I've used the little Paint program that comes bundled with Windows a time or two, mostly just for some quick doodling. There have been a few improvements over the years but nothing stupendous. Earlier this week my husband saw me working on some graphics in a couple of programs (the free and excellent PhotoScape and the starter version (free) of ArtRage) and he mentioned that in Windows 7, the Paint program is much improved. Opened it up a little bit later, and Wow! It sure is...
Paint in Windows 7
No, it's no Photoshop. It's not even on a par with the better free image creation and editing software out there. But it is much better than ever before with a lot of nice features. Some of the first features I noticed were the menu/toolbar improvements, more brushes, more shapes, and better crop, resize, and rotate tools. You can save in several formats, with PNG as the default. If your paint needs are basic but previous versions of Paint were just too basic, you may find that the new Paint really is all you need. And since it comes with Windows, it's essentially a freebie that you don't have to download and install.
- Windows 7 First Look: MS Paint - Online Tech Tips has screenshots and a rundown of the improvements.
- Paint - Microsoft tells us that the new Paint is also touch-ready, so if you have a touchscreen PC you can do a little finger-painting with Paint.
- Microsoft Paint Screenshots in Windows 7 - ijustrealized.com details more of the improvements.
Update. Here are some tutorials I've created using Windows 7 Paint.
I use paint all hte time for quick graphics or sketches for ideas. Just for me though and not to use in actual work. I’m not using widnows 7 yet though.
Thankyou for the informative article! I had electronically sketched a whole bunch of illustrations on MS paint and want to now self publish a book with those sketches. The uploaded sketches still have jagged lines instead of smooth ones and thats how they will be printed..and I wanted to correct that myself since I cant afford the cheapest service package offered by the online self- publishing company at 600 dollars.
How can I convert the sketches to high resolution ones?
informative article.