Microsoft Paint Gains A New Powerful Feature From Photoshop: Layers

Microsoft Paint Gains A New Powerful Feature From Photoshop: Layers

The venerable Microsoft Paint, which gets a visual upgrade in Windows 11, is soon getting a new feature that should prove its worth: Layers. Most people understands the concept of layers in image editing software such as Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator – in fact, it’s one of the most common elements of any advanced editing and creation software.

“You can now add, remove, and manage layers on the canvas to create richer and more complex digital art. With layers, you can stack shapes, text, and other image elements on top of each other,” Microsoft wrote in the company’s blog. The new feature will occupy right side of the window, and a simple drag-and-drop will rearrange layers as specified in the order. It’s more than just that: the app will also support merging, duplicate and hide layers, which should give novice editors a good amount of flexibility.

The app also gains support for transparency with PNG files – at long last. This will present itself as a checkerbox pattern in the editor window – much like all editing apps – indicating it is a transparent region. That also meant the Erase feature will now reverts the region back to transparent state instead of white color background in the old versions of the app (it’s also layer-aware, meaning it erases only the layer selected and preserves the ones under).

This, coupled with the background removal feature that Microsoft is currently previewing in Beta channel, should significantly power up Paint’s capabilities as an image/vector editor for people who don’t necessarily have the skillset or access to professional tools such as Adobe’s editing software or open-source alternatives (such as GIMP).

It’s worth noting the layers feature is currently testing under Windows Insider Canary and Dev Channel – so it’ll be a while before the feature makes its way into all Windows 11 systems.

Pokdepinion: Nice to see the basic tools in Windows gets modern-day feature upgrades.