Microsoft Announces Paint 3D, the Biggest Update Ever To the Classic App

Microsoft is releasing a revamped and modernized Paint app for Windows 10 that let people draw and convert things in 3D. The company announced the app at its keynote today where it stressed the future of making things in 3D. The Verge adds:Users can take photos and easy turn portions of the photo into 3D objects. Along with the app, users can also share work in a new community online that comes with a focus on Minecraft. People can directly export from the game and 3D print whatever they make. The new version of the Paint app was put online earlier this month and available for anyone to download. The app is a Universal Windows app that comes with pen and touch-friendly features, as well as support for 3D objects. The new app stays true to the original Paint app in that it's a basic editing and creating app but with some added 3D effects.

About time!

[hcs_$reboot]

The first version is from 1985... so for 30 years MS paint has been this nauseously crappy application. About time!

Re:About time!

[Penguinisto]

Actually, Microsoft did try to take a stab at Photoshop back in 1998-1999 or so, using (IIRC) the same name - "Paint 3D". They included an application CDs in their TechNet subscription packages for awhile; it stopped showing up in 2000-ish.

The interface blew goats, it was slow and occasionally quite buggy (at least on NT 4), but it did have some ideas in it worth exploring; I think it most likely died a quiet death due to the monopoly lawsuit...

Re:

[AnAirMagic]

They also bought ImageComposer, which was a really powerful piece of image editing software with a (deceptively simple) UI that made it look like paint.

Re: About time!

[Anonymous Coward]

Crappy maybe. Useful for dick pics. I love this app, I use to trace pictures of cars downloaded from AOL and change the colors on them.

Not really new, folks...

[Penguinisto]

Microsoft could have saved themselves some coding time by going into Corel's Graveyard and buying the source for Canoma [wikipedia.org] (originally made by the same folks who made Poser and Bryce, so the codebase is more than a little yucky and tangled, but still...)

Re:

[xxxJonBoyxxx]

I thought Corel picked up Paint Shop Pro too. (I still installed/used PSP v6.2 on most of my personal machines until Paint.NET came along - that one copy I bought in the early 2000's has been a great value!)

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[Penguinisto]

They did (they picked up a *lot* of stuff...) I did find out they sold Canoma to Adobe sometime in the past decade, though. Learn something new every day.

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[Quirkz]

Ah, man, I miss Bryce. I played with that program for endless hours in college, and made what at the time seemed like amazing images of things I couldn't have ever drawn on my own.

Actually, I've still got some of that stuff online:
http://quirkz.com/art.php [quirkz.com]

It's dated now, but in '97 it seemed relatively impressive.

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[nmb3000]

Nice. I spent many hours messing around with POV-Ray [wikipedia.org] on my old 400 Mhz Pentium II (and many more hours waiting for scenes to render...). Sadly I lost everything from that period when the drive crashed.

It's fun to look at mid-90's computer generated images and see how much has changed. I went through a folder of old Digital Blaspheme wallpapers (remember those?) a while back and they just look so quaint now.

can't spell Paint without pain

[Thud457]

kudos to Microsoft for forging ahead into the brave new world of crappy homemade VR!

3d print from minecraft!

[Anonymous Coward]

the dot matrix printing of the 21st century.

And why are they doing that after all this time..?

[evolutionary]

MS is funny. That application has been so outdated compared to half a dozen open source apps or even relatively simple javascript apps, it was embarrassing. I went to GIMP/GIMPshop awhile back. If they had done this 10 years ago, I might have been impressed. Now, I'll stick to my GIMP or perhaps Blender if I want serious 3D "painting". (A 7 year old taught himself to use this program a couple years ago, he'll never go to MS Paint again. LOL)

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[NotAPK]

Don't think for one second that Microsoft gives two shits about developers and their software.

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[NotAPK]

Paint.NET is to Paint as Notepad++ is to Notepad.

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[LinuxIsGarbage]

And GIMP is to Paint, as Edlin is to Notepad.

Re:

[gfxguy]

Me, too. If I have to do a lot of work on images, or anything remotely complicated, I install something else, but when I need to take a screenshot and crop it, I can be done in paint before GIMP finishes loading. OK, not quite, but yes, for something like that it's simple and fast.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't help but wonder if they didn't feel like messing with Adobe's lawyers. It was bad enough when the whole Netscape/IE thing got them in trouble. So if they went through all the trouble of making something close to Photoshop in terms of capability, they'd just be spending a lot of money to lure a market that's dominated by Mac weenies, and then Adobe sues them. Classic case of a big company not being able to innovate for various reasons. The authors of GIMP aren't worth suing, and small shops can't

Fix your 2D first, MS.

