Windows Paint an Overlooked Tool Included with all Windows Versions

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Windows paint an over looked tool that has become more robust as of Windows 7 is a great but mostly unknown about tool for photos and social media. This tried-and-true program is now easier to use and more fun as well. You can touch up those phone pictures you want to post add text and much more. The new realistic digital “brushes” will bring your pictures to life in shades of watercolor, crayon, and calligraphy. Paint is now touch-ready too, so if you’ve got a touchscreen PC, you’ll soon be finger painting right on the screen. You can even use two fingers to trace two separate strokes.

History of MS Paint

ZSoft Corporation's PC PaintbrushPaint was introduced with the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0. It was a licensed version of ZSoft Corporation’s PC Paintbrush, and supported only 1-bit monochrome graphics under a proprietary “MSP” format. Paint was later superseded by Paintbrush in Windows 3.0, with a redesigned user interface, color support and support for the BMP and PCX file formats. The early versions were very crude and limited and if you really needed to edit photos or create banners or signs you needed very expensive graphics editing software. Windows 95 Microsoft introduced a new version of Paint. The same icons and color palette continued to be used through Windows XP. Not so useful a tool until Windows 7.

MS Paint Windows 7The version of Paint in Windows 7 and Windows 8 makes use of the Ribbon GUI It also features “artistic” brushes composed of varying shades of gray and some degree of transparency that give a more realistic result. To add to the realism, the oil and watercolor brushes can only paint for a small distance before the user must re-click (this gives the illusion that the paint brush has run out of paint). The Paint application can now undo up to 50 subsequent changes. It also has anti-aliased shapes, which can be resized freely until they are rasterized when another tool is selected. This version supports viewing (but not saving) transparent PNG and ICO file formats and saves files in the .png file format by default. There is now an option to make any shape bigger or smaller after drawing it. Text can now be pasted into text boxes that don’t have enough room to display the text. A text box can then be enlarged or reshaped appropriately to fit the text if desired. Previous versions of Paint would display an error message if a user tried to paste more text than there was room for. The Windows 8 version of Paint mostly corrects a long standing defect from previous versions involving an inability to scroll the window when editing in Zoom view. All in all for those of you unaware of this little gem included with your PC get creative add some text to that cute picture of your cat perhaps it will go viral or show off your artistic ability and do a water color with paint. If it is more robust features are what you need then it would be time to visit some of our sponsors web sites and break out the wallet to buy professional image editing software but you can have a lot of fun with paint. For more information about using Microsoft Paint visit Microsoft’s website CLICK HERE>>

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