HeliosPaint is a free and easy to use paint program for editing photos, drawings and icons. 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.
Curved, straight and freehand lines with choice of width, dash pattern, line joint and arrow heads.
Paint Brush with adjustable size and edge feathering.
Eraser with adjustable size and edge feathering.
Spray Can with adjustable size and edge feathering 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.
Image filters: RGB levels, HSB levels, contrast, gamma, invert, gray, black and white, colour filter, sharpen, blur, edge feathering, edge detection, oil painting effect, emboss, unsharp mask, chrome, sepia tone, threshold.
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 an area of the image. Sensitivity of lasso and wand is adjustable. Transparency of overlaid area 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.
Save selected area as transparent gif or transparent png file.
Undo and redo.
Printing with auto fit to page.
Export image to PDF file.
Simple and easy to use help file.
Reads and writes image file formats: bmp, gif, jpg/jpeg, pct/pict, pcx, pgm, png, ppm, psd, ras, tga, tif/tiff, wbmp, xpm.
Supports images up to 12 megapixels in size (a high end computer is recommended for working with very large images).