[Tablizer]

GIMP is overkill for simple stuff: takes too long to load, its menus are too big/deep, and its defaults are set for giant images, not regular. (GIMP's defaults suck for lots of things, now that I think of it.)

For quicky web prep, often I need basic things like contrast, darken/lighten (alpha), tint, overall blur/sharpen, and spot blur/sharpen. If MS-Paint added those to its existing features, I'd need GIMP less than 5% of the time.

Re:

[Tablizer]

I tried to install Paint.net a few years ago and it locked up File Explorer. I had to uninstall it to get FS back to normal.

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[gfxguy]

Ok, but what do you think this new paint will be like when they add all the features? It'll have big/deep menus and a lot of UI clutter in order to squeeze all the controls in, and it'll take just as long to load as GIMP does. I use paint when I need to do something like take a screenshot and crop it; it's simple and easy. I'm not nay-saying this new paint 3d program, but I imagine it'll be as complex as GIMP. Still not difficult to paste and crop an image, but just as long to load and do what I want as

Would prefer a seperate app

[ninthbit]

Give paint all the crap you want, but for the most basic and quick stuff, it got the job done. I would have preferred them do the notepad/wordpad thing and had the "advanced" version be a separate app. Knowing the them, the bloated version will take forever to load as it pulls in 3d libraries and a horde of other garbage inheritance/dependencies.

Re:

[Penguinisto]

Ugh. No, no it does not.

Okay, that's probably the artist in me talking, but seriously - outside of some really non-professional home stuff (or the occasional semi-dank meme that makes fun of childish actions), MS Paint falls way, way, way short for illustration. No, really... I'd rather masturbate with a handful of glass shards than use MS Paint for *anything* work-related... and no, I'm not a professional artist.

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[Korbeau]

> outside of some really non-professional home stuff

Who do you think Paint target audience is?

I think paint is quite effective for most Windows "household tasks" (converting images, cropping, resizing, writing annotations, combining, saving screenshots etc.)

I've used GIMP and Photoshop enough to know my way around but I've never been an expert. And opening GIMP for most of the tasks listed above is just troublesome (very long load time, bloated UI).

> MS Paint falls way, way, way short for illustratio

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[NotAPK]

"Who do you think Paint target audience is?"

I think you're over thinking it.

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[SirSlud]

That's literally the point. To go from screen-cap + crop + text -> image with no asthetic requirements, mspaint is great

It's useful for extremely simple stuff. I work with professional (video game) artists, and they use it all the time for quick and dirty internal screen cap, joke, or congrats type emails, etc.

It's frequently the right tool for the right job.

Re:

[gfxguy]

Agree with the others - nobody suggested using paint for illustration. I work in television graphics and have to do stuff like grab a screen shot, crop it, and send it to clients. Running photoshop or GIMP for that is like running Visual Studio or eclipse to write a 3 line batch file.

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[MountainLogic]

Just hope I can still get "genuine" MS paint and not have to live with the bloat ware

Nadella knows!

[Gravis Zero]

I'm glad Microsoft finally put someone in charge that knows what people really want. Do people want proper patch testing, privacy or improved security? NO! People want a better version of MSPaint! Let's hear it for Nadella! ;)

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[bfpierce]

Yeah I mean, there's only one team of engineers working for Microsoft.

They're struggling so much staffing they often times pull the guys/gals working on their backend security over to work on paint.

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[Bob the Super Hamste]

They're struggling so much staffing they often times pull the guys/gals working on their backend security over to work on paint.

I think you have that backwards that should read:

They're struggling so much staffing they often times pull the guys/gals working on paint over to work on their backend security.

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[decipher_saint]

MS Paint is perfect as is, just some people know how to use it better than others https://youtu.be/v2g5qbvb7F4 [youtu.be] :-)

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[Penguinisto]

Makes me just want to run out and restore a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air with nothing more than a Philips screwdriver, three rolls of duct tape, and a wad of used chewing gum... :/

(Okay, props to the dude and all, but damn.)

Re:

[MountainLogic]

Never worked on a '57 Chevy, but I suspect you may need to downgrade your tool chain to a flat blade.

That's great

[DrXym]

Now how about updating notepad, fax & scan, regedit, msconfig, et al. Some of these tools which are still necessary in Windows are positively arcane and have barely changed in years. Notepad in particular is so antiquated it can't even convert line endings. Tools like fax & scan is riddled with usability issues.

But hey we have some crappy 3d painting functionality in MS Paint! Hooray?

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[The Conductor]

Heh, even the "edit" command in later versions of MS-DOS could handle line endings correctly when Notepad could not. (It was a pain to navigate the Windows directory structure in an 80-column screen though.) Notepad was so bad, I would sometimes have to open a DOS box just to use its editor. I am sure there is a joke about the "edlin" command here, but that's not funny!

