mtPaint (short for Mark Tyler's Painting Program) is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

raster graphics editor A raster graphics editor is a computer program that allows users to create and edit images interactively on the computer screen and save them in one of many raster graphics file formats (also known as bitmap images) such as JPEG, PNG, and GI ...

for creating

icons An icon () is a religious work of art, most commonly a painting, in the cultures of the Eastern Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Catholic churches. They are not simply artworks; "an icon is a sacred image used in religious devotion". The most ...

pixel art Pixel art () is a form of digital art drawn with graphics software, 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 a ...

and for photo editing. It is available for

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and

Linux Linux ( or ) is a family of open-source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991, by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged as a Linux distribution, which ...

operating systems An operating system (OS) is system software that manages computer hardware, software resources, and provides common services for computer programs. Time-sharing operating systems schedule tasks for efficient use of the system and may also inc ...

History

mtPaint was originally written by Mark Tyler specifically for Linux operating systems, as a personal project for his own use. He evaluated existing graphics editors, but decided to write his own from scratch. Work was started on 7 August 2004 and the first public release was made on 13 September 2004. Of the development speed, Tyler noted, "This rapid development was only possible after I used and studied an excellent program call mhWaveEdit, written by Magnus Hjorth, in the Spring of 2004. As well as being an extremely good wave editing program, I also learnt many valuable lessons from this program." One of the design aims was to produce a lightweight graphics editors that could be run on older hardware. As such the interface uses the

GTK GTK (formerly GIMP ToolKit and GTK+) is a free and open-source cross-platform widget toolkit for creating graphical user interfaces (GUIs). It is licensed under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License, allowing both free and propriet ...

1/2 toolkit. Other design goals included that it be fast, reliable and free software under the

GNU General Public License The GNU General Public License (GNU GPL or simply GPL) is a series of widely used free software licenses that guarantee end users the Four Freedoms (Free software), four freedoms to run, study, share, and modify the software. The license was th ...

to protect user freedom. The first release was version 0.23 and it featured an indexed palette system, but no RGB support. Following version 0.30 the program was ported to

as Tyler personally wanted to use it on a Windows computer he had. The version number went directly from release 0.97 to 2.00, with no 1.00 series. Version 2.00 was released on 7 August 2005. Tyler explained the version numbering, "To go from version 0.97 to 1.00 would not have reflected the quantum leap in functionality due to the implementation of layer facilities." Version 3.00 introduced channels with help from Dmitry Groshev, who did the work to implement the alpha (transparency), selection and mask channels. Groshev's coding was the first time that another developer's work had been directly written for mtPaint, although open source code from other projects had been incorporated previously. Version 3.00 also marked the start of a user manual for the program. Following 3.00 Tyler decided to leave the mtPaint and work on other software projects and Groshev became the maintainer. He continued to slowly add features and functionality, but through a slow cycle of releases. Version 3.50 was released on 31 December 2020 and is the most recent release. mtPaint has been included as a default application with a number of

Linux distribution A Linux distribution (often abbreviated as distro) is an operating system made from a software collection that includes the Linux kernel and, often, a package management system. Linux users usually obtain their operating system by downloading one ...

s, including all the

LXDE LXDE (abbreviation for Lightweight X11 Desktop Environment) is a free desktop environment with comparatively low resource requirements. This makes it especially suitable for use on older or resource-constrained personal computers such as netb ...

versions of

Lubuntu Lubuntu ( ) is a lightweight Linux distribution based on Ubuntu and uses the LXQt desktop environment in place of Ubuntu's GNOME desktop. Lubuntu was originally touted as being "lighter, less resource hungry and more energy-efficient", but now ...

(18.04 LTS and earlier),

Linux Mint Linux Mint is a community-driven Linux distribution based on Ubuntu (which is in turn based on Debian), bundled with a variety of free and open-source applications. It can provide full out-of-the-box multimedia support for those who choose to i ...

as well as

Puppy Linux Puppy Linux is an operating system and family of light-weight Linux distributions that focus on ease of use and minimal memory footprint. The entire system can be run from random-access memory (RAM) with current versions generally taking up abou ...

