Celebrating 20 Years of NPS Image Editor

Picture this: a cozy December winter break in snowy Minnesota. A Windows 95 machine with 16 MB of RAM and a loud mechanical hard drive. And a teen who had spent the past year learning how to program in Visual Basic 6.

I was always a fan of playing around with painting software including the obvious Microsoft Paint but also a children's paint program on old Macintoshes at school. A feature I distinctly remembered was the ability to paint in rainbow colors and I wished MS Paint had that feature.

And in December of 2005, my dream had become a reality. Nookkin's Paint Shop was born.

It wasn't great. It was full of bugs and mostly made up of online code examples I had pasted together without fully understanding them, but it was something, and it was mine.

The early releases

In 2006 I upgraded to a Windows XP computer which was a major improvement over Windows 95.

In 2008 I released version 2.0 codenamed "RatTamer" which was the first public release of the software, with limited CD-ROM and online distribution.

Around 2007 I had started working on NPS 3.0 codename "Obsidian" which ditched VB6 in favor of VB.NET, and finally released the first milestone in 2009. I continued to work on the VB6 version in the meantime.

The establishment of Obsidian

In 2012 I released Obsidian Beta 1 just in time for my flurry of internship applications as I was finishing up college. This was the first feature-complete version with all drawing tools implemented.

In 2015 (after 10 years of NPS Image Editor's existence) I had started a software development career and moved to another state. NPS Image Editor was not my top priority at the time so unfortunately not much had changed, but a year later I started adding support for more color spaces in the color picker.

And in 2019, after many many requests, I released layers. They weren't a part of my original vision but I'm glad I added them in a way that kept some of that original simplicity.

Support for layers opened up a whole new world of cool functionality I could add, including blending modes, animation, and GIF support.

The future is now

Fast forward to today, 20 years later. NPS Image Editor is a well-established piece of software with support for layers, filters, text effects, scripting, and more – all with a rather unique approach of keeping the simplicity of Paint and adding more functionality on top of it, rather than starting with a full-fledged photo editor and paring it down. The color picker has taken on a life of its own. I can now confidently say that my original vision has been completed.

NPS Image Editor is what led me to pursue a computer science degree (and working on it kept me sane in between school assignments). It got me job interviews and eventually led to my 11-year career at my current job. It's been a steady journey of learning and expanding my skills while creating something very useful.

So what does the future hold? A lot has changed in the world of computing but I am still passionate about software development and intend to keep working on NPS Image Editor, though I will likely shift my effort towards a cross-platform mobile-friendly variant. (I've yet to find a good mobile image editor and accept the challenge of creating my own.)

Here's to another 20 years!

Download NPS Image Editor today

For a more detailed history of NPS Image Editor, please check out the history page!