Microsoft’s newest Paint replace makes me wish to ditch Photoshop fully

Microsoft has introduced a serious new replace to its default Paint app for Windows 11. Along with a brand new opacity slider, which grants quick access to Pencil and Brush stroke transparency ranges, the corporate is lastly introducing a devoted .paint venture file format into the combination.

Just like different portray functions with their very own bespoke file codecs, .paint unlocks the much-appreciated capability to save lots of a canvas in venture kind, making it simple to hop again in and decide up the place you left off in your photograph enhancing or inking journey at a later date.

“When you’re prepared to save lots of your paintings, go to the File menu and choose Save as venture. The File Explorer will open, permitting you to decide on a location and save your work as a .paint file. If you’re able to return, merely open the file to launch it in Paint, proper the place you left off,” writes Dave Grochocki, Microsoft Principal Group Product Supervisor, in a Windows Insider Blog post.

These new Paint updates are rolling out now within the Home windows Insider Program Canary and Dev channels, the place they’re going to be obtainable for early testing. A secure launch to the general public is predicted within the coming weeks, although Microsoft hasn’t dedicated to a particular timeline as of but.

Microsoft’s Paint app has a storied previous

Paint went from abandonware to state-of-the-art seemingly in a single day

Within the Home windows 11 period, Microsoft has doubled down on supporting its suite of in-box functions that ship with its flagship PC working system. Classics like Notepad and Snipping Software have obtained their fair proportion of updates in recent times, however it’s the glow-up of Paint that I discover to be probably the most fascinating.

Paint has been round for so long as Microsoft Windows has existed, first serving as a tech demo for digital artwork creation by way of mouse and cursor. The app obtained a gentle circulation of updates up till Home windows 8 in 2012, the place it was unceremoniously dropped like a sack of potatoes.

Microsoft first experimented with a modernized portray expertise within the type of a brand new app referred to as Fresh Paint, which remains to be obtainable on the corporate’s Home windows 11 storefront to this present day. Then, a number of years later, it launched Paint 3D — yet another new painting app, however with an emphasis on three-dimensional artwork creation (this was at a time when Home windows Blended Actuality was high of thoughts at Microsoft).

Within the wake of Paint 3D, Microsoft introduced plans to deprecate the unique Paint app in 2017, prompting a lot backlash from the tech neighborhood and past. The company eventually reversed course, declaring Paint a everlasting fixture of the Home windows expertise, and, in an ironic accident, Paint 3D itself was in the end canned late last year.

Microsoft Paint is lastly nice

Paint has formally put Adobe Photoshop on discover

Microsoft / Pocket-lint

Roughly coinciding with the discharge of Home windows 11 in 2021, Microsoft gave basic Paint a large redesign, with modernized consumer interface components, Fluent design language ideas, and full help for darkish mode.

Within the years since, Paint has obtained a ton of recent capabilities, together with long-requested options like help for transparency and the PNG file sort, configurable layers, an object selector device, smoother zooming, a extra outstanding thickness slider, and a background elimination operate.

Paint has additionally benefited vastly in right now’s Copilot+ PC era, with generative AI-powered features like Picture Creator, sticker era, and extra being launched in current months.

With the brand new additions of a devoted .paint file sort and a devoted opacity slider, I reckon Paint is now greater than enough for the overwhelming majority of informal photograph enhancing workflows. In actual fact, if I have been rivaling Photoshop, I would begin to get a bit nervous. Adobe’s Artistic Cloud subscription is not low cost, and whereas it is nonetheless a extra highly effective suite than Paint, it additionally introduces an undesirable quantity of bloat and heaviness into the combination.

As a free, standalone roster graphics editor, Paint is now a succesful (and visually pleasing) possibility that seamlessly integrates into the Windows 11 expertise. In 2025, Paint is lastly a robust sufficient piece of software program for general-purpose picture enhancing — it is exhausting to consider that just some quick years in the past, the long-lasting app was getting ready to discontinuation.