Тайните възможности на MS Paint

The secret features of MS Paint

Since I already showed you how to run the Windows XP version of MS Paint under Windows 7/8, it’s time for me to release the following article, which lists the hidden features of MS Paint. The article is largely copied from the article „MS Paint Tricks“ written by a guy named Messenjah and I’ve also included 3 additional tricks to the list, for a total of 13 secret features of MS Paint for you to read about.

When you need a free, powerful image editing/creation software, people often turn to Paint.NET, Krita, Pinta, KolourPaint, MyPaint, The GIMP or any of the other graphics editors. But who knew that Microsoft Paint was so powerful and sophisticated?

The evolution of the MS Paint logo. From left to right: Win1, Win3, Win95, Win98, WinXP, Vista, Win7.

MS Paint is actually a very powerful graphics editor. Here are the things about MS Paint that you probably don’t know about.

1. Brush scaling

This is pretty much the most basic thing here. You may think that the standard brush sizes in MSPaint only come in the three sizes, right? Wrong.

Open up a new document in paint, select the paintbrush tool, (hold Ctrl and) press the + button on the numpad. The brush size will grow as big as you need! Amazing, huh? By (holding Ctrl and) pressing - (from the NumPad) the brush size will decrease.

This technique also works with the line tool, the spraypaint tool, and the eraser tool.

2. Custom brushes

This is the one that NOBODY knows – You can make your own custom brushes in paint! Select the pencil tool and draw yourself a small textured brush in X color.

Here’s what I did:

Now, select that little image, turn transparency on, hold Shift, and drag it around!

Cool, huh? You can draw ANYTHING and do this. Here’s another one I did.

This is also known as „trail mode“.

3. The ‘Stamp’ tool

This is something I improvised. It’s the ‘Stamp’ tool.

So, I have this image of an old lady:

And I want to put these leaves in her hair.

Now, I could copy and paste all day, but there is an easy way around this.

Select the leaf, turn transparency on, and drag the leaf to wherever you want it.

Whenever it’s there, while it’s still selected, hold Shift, click once, release Shift, and drag the image away.

:O! It stamped! Repeat as necessary (I rotated too.)

This also works with a pressed Ctrl and without a release of Ctrl.

4. Image scaling

So say you scanned something and the image is WAY too big and you want it smaller. How do you go about that?

Well, open up paint and paste your image in. I didn’t have anything massive to scan so I used this picture of a Dr Pepper.

Now, say you want it smaller. You probably try to highlight it and scale it, right? It ends up looking compressed and improportioned.

Well, there’s an easier way. All it takes is a single keystroke!

Ctrl + + (the Plus from the Numpad) to make it larger or Ctrl + - (the Minus from the Numpad) to make it smaller.

This is especially useful for scaling sprites, as it keeps their pixels proportional.

5. Color replacement

Say you have drawn something with an absolutely crazy pixel border, and all of a sudden you don’t like the border color.

Like this box I drew.

Now, I want to re-color the border yellow but I have absolutely 0 time and 0 energy. What do I do?

I use the COLOR REPLACEMENT FUNCTION!

Select the eraser tool.

In the primary color box, select the color that you don’t like that you want to erase (select the Pick color tool and click with the left mouse button on the desired color). In the secondary color box, select the color you want to replace said exiled color with (select the Pick color tool and click with the right mouse button on the desired color).

Then hold right click and sweep with the Eraser tool over the ugly color.

If your drawing is large, scale the eraser brush as needed.

Ta-da!

6. The grid

Say that you’re trying to edit a piece of pixel art that you drew, and, even though you’re zoomed in all the way, you’re having trouble fine tuning — you’re having trouble positioning the crusor where you want.

This is where the grid comes in.

MSPaint comes with a built-in grid feature, accessable by hotkeys.

To view the grid, simply zoom in to either 6x or 8x, and hit Ctrl + G or select View -> Zoom -> Show grid.

7. The hidden 10x zoom

In the WinXP version of Paint, there is a hidden 1000% (10x) zoom. It is achieved by clicking the area just underneath the 8x zoom. Of course, the Win7 version has more sophisticated zooming.

Clicking in the area highlighted in red will activate the hidden 10x zoom mode.

