Microsoft Paint is a simple
raster graphics editor that has been included with all versions of
Microsoft Windows
Windows is a group of several proprietary graphical operating system families developed and marketed by Microsoft. Each family caters to a certain sector of the computing industry. For example, Windows NT for consumers, Windows Server for serv ...
. The program opens and saves files in
Windows bitmap
The BMP file format, also known as bitmap image file, device independent bitmap (DIB) file format and bitmap, is a raster graphics image file format used to store bitmap digital images, independently of the display device (such as a graphics adap ...
(BMP),
JPEG,
GIF,
PNG, and single-page
TIFF
Tag Image File Format, abbreviated TIFF or TIF, is an image file format for storing raster graphics images, popular among graphic artists, the publishing industry, and photographers. TIFF is widely supported by scanning, faxing, word process ...
formats. The program can be in color mode or two-color
black-and-white
Black-and-white (B&W or B/W) images combine black and white in a continuous spectrum, producing a range of shades of grey.
Media
The history of various visual media began with black and white, and as technology improved, altered to color. ...
, but there is no
grayscale
In digital photography, computer-generated imagery, and colorimetry, a grayscale image is one in which the value of each pixel is a single sample representing only an ''amount'' of light; that is, it carries only intensity information. Graysc ...
mode. For its simplicity and wide availability, it rapidly became one of the most used Windows applications, 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 features of
Windows 10
Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...
and announced that it would become a free standalone application in
Microsoft Store
Microsoft Store (formerly known as Windows Store) is a digital distribution platform operated by Microsoft. It started as an app store for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 as the primary means of distributing Universal Windows Platform app ...
. Microsoft had envisioned
Paint 3D
Paint 3D is a raster graphics and 3D computer graphics application which is a refresh of Microsoft Paint. It is one of several 3D modeling and printing applications (formatted under 3MF) introduced or improved with the Windows 10 Creators Upda ...
as a replacement. However, Paint continued to be included with Windows 10. Microsoft eventually reversed course and announced an updated version of Paint in
Windows 11
Windows 11 is the latest major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, released in October 2021. It is a free upgrade to its predecessor, Windows 10 (2015), and is available for any Windows 10 devices that meet the new Windows 11 ...
. Instead, Microsoft deprecated Paint 3D.
History
The first version of Paint was programmed by Dan McCabe and introduced with the first version of Windows,
Windows 1.0
Windows 1.0 is the first major release of Microsoft Windows, a family of graphical operating systems for personal computers developed by Microsoft. It was first released to manufacturing in the United States on November 20, 1985, while the Euro ...
, in November 1985 as a competitor to
Macintosh's MacPaint
MacPaint is a raster graphics editor developed by Apple Computer and released with the original Macintosh personal computer on January 24, 1984. It was sold separately for US$195 with its word processing counterpart, MacWrite. MacPaint was nota ...
. It was a licensed version of
ZSoft Corporation
PC Paintbrush was a graphics editing software created by the ZSoft Corporation in 1984 for computers running the MS-DOS operating system.
It was originally developed as a response to the first paintbrush program for the IBM PC, ''PCPaint'', whic ...
's
PC Paintbrush
PC Paintbrush was a graphics editing software created by the ZSoft Corporation in 1984 for computers running the MS-DOS operating system.
It was originally developed as a response to the first paintbrush program for the IBM PC, ''PCPaint'', whic ...
that shipped with 24 tools and can read and write files only in the proprietary "MSP" format drawn in monochrome graphics. Aside from "pencil" and "shape" tools and a brush that draws in 24 "brush shapes and patterns", the toolset also contained two features unique for the time: one the ability to draw
Bézier curves and the other that forces lines to be drawn on three angles to create an
isometric three-quarter perspective. This version was later superseded by Paintbrush in
Windows 3.0
Windows 3.0 is the third major release of Microsoft Windows, launched in 1990. It features a new graphical user interface (GUI) where applications are represented as clickable icons, as opposed to the list of file names seen in its predeces ...
, with a redesigned user interface, true color support, and support for the
BMP and
PCX
PCX, standing for ''PiCture eXchange'', was an image file format developed by the now-defunct ZSoft Corporation of Marietta, Georgia, United States. It was the native file format for PC Paintbrush and became one of the first widely accepted DOS ...
file formats. Microsoft had deprecated the MSP format, and Paintbrush could only read MSP files.
Microsoft shipped an updated version of Paint with
Windows 95
Windows 95 is a consumer-oriented operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of operating systems. The first operating system in the 9x family, it is the successor to Windows 3.1x, and was released to manufacturi ...
and
Windows NT 4.0
Windows NT 4.0 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It is the direct successor to Windows NT 3.51, which was released to manufacturing on July 31, 1996, and then to retail ...
