Did you know that, for the first time since Windows 95, Microsoft has actually changed Windows’ built-in Paint application in a useful way? It’s true. As with Office 2007, Paint in Windows 7 has been given a face lift courtesy of the new Ribbon interface. Will the new Paint replace Photoshop in the artist’s toolbox? Probably not. But it does have a lot of nice features that finally manage to make Paint less of a joke and more of a usable application.

The Paint Ribbon

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Like Office 2007, the new Windows 7 Paint includes the new user-friendly Ribbon Interface.

Love it or hate it, one of the Ribbon’s strengths is its ability to take buried functionality and make it accessible to users. Much of the “new” stuff in Windows 7 Paint has actually been built-in to the product for years, accessible only by obscure keystrokes. Now, it’s all out in the open for everyone and their grandmother to see. Let’s take a closer look.

Brushes

Windows 7 Paint brings with it a series of new brushes – old favorites like the standard brush and Spraypaint are still here, but they’re augmented by two calligraphy pens, oil and watercolor brushes, crayon, marker, and colored pencil. Most of these are quite distinct and add a nice subtlety to drawings that wasn’t possible in older versions, especially the ones that make use of transparency.

Shapes

In Paint of old, you could draw simple shapes like lines and rectangles, but nothing more complex. Windows 7 Paint brings fun and useful shapes into the equation – most of these seem to be aimed squarely at children, who will appreciate the hearts and lightning bolt shapes a little more than your average graphic designer. The Outline and Fill menus allow you to customize your shapes further, drawing the outline of the shape using one color and brush and filling it in with another color and brush.

Image manipulation

Just as before, you can select portions of an image using a square or free-form tool. Windows 7 Paint makes resizing, flipping, and cropping that image much easier than before. Just as before, it’s right there in the Ribbon. Select a potion and crop the rest of the image just by clicking the Crop button – that’s how easy it should have been all along, guys. The Resize dialogue box actually lets you resize a selection while maintaining its original aspect ratio – no more awkward, stretchy resizings! Lastly, the Rotate menu does just what it’s supposed to, no muss, no fuss.

For me, this is the most useful stuff in the new Paint – it’s great for quickly resizing and cropping images or screenshots for blog posts or for emailing to friends or co-workers, and I don’t have to download and install any extra image editing programs on top of a fresh operating system install.

The View tab

The real meat of Windows 7 Paint is all under the Home tab, but there’s another one up there too. The View tab has some nice tools for people doing detail work in Paint – this is where all of the Zoom tools are, as well as some Rulers and Gridlines for the times when you need things to be pixel-perfect. Gridlines were accessible in previous versions of Paint by zooming into an image and pressing Ctrl+G, but I think we can all agree that this is an easier way to do it.

And the Rest

Paint now saves in .PNG format by default instead of the lower-quality .JPG, which is a nice feature. Aliasing is also less of a problem than in previous versions of Paint – resizing images, in particular, looks much better than it did before.

Most of these features are self-explanatory, and that’s sort of the point – in Windows 7, Paint is a genuinely useful and easy-to-use application. The new features make it excellent for kids who want to doodle and professionals who need a quick and lightweight image editor, and the new interface makes everything easy to find. Long-time users of the Paint we’ve all known since Windows 95 will need a few minutes to orient themselves, but after that I think you’ll find that the new Paint is a vastly more usable program.