The zoom slider in the Win7 version of MS Paint

8. Quick undo

Another feature of paint that is more commonly known about is the ‘quick undo’ feature.
However, it is a shame that WinXP version MS Paint supports only 3 levels of Undo unlike the infinite unod of the GIMP, Paint.NET and other programs. According to information I found on the Internet, the Win7 version of MS Paint, however, supports 50 levels of undo.

It doesn’t really have that much use, and, more often than not, is accidentally toggled by the user. This ends up in frustration.

So let’s say that you’re drawing a smiley face, and you get the eyes down good.

So then you move onto the mouth, you start drawing, and it’s going good.

But just then, suddenly, you launch into an epileptic seizure.

Your body flails around wildly, and, unfortunately, your hand is not an exception to the flailing.

That seizure just done gone and [messed] up your artwork!

But, for whatever reason, your finger is still pressed down on the mouse.

This means that you will be saved the effort of having to reach ALL THE WAY UP to Edit -> Undo.

Quite simply, if you mess up, and your mouse is still pressed, you can hit the opposite mouse button to undo what you have drawn so far.

In our case, a simple right click will revert our smiley back to his no-mouth state.

This feature may not appear to be useful at first, but if you’re drawing small lines and squiggles such as fur or something, this tool is a godsend and may save you some medical bills for repetitive strain injury for hitting Ctrl + Z so much.

9. Pseudo-3D drawing

Another feature, that was brought to my attention by Hazard Rush Studios is one that is nameless in nature and appears to be completely useless, and may possibly have no practical function at all.

It does however require a scroll wheel.

Select the paintbrush tool or the pencil tool and start drawing something. I chose to draw a chicken.

Mid-line, scroll your scroll wheel. Look what happens!

Your line displaced itself, and then reverted back to its original co-ordinates.

I’m not sure about you, but this feature appears to be pretty useless…

… Unless you want to draw an extruded 3D chicken.

10. Black-and-white mode

Paint also has a black-and-white mode (true black-and-white, not greyscale) in the WinXP (Image -> Attributes -> Colors: Black and white) version that is surprisingly still present in the Win7 version (File -> Properties -> Color: Black and white)). It can also be easily accessed using Ctrl + E. When enabled, the current image will lose its colour information and the palette will change accordingly.

The black-and-white palette of MS Paint.

11. Tertiary color

One of the other hidden features of MS Paint is the ability to choose a tertiary colour. Everyone knows that you can left-click to select the foreground colour, and many people know that a right-click selects the background colour, but not too many people know that Ctrl + left click allows one to select a tertiary colour. While painting, the tertiary colour can be accessed by holding Ctrl.

The colour wells before and after choosing green as the tertiary colour.

12. Miscellaneous other hidden features

The user may also draw straight horizontal, vertical, or diagonal lines with the pencil tool, without the need of the straight line tool, by holding the Shift key and dragging the tool.

Users can also draw perfect shapes (which have width equal to height) using any shape tool (shape tools: Rectangle tool, Polygon tool, Ellipse tool, Rounded rectangle tool) by holding down the Shift key while dragging.

To crop whitespace or eliminate parts of a graphic, the blue handle in the lower right corner can be clicked and dragged to increase canvas size or crop a graphic.

13. „Indexed palette Shifting“ by means of copy+pasting over a 256-color BMP image

I learned this trick from the other users of the official Pekka Kana 2 subforum of the Piste Gamez forum.
I call it „PK2-related 8-bit BMP copy-pasting into an indexed BMP palette for „indexed palette shifting““.

The image that I want to change to Pekka Kana 2’s color palette is the following:

I’ll paste it in MS Paint (WinXP version) over this indexed-color BMP image from Pekka Kana 2:

The result is the following image that can successfully be used in a Pekka Kana 2 map/episode:

And that’s pretty much all I have to teach. Happy MSPainting!

I’d love to see any artwork you do in MS Paint, or hear any comments or suggestions — Messenjah’s Profile Page.

Also feel free to leave a comment after the article. 🙂

Sources/References:
1. http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/tutorial/mspaint
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Paint#Overall
3. http://tpenguinltg.wordpress.com/2013/04/30/ms-paint-tricks-that-you-probably-didnt-know-you-could-do/
4. http://www.labnol.org/software/ms-paint-tips/9305/
5. http://icecold-function.blogspot.com/2011/03/unlock-secrets-of-ms-paint.html
6. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYBT5m75OtY
7. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZnYoTQbSIAg

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