Microsoft
The venerable, equally derided and beloved MS Paint app has been on a roll these days, selecting up a major redesign, dark-mode support, higher zoom controls, and different fit-and-finish updates all inside the final couple of years. However at the moment Microsoft introduced that it’s lastly including two features that would make the app a bit extra helpful for energy customers: help for Photoshop-esque picture layers and the power to open and save clear PNGs.
If you happen to’ve by no means labored in a picture editor aside from Paint, layers provide the alternative to resolve which parts in a picture seem above and under different parts. 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 help for layers, including new parts to a picture like that is all the time 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 parts in a picture, since all the weather you used to make the picture are nonetheless totally intact.
Help for creating, enhancing, and saving clear PNG photos goes hand in hand with help for layers, because it’s helpful to have the ability to pull a single object out of an present picture so you may put it in a brand new one. Clear PNG help goes nicely with the automated background removal 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, however it might be extra. It is also 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 have requested Microsoft each of those questions and can replace if we get any new information.
The redesigned Paint is rolling out to Home windows Insider testers in each the Dev and Canary channels, the 2 bleeding-edge and less-stable variations of Home windows 11. Like different latest app updates, this seems to require Home windows 11 and will not be backported to Home windows 10.
