I said “Yep, what a concept”
You might remember a few years back that Microsoft seemed to have no intention of continuing to support MS Paint, even planning to kill it off with Windows 10. And yet, it persisted all the way into Windows 11. It even got a redesign and even dark mode. But now, it is going Super Saiyajin 3 even further.
The Windows 11 version of MS Paint is getting what may be the most significant upgrade the program has gotten in decades. Straight from the horses mouth, Paint is not only getting a layers feature, but also the ability to handle transparency. Frankly, these are features no one would’ve ever expected Paint to be capable of (and previously the domain of far weightier editing programs like Photoshop), and yet here they are. Layers in particular is significant, as they allow users to work and move separate parts of an image, a feature Paint has lacked for quite some time.
Transparent PNGs are also a big deal. Before, Paint could save things as PNG, but all transparency would be lost. A problem, if your editor of choice wouldn’t read the filetype of a given image you needed, since Paint probably could read it and save it as a PNG. Now, you’ll be able to get those transparent images out of shit formats that nothing works with like WEBP, and much more.
As of right now, though, there’s no word on how far the Layers feature will go. Paint is designed and meant to be a fairly lightweight program (and that’s pretty much how I used it personally despite doing most actual work in GIMP), and most lightweight programs that do have layers don’t allow for too many. The screenshots Microsoft provided don’t show more than five, but that might not be the limit.
It’s also worth noting that this upgraded MS Paint is only for Windows 11 and, presumably, up. It won’t be backported to Windows 10, for reasons that should probably be obvious at this point. Also, these new changes aren’t going to be available to everybody just yet. They’re being rolled out in the Dev and Canary builds for Windows Insider testers first, probably to iron out any wrinkles. But to think the day will come…
Source: Ars Technica
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