Microsoft PaintMicrosoft Paint (formerly Paintbrush) is a simple raster graphics editor that has been included with all versions of Microsoft Windows. The program opens and saves files in Windows bitmap (BMP), JPEG, GIF, PNG, and single-page TIFF formats. The program can be in color mode or two-color black-and-white, but there is no grayscale mode. For its simplicity and that it is included with Windows, it rapidly became one of the most used applications in the early versions of Windows, introducing many to painting on a computer for the first time. It is still widely used for simple image manipulation tasks.
In July 2017, Microsoft added Paint to the list of deprecated Windows features, meaning that it will not be developed further and might be removed in the future. It will, however, be made available in the Microsoft Store for free.[1][2]
In Windows 10, Paint can be found in the Start menu under Windows Accessories, or one can type "mspaint" or "pbrush" in the Run dialog box (⊞ Win+R).
History
The first version of Paint was introduced with the first version of Windows, Windows 1.0, in November 1985. It was a licensed version of ZSoft Corporation's PC Paintbrush, and supported only 1-bit monochrome graphics under a proprietary "MSP" format. This version was later superseded by Paintbrush in Windows 3.0, with a redesigned user interface, true color support and support for the BMP and PCX file formats.
Microsoft shipped an updated version of Paint with Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, which allows saving and loading a custom set of color wells as color palette (.pal) files.[3] This functionality only works correctly if the color depth of images is 16-bits per pixel (bpp) or higher. Later versions of Paint do not support this feature.
In Windows 98, Windows 2000 and Windows ME, Paint can save images in JPEG, GIF and PNG formats when appropriate plug-ins are installed. Such plug-ins are included with Microsoft Office and Microsoft PhotoDraw. This also allows Paint to use transparent backgrounds.[4][5] Support for PCX files was dropped.[6] Starting with Windows ME, the canvas size expands automatically when larger images are opened or pasted, instead of asking.
In Windows XP and later, Paint uses GDI+ and therefore can natively save images as BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF and PNG without requiring additional graphics filters.[7] However, alpha channel transparency is still not supported. Support for acquiring images from a scanner or a digital camera was also added to Paint.
In Windows Vista, the toolbar icons and default color palette were changed. Paint in Windows Vista can undo a change up to 10 times, compared to 3 in previous versions; it also includes a slider for image magnification and a crop function. This version saves in JPEG format by default.[8]
Features
Paint has a few functions not mentioned in the help file: a stamp mode, trail mode, regular shapes, and moving pictures.[13] For the stamp mode, the user can select part of the image, hold the Ctrl key, and move it to another part of the canvas. This, instead of cutting the piece out, creates a copy of it. The process can be repeated as many times as desired, as long as the Ctrl key is held down. The trail mode works exactly the same, but it uses the ⇧ Shift instead of the Ctrl key.
The user may also draw straight horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines with the pencil tool, without the need of the straight line tool, by holding the ⇧ Shift key and dragging the tool. Moreover, it is also possible to thicken or thin a line either before or simultaneously while it is being drawn via Ctrl++ (NumPad only) or Ctrl+- (NumPad only). To crop whitespace or eliminate parts of a graphic, the blue handle in the lower right corner can be dragged to increase canvas size or crop a graphic. Users can also draw perfect shapes (which have width equal to height) using any shape tool by holding down the ⇧ Shift while dragging.
Older versions of Paint, such as the one bundled with Windows 3.1, allow controlling the drawing cursor with the use of arrow keys as well as a color-replace brush, which replaced a single color underneath the brush with another without affecting the rest of the image. In later versions of Paint, the color erase brush may be simulated by selecting the color to be replaced as the primary color, and the one it is replaced with as the secondary color, and then right-click dragging the erase tool. Controlling the drawing cursor with arrow key is no longer supported, but it is possible to simulate it with the MouseKeys accessibility feature of Microsoft Windows.