something from Windows 3.1 era. It has a toolbar that shows all the tools we can select to make the drawings – pencil, line, curve, fill, rectangle, circle, text, substitute, rotate, resize, transparency, gradients and Gaussian blur. It features a tabbed user interface and we can open or create multiple drawings under multiple tabs. The tabbed user interface makes it easy to copy and paste from one picture to another or compare multiple images.
The program uses multiple layers when you use a proprietary image file format. This is similar to other programs that use several layers in the image such as GIMP or Paint.net. The program is not meant to be used for any professional or serious work as it lacks advanced features that you can see in other open-source software like Paint.net or GIMP. It can be used by kids or by novice users who want to learn how to use basic functions on a Windows PC. There are much better and more advanced image editing and drawing programs available on the internet for any serious drawing work.
You can download jfPaint from https://sourceforge.net/projects/jfpaint/.