Microsoft
The venerable, equally derided and beloved MS Paint app has been on a roll currently, choosing up a significant redesign, dark-mode support, higher zoom controls, and different fit-and-finish updates all inside the final couple of years. But immediately Microsoft introduced that it’s lastly including two options that might make the app a bit extra helpful for energy customers: support for Photoshop-esque picture layers and the power to open and save clear PNGs.
If you’ve got by no means labored in a picture editor aside from Paint, layers provide the alternative to resolve which components in a picture seem above and under different components. Say you are engaged on a picture with a blue sky background, an airplane on high of it, and a cloud on high of the sky and the airplane. In a picture program with out support for layers, including new components to a picture like that is at all times harmful—you lose the power to see and edit the a part of the sky that’s coated by the aircraft and the cloud, and the a part of the aircraft that’s coated by the cloud. Layers additionally make it simpler to reposition components in a picture, since all the weather you used to make the picture are nonetheless absolutely intact.
Support for creating, enhancing, and saving clear PNG photos goes hand in hand with support for layers, because it’s helpful to have the ability to pull a single object out of an current picture so you may put it in a brand new one. Transparent PNG support goes properly with the automated background elimination button that Microsoft added to Paint builds earlier this month.
Low-end picture applications typically have some sort of restrict to the variety of layers you should utilize in a single picture. Screenshots present as many as 5 separate layers, nevertheless it might be extra. It’s additionally not clear what file format Paint makes use of to avoid wasting works-in-progress with editable layers intact—the Paint equal of a .PSD file, in different phrases. We’ve requested Microsoft each of those questions and will replace if we get any new data.
The redesigned Paint is rolling out to Windows Insider testers in each the Dev and Canary channels, the 2 bleeding-edge and less-stable variations of Windows 11. Like different latest app updates, this seems to require Windows 11 and will not be backported to Windows 10.