, which allows saving and loading a custom set of color wells as color palette (.pal) files. 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 95–98,
Windows 2000
Windows 2000 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft and oriented towards businesses. It was the direct successor to Windows NT 4.0, and was released to manufacturing on December 15, 1999, and was officiall ...
and
Windows Me
Windows Millennium Edition, or Windows Me (marketed with the pronunciation of the pronoun "me"), is an operating system developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows 9x family of Microsoft Windows operating systems. It is the successor to Windo ...
, Paint can open JPEG, GIF and 48-bit (
16-bpp) TIF images and save images in JPEG and GIF formats when appropriate
graphics filters are installed. Such plug-ins are included with
Microsoft Office
Microsoft Office, or simply Office, is the former name of a family of client software, server software, and services developed by Microsoft. It was first announced by Bill Gates on August 1, 1988, at COMDEX in Las Vegas. Initially a marketin ...
and
Microsoft PhotoDraw
Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000 is a discontinued vector graphics and raster imaging software package developed by Microsoft.
History Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000
Microsoft PhotoDraw 2000 was released in 1999 along with Microsoft Office 2000 Premium and D ...
. This also allows Paint to use transparent backgrounds. Support for
PCX
PCX, standing for ''PiCture eXchange'', was an image file format developed by the now-defunct ZSoft Corporation of Marietta, Georgia, United States. It was the native file format for PC Paintbrush and became one of the first widely accepted DOS ...
files was dropped.
Starting with Windows Me, the canvas size expands automatically when larger images are opened or pasted, instead of asking.
In
Windows XP
Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...
and later, Paint uses
GDI+
The Graphics Device Interface (GDI) is a legacy component of Microsoft Windows responsible for representing graphical objects and transmitting them to output devices such as monitors and printers. Windows apps use Windows API to interact with G ...
and therefore can natively save images as BMP, JPEG, GIF, TIFF and PNG without requiring additional graphics filters.
In
Windows Vista
Windows Vista is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was the direct successor to Windows XP, which was released five years before, at the time being the longest time span between successive releases of ...
, 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.
Windows 7 and 8.x
![MS Paint Win7 PaintBrush types](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2c/MS_Paint_Win7_PaintBrush_types.png)
The version of Paint in
Windows 7
Windows 7 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was released to manufacturing on July 22, 2009, and became generally available on October 22, 2009. It is the successor to Windows Vista, released nearly ...
and later features a
ribbon
A ribbon or riband is a thin band of material, typically cloth but also plastic or sometimes metal, used primarily as decorative binding and tying. Cloth ribbons are made of natural materials such as silk, cotton, and jute and of synthetic mater ...
in its user interface. 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 paintbrush has run out of paint). In addition, Paint 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
is an action-adventure game developed by Japan Studio and Team Ico, and published by Sony Computer Entertainment, released for the PlayStation 2 video game console in 2001 and 2002 in various regions. It was designed and directed by Fumito U ...
file formats and saves files in the .png file format by default.
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
Windows 8 is a major release of the Windows NT operating system developed by Microsoft. It was Software release life cycle#Release to manufacturing (RTM), released to manufacturing on August 1, 2012; it was subsequently made available for downl ...
version of Paint mostly corrects a long-standing defect from previous versions involving the inability to scroll the window when editing in Zoom view over 100%. However, when inserting text in Zoom view, the user cannot move the text beyond the zoomed viewport while the text window is in edit mode with either the mouse or keyboard.
Windows 10
In the April 2017 "Creators Update" for Windows 10, Microsoft released
Paint 3D
Paint 3D is a raster graphics and 3D computer graphics application which is a refresh of Microsoft Paint. It is one of several 3D modeling and printing applications (formatted under 3MF) introduced or improved with the Windows 10 Creators Upda ...
alongside Paint. In addition to the traditional two-dimensional drawing tools, Paint 3D can import and manipulate three-dimensional models. Three months later, on July 23, 2017, Microsoft added Paint to the list of deprecated Windows features. The next day, in the wake of "an incredible outpouring of support and nostalgia", Microsoft clarified that Paint would become a free app on
Microsoft Store
Microsoft Store (formerly known as Windows Store) is a digital distribution platform operated by Microsoft. It started as an app store for Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 as the primary means of distributing Universal Windows Platform app ...
, even though Paint 3D offers the same functionality.
Paint, however, remained a part of all versions of Windows 10. The closest Microsoft ever got to enacting said decision was adding a removal notice to Paint's user interface in Windows 10 versions 1803 and 1809.
In March 2021, with the release of Windows 10 Insider build 21332 to the Dev Channel, Microsoft removed Paint 3D from clean installations of the build, in addition to the 3D Objects app.
In April 2021, Microsoft released Windows 10 Insider build 21354, which made Paint (along with
Snipping Tool) updatable from the Microsoft Store. It had also been moved from the Windows Accessories folder of the
Start menu
The Start menu is a graphical user interface element used in Microsoft Windows since Windows 95 and in other operating systems. It provides a central launching point for computer programs and performing other tasks in the Windows shell. It is name ...
to its own section.
