Licensing īefore version 2.0, Natron was licensed under the Mozilla Public License version 2.0, which allowed redistributing it with closed-source plug-ins.

In January 2015, the Art and Technology of Image (ATI) department in Paris 8 University announced that they would switch to professional-quality free and open-source software for teaching computer graphics to students and artists, including Blender, Krita and Natron. Version 1.0 was released on December 22nd, 2014, together with a large sample project by François 'CoyHot' Grassard, a professional computer graphics artist and teacher, demonstrating that Natron could execute interactively graphs with more than 100 nodes. Subsequent beta releases brought additional features such as motion blur, color management through OpenColorIO, and video tracking. The first widely available public release was 0.92 (June 6th, 2014), which brought rotoscoping and chroma keying functionalities. The prize was a 12-month employment contract to develop Natron as a free and open-source software within the institute. The project was the winner of the 2013 Boost Your Code contest by Inria. Natron was started by Alexandre Gauthier in June of 2012 as a personal project. Natron is named after Lake Natron in Tanzania which, according to Natron lead programmer Alexandre Gauthier, provides 'natural visual effects' by preserving its dead animals.

How to use natron software