Comment 4 for bug 1555426

OPTION 1: INSTALL PINTA 1.6 FROM PPA
looking at official Debian web page https://packages.debian.org/search?searchon=names&keywords=pinta it looks Jessie by default still uses Pinta 1.3 version.

I searched the web to see if Debian also supports PPAs like Ubuntu so you could install Pinta 1.6 version and found out PPAs are supported in Debian (in Jessie and later) https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/45879/how-to-add-repository-from-shell-in-debian by installing package:
sudo apt-get install python-software-properties

Next commands should be the same as in Ubuntu http://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/howto/installing-pinta so adding PPA and install new Pinta version:
sudo add-apt-repository ppa:pinta-maintainers/pinta-stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install pinta

Above will install Pinta 1.6 which is way less buggy then 1.3 version. I don't know if this solves the problem, but at least a lot of problems will disappear because they have been fix in later versions.

Please note I am not! Debian user, so I can't test this out. If you are not sure about installing PPAs please ask some question on Debian forum or similar.

OPTION 2: RUN PINTA 1.7-DEVELOPMENT
If you are afraid you will corrupt something with above steps it is safer! way of trying out Pinta 1.7-development version (currently very stable at least as stable as Pinta 1.6). Trying out Pinta-developnent does not! require any installation, just unzip archive, directory with files is created and then run a program. If you don't like Pinta-development you can simply delete directory without harm to your existing system.

1. I strongly suggest you first install Pinta from official repository, so all dependencies are installed like "mono" etc. You already did this, because you are using Pinta 1.3.
2. From web page: http://pinta-project.com/pintaproject/pinta/builds download latest "zip" file. Currently this is: http://ci-builds.pinta-project.com/downloads/pinta-dev-1.7.0.218.zip
3. Unzip the file, like using: unzip <pinta-zip-file>
Note: I don't know if Debian already has some program to unzip the zip archive, if not then package name is something like "zip", probably: sudo apt-get install zip
4. Move to the extracted directory: cd <pinta-directory>
5. There you will see Pinta.exe file. Yes, this looks like Windows file, but it is actually the file that can be run with Mono. So execute command:
mono Pinta.exe
and Pinta should start up. Please check the Help | About menu and there should be version 1.7.xxx.

Please try out your problem and report back if the problem is solved.

P.S. I am currently using Pinta 1.7-development in day-to-day work without big issues in Ubuntu 14.04. I have created keyboard shortcut <Super>+<Shift>+P to run this "mono Pinta.exe" from extracted directory.

Hope this helps.