Windows 11
In August 2021, Microsoft teased an updated version of Paint for
Windows 11
Windows 11 is the latest major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, released in October 2021. It is a free upgrade to its predecessor, Windows 10 (2015), and is available for any Windows 10 devices that meet the new Windows 11 ...
, featuring a refreshed UI, improved font picker, and a
dark theme
A light-on-dark color scheme —also called black mode, dark mode, dark theme, night mode, or lights-out (mode)— is a color scheme that uses light-colored text, icons, and graphical user interface elements on a dark background. It is often d ...
.
Features
Paint has a few functions not mentioned in the help file: a ''stamp mode'', ''trail mode'', ''regular shapes'', and moving pictures. For the stamp mode, the user can select a part of the image, hold the 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 key is held down. The trail mode works exactly the same, but it uses the instead of the 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 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 (
NumPad
A numeric keypad, number pad, numpad, or ten key,
is the palm-sized, usually-17-key section of a standard computer keyboard, usually on the far right. It provides calculator-style efficiency for entering numbers. The idea of a 10-key n ...
only) or (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 a width equal to the height) using any shape tool by holding down the while dragging.
Older versions of Paint, such as the one bundled with
Windows 3.1
Windows 3.1 is a major release of Microsoft Windows. It was released to manufacturing on April 6, 1992, as a successor to Windows 3.0.
Like its predecessors, the Windows 3.1 series ran as a shell on top of MS-DOS. Codenamed Janus, Windows 3 ...
, feature 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.
Support for indexed palettes
By default, almost all versions of Paint are generally unable to properly downgrade created images to indexed palettes using fewer than 24 bits per pixel. When saving an image in a format that uses indexed palettes with fewer than 24 bits per pixel, a warning message appears about the loss of quality. Paint does not utilize binary, color or grayscale
dither
Dither is an intentionally applied form of noise used to randomize quantization error, preventing large-scale patterns such as color banding in images. Dither is routinely used in processing of both digital audio and video data, and is often ...
ing or palette optimization, and the image will be saved with usually irreversibly scrambled colors.
Paint is nonetheless able to correctly load and save indexed palettes in any of the supported formats if an image is opened as an 8-bit or otherwise indexed palette image. In that case, the image's palette is preserved when saving. However, there is no way to see the actual palette; color choices for brushes, text, and erasers as well as user-defined colors will be limited to the closest available color in the indexed palette.
See also
Bundled Paint equivalents on other OSes
*
Deluxe Paint
Deluxe Paint, often referred to as ''DPaint'', is a bitmap graphics editor created by Dan Silva for Electronic Arts and published for the then-new Amiga 1000 in November 1985. A series of updated versions followed, some of which were ported ...
, for
Amiga
Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
*
KolourPaint
KolourPaint is a free and open-source raster graphics editor by KDE. It is similar to Microsoft Paint before the version shipped with Windows 7, but has some additional features such as support for transparency, color balance and image rotation ...
, for
KDE
KDE is an international free software community that develops free and open-source software. As a central development hub, it provides tools and resources that allow collaborative work on this kind of software. Well-known products include the ...
*
MacPaint
MacPaint is a raster graphics editor developed by Apple Computer and released with the original Macintosh personal computer on January 24, 1984. It was sold separately for US$195 with its word processing counterpart, MacWrite. MacPaint was nota ...
, for
Macintosh
The Mac (known as Macintosh until 1999) is a family of personal computers designed and marketed by Apple Inc., Apple Inc. Macs are known for their ease of use and minimalist designs, and are popular among students, creative professionals, and ...
*
Pinta, for
GNOME
*
Pocket Paint, for
Windows CE
Windows Embedded Compact, formerly Windows Embedded CE, Windows Powered and Windows CE, is an operating system subfamily developed by Microsoft as part of its Windows Embedded family of products.
Unlike Windows Embedded Standard, which is base ...
* PaintZ, for
ChromeOS
ChromeOS, sometimes stylized as chromeOS and formerly styled as Chrome OS, is a Linux-based operating system designed by Google. It is derived from the open-source ChromiumOS and uses the Google Chrome web browser as its principal user interfa ...
Misc.
*
Comparison of raster graphics editors
Raster graphics editors can be compared by many variables, including availability.
List
General information
Basic general information about the editors: creator, company, license, etc.
Operating system support
The operating systems ...
*
Microsoft Fresh Paint
Fresh Paint is a painting app developed by Microsoft and released on May 25, 2012.
History
Fresh Paint originated from a Microsoft Research project known as Project Gustav, an endeavor to reproduce the behavior of physical oil paint on a digital ...
*
GIMP
*
Pixel art
Pixel art () is a form of digital art drawn with graphical software where images are built using pixels as the only building block. It is widely associated with the low-resolution graphics from 8-bit and 16-bit era computers and arcade video g ...
, a form of digital art
References
{{Raster graphics editors
1985 software
Raster graphics editors
Windows components