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[mccalli]

That's not what's meant - we're talking CRLF vs just CR, not all the rich text stuff.

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[NotAPK]

Notepad's primary technical failure is that it uses a very simple memory buffer of the file contents. This is why it's dog slow to load a large file. Other editors only load the parts of the file being looked at, which reduces memory use and gives the impression that the file has been loaded much faster.

Re:

[gfxguy]

I think that's still the point people are making - you don't write a 10k line novel in notepad, you cut and paste things to lose the formatting, or you write 10 line batch files. It's great to have something so simple sometimes.

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[NotAPK]

Sure, but if all I want to do is read the first few bytes of a 1GB file then Notepad chokes, while other file viewers manage this without issue.

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[DrXym]

Notepad is greatest for nothing whatsoever. It is a crap editor by any reasonable definition. Given how many files such as readmes, config files that have Unix line endings, it would be nice if Microsoft lifted a finger and made the trivial changes necessary to open and save these files properly. Other things that would be useful would be in/outdenting selected text, UTF-8/UTF-16 conversion, some config settings to control indentation tab / space behaviour, being able to "save as" a file without it tacking

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[iampiti]

Does Regedit really need an update? Why? Please don't tell me it need a "modern" UI

Re:

[DrXym]

Off the top of my head, here are some ways it could be improved:

Why can't it grey out the options I don't have permission to modify or at least show an icon in a column which indicates read-only?

In sections such as HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT why can't I click on a file extension and have a summary of what process opens that file, what shell extensions are associated with it and so on. Why can't I click on an interface IID and see what DLL or EXE hosts it and also what objects interfaces are by the same binary. W

Re:

[DrXym]

So are you complaining that Notepad is too Unix-like philosophy, or are you complaining that it hasn't kept up with the times? Maybe adding ribbons, making the UI more like Chrome, or throwing some JavaScript on it to host it on the cloud would be better? As I recall, those UI changes were very lauded by Slashdot.

I'm complaining it is not fit for purpose in any sense. It can't even open some random README that comes with a product because it might have Unix style line endings. It would be a relatively trivial option to detect the line ending style when opening a file and correctly render and save back to it. It doesn't even do that.

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[Zontar The Mindless]

Silverlight stomped Flash

In the same universe where Spock has a beard, maybe.

MS Paint XP

[Topwiz]

I have been using MS Paint XP on Windows 10 and it works great. http://www.mspaintxp.com/ [mspaintxp.com]

Useless

[SeriousTube]

Great. They add in some 3d stuff but you can't even do basic things like make a selection.

Why do this?

[Beezlebub33]

Ugh. Is it as good as Paint.net? If I want to do real work, I use Gimp or Photoshop. If its minor / quick, I use paint.net. That's been my go-to for years. I really, really don't think that they should be doing a 3D app until they get 2D right. Looking at the demo video, this latest iteration reminds me of TuxPaint!

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[argStyopa]

http://www.warrenpaint.com/ind... [warrenpaint.com] (ie what you get if you enter paint.net) is going to get slashdotted.

Re:

[argStyopa]

To be clear, the correct url is http://www.getpaint.net/index.... [getpaint.net]

MacOS Preview

[backslashdot]

MacOS has a much better program than Paint 3D for doing this type of stuff. It's called Preview. .. ....

OK fine. I lied. Preview sucks you can't even draw properly in it. Why the F doesn't MacOS come with a Paint program??

Re:

[Penguinisto]

Most likely because, traditionally, Macs are used by graphic artist types who already have near-literal arsenals of graphics/CG applications. Even though I only do grpahics/art for fun, my own Mac has GIMP, DAZ Studio, Maya, Carrara, Modo, Poser, and a zillion smaller applications that support all of those (Iray, Reality, LuxRender, UV Mapping utilities, various image/video viewers, etc). Pretty certain that the pros have way more stuff installed, and they installed them the same day they unboxed the comput

Pokey in 3D

[vittal]

Awesome - I await POKEY THE PENGUIN in 3D!

Years ago 3d from photos

[future assassin]

when I bought this book https://www.amazon.com/Teach-Y... [amazon.com] I believe the cd contains a program that could turn part of a photo like a building into a 3d object.

Most important of all

[iampiti]

Does it have an UI fit for a desktop PC used with mouse and keyboard? Or is this one of this newfangled mobile-like apps that forces a horrid touch UI on desktop users?

It's no TiltBrush

[SolemnLord]

Microsoft was pushing AR/VR today, and while Paint 3D is going to be a quick-and-dirty toy in the same way MS Paint is, I'm wondering if it'll have actual VR, TiltBrush-style functionality. When I had a chance to demo a Vive, TiltBrush was one of the apps I tried, and it immediately became a killer app.

Which is something MS is going to need if they want to sell those 300$ headsets.