Windows 7 MS / Windows 7 Paint Review

If you’re someone who happily creates pixel art with Paint on Windows XP or Windows Vista, you’ll probably hate the new Paint in Windows 7.

While the new Paint has some new features and uses the new Ribbon User Interface that Microsoft is using across all of its Windows and Office products, they have also removed a lot of cherished features.

In this article, I will go through some of the features that have been removed and others that have been added. After using the older version of Paint and the new version, I can see Paint novices can see how well the new version works, but veterans will be quite disappointed.

I will also write about how you can get the old version of Paint and use it in Windows 7 and above. If you just want to do it, skip it Install Old Version of Paint in Windows 7/8/10 part.

First, let’s see the GUI interface differences. As you can tell from the images below, Windows 7’s Paint interface is completely different from XP and Vista’s Paint versions.

What’s good in Windows 7 Paint?

Unfortunately, there aren’t many aspects of the new Paint that are better than the older versions, but here’s what I can come up with.

Windows 7 Paint has a cleaner and more modern interface

In terms of GUI, the new version of Paint definitely looks better. That doesn’t necessarily mean it’s easier to find the tools or options you want, but the interface is clean and modern.

I’ve been using newer versions of Office for the past few years and am used to the ribbon interface, so it’s not a big deal to see buttons instead of menus.

Also, Windows 8 and Windows 10 use the same ribbon interface on the OS, so everything goes that way.

Thankfully, you can still use CTRL and + to increase the line thickness size when using different drawing tools.

In the drop-down list, there are only four sizes to choose from, which is pretty useless, so it’s still essential to be able to adjust the thickness to any size using the hotkey.

Another positive is that you can still paste an object and use transparency to remove the white parts to reveal what’s underneath. I thought they got rid of the transparency feature, but it’s just hidden under Select knot.

The only other positive I can think of is the inclusion of some other brushes and shapes. Paint has always been a very simple tool, so there aren’t many tabs, buttons or options to get started.

What’s bad in Windows 7 Paint?

A lot of things in my opinion! Most of these complaints are minor, but they all make for a very frustrating experience for veteran Paint users.

Hãy bắt đầu với một trong những vấn đề lớn nhất của tôi: khử răng cưa tự động trên mọi thứ.

Some people will love this feature, but a lot of people will hate it. For the average user, anti-aliasing makes everything look smooth and nice, but if you’re a graphic artist, you might not necessarily want everything smoothed automatically. An option should be added to enable or disable.

Khó chịu thứ hai: Vẽ tự động chọn bất kỳ dòng hoặc đối tượng nào sau khi bạn vẽ nó

In older versions of Paint, you could start drawing a line and then continue drawing another line as soon as you release the mouse button. This makes point-to-point drawing easy using Paint.

Now whenever you draw a line it will select that line and you cannot continue drawing from that point. This is really annoying and makes drawing in Paint a lot more difficult.

Vấn đề thứ ba: vẽ màu đặc bằng cọ không hoạt động với thùng sơn

I mean when you draw solid colors using a brush and then try to fill it with a different color, the new Paint leaves a border around the brush stroke.

In Windows XP and Vista Paint, this is not a problem. You can just fill the brush stroke with a different color and it will fill the entire stroke without sketching. Again, small change, but makes a big difference for some types of designers.

There is a way around this and that is by using the Pencil tool, drawing lines and then using the paint bucket. When using a pencil, there is no black border.

Sai lầm thứ tư: loại bỏ các pixel pixel rắn

If you’ve done a lot of pixelation by editing pixels in Paint, the older version allows you to actually edit at the pixel level using pixel brushes. You now have all the newer brushes like airbrush, crayons, etc, which is great, but the older ones shouldn’t be deleted.

There are other problems, but I won’t waste too much time on that. Some things are really hard to find, whereas that was evident in previous versions.

For example, inverting the colors in the old version was easy: just click on the menu or use the hotkey. In the new version you have to right click on the object and then you will see the option. Not a big deal, but it takes a while to get used to if you’re coming from an older version.

Install Old Version of Paint in Windows 7/8/10

If you can live with the new version of Paint, then congratulations. If not, it might be worth reverting to an older version.

Luckily, there’s an easy way to get older Paint in Windows 7 and later. Actually, there are two ways: download a program or manually replace Paint in Windows 7. The first method is easier and less risky.

Paint XP is the standard old MS Paint that you can run on Windows 7 and Windows 10.

When you run the EXE file, make sure to click Custom settings then uncheck the additional junk software it wants to install. As long as you do that, you’ll only get the Paint program and nothing else.

The second method is more technical, but thankfully someone has written a detailed guide. Hopefully, one of those two methods works for you. If you have any questions, please post a comment. Enjoy!