Features

mtPaint includes a range of features for creating drawings and editing photographs. These include: * Vertical and horizontal split views * Wide range of shortcut keys * 12 image clipboard * "undo" up to 1,000 times * Image zoom from 10% and 2000% * Languages: Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Taiwanese), Czech, Dutch, English (UK), French, Galician, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Brazilian), Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish *

Screenshot screenshot (also known as screen capture or screen grab) is a digital image that shows the contents of a computer display. A screenshot is created by the operating system or software running on the device powering the display. Additionally, s ...

support * 100 layers * 81 brush shapes * User defined gradients * scaling and resizing images * rotating, including arbitrary rotation angles * effects including inverting,

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. Graysca ...

, isometric transformations, edge detect, sharpen, unsharp mask, soften,

Gaussian blur In image processing, a Gaussian blur (also known as Gaussian smoothing) is the result of blurring an image by a Gaussian function (named after mathematician and scientist Carl Friedrich Gauss). It is a widely used effect in graphics software, ...

, emboss and bacteria

File formats

mtPaint supports BMP,

GIF The Graphics Interchange Format (GIF; or , see pronunciation) is a bitmap image format that was developed by a team at the online services provider CompuServe led by American computer scientist Steve Wilhite and released on 15 June 1987. ...

JPEG JPEG ( ) is a commonly used method of lossy compression for digital images, particularly for those images produced by digital photography. The degree of compression can be adjusted, allowing a selectable tradeoff between storage size and imag ...

, LSS, PNG, TGA,

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 processin ...

, XPM and

XBM In computer graphics, the X Window System used X BitMap (XBM), a plain text binary image format, for storing cursor and icon bitmaps used in the X GUI. The XBM format is superseded by XPM, which first appeared for X11 in 1989. Format XBM fil ...

formats for both loading and saving images.

Reception

mtPaint has been criticized for low

discoverability Discoverability is the degree to which something, especially a piece of content or information, can be found in a search of a file, database, or other information system. Discoverability is a concern in library and information science, many aspects ...

of features, by users and even by the lead developer, Dmitry Groshev, who noted that its features, "may look opaque to users who do not like to read docs; but not everything in image processing can be made self-explanatory, particularly if one tries to keep the program small. Those features which aren't obvious, have explanations in the handbook; time spent looking them up will be well rewarded by not wasting time on learning things by trial and error." Some users have written their own guides to make up for deficiencies in the official mtPaint Handbook. A 2015 review on

Softpedia Softpedia is a software and tech news website based in Romania. It indexes, reviews and hosts various downloadable software and reports news on technology and science topics. Website Softpedia hosts reviews written by its staff—each review in ...

noted that the mtPaint GTK interface looks "outdated", but concluded, "although it hasn't been updated for a while and the interface could use some work in the graphical department, mtPaint features some pretty advanced options to help you manipulate images." Reviewer Seth Kenlon praised mtPaint in 2017, writing, "what makes mtPaint great is that it specializes in pixel art, has a tiny footprint—the application is about 391k, compiled (assuming Gtk is installed separately)—and it is designed to run efficiently on specs as low as 200MHz CPU with 16MB of available RAM." Linux Experten noted, "due to its efficient design, it can run on older PC hardware (such as a 200mhz cpu and 32mb frame). It can edit indexed palette or 24 bit RGB images and offer basic painting and palette manipulation tools. It aims to be simple and easy to use." A review in ''Top Best Alternatives'' praised mtPaint's "efficient and simple interface". A 2017 review by Martins D. Okoi for FOSSMint noted the infrequent releases of mtPaint, but praised its small memory footprint and advanced features. A 2020 review in

Full Circle magazine ''Full Circle'' is a free distribution Portable Document Format magazine that was founded by Ronnie Tucker in April 2007. It is released on the last Friday of every month in PDF, EPUB ebook format and also on the Issuu electronic publishing pla ...

concluded, "mtPaint is a very mature application – with 15 years of development behind it. It is fast to use, and has enough features that many users will find it very useful for photo editing and making drawings."

References

External links