Microsoft Finally Added This Key Photoshop Feature to Paint

Once intended as little more than a procrastination tool in the vein of Solitaire and Minesweeper, Microsoft Paint is slowly but surely becoming useful for more than just sketching pixelated doodles. A new update is adding support for both layers and imagery with transparency: key features in Adobe's Photoshop software.

Although some artists have used Microsoft Paint to painstakingly create some truly impressive works of art, the app has always offered a fairly rudimentary toolset for making and editing images. Compared to image-editing juggernauts like Photoshop, Microsoft Paint is more akin to a digital box of crayons.

Microsoft wants to change that. Earlier this month, it released an update to Windows Insiders (the company's term for users who have signed up to get early access to new features), giving Microsoft Paint the ability to isolate objects in an image and remove the background with just a single click.

Taking that feature one step further, Microsoft revealed on Sept. 18 some additional Paint updates, with Photoshop-like layers being the highlight. MS Paint users can now "stack shapes, text, and other image elements on top of each other." This makes it easy to embellish and edit without potentially hurting the base image—any changes will live on a separate layer, as if you were adding a mustache to the "Mona Lisa" by drawing on transparent plastic placed over it.

Users can also change the stacking order of layers, hide or reveal various layers as they experiment, duplicate layers and even permanently merge several layers together once they're happy with the results. However, one of Photoshop's most useful layers features, being able to adjust the transparency of each layer, doesn't appear to be available in MS Paint just yet.

That's not too surprising, as this update also sees Paint just now dipping its toes into transparent images, finally gaining the ability to open and save transparent PNGs without deleting their transparency. It may take some time to make Paint understand transparency in layers.

Photoshop's position as the most popular image-editing tool on the market is safe for now, but Adobe might want to start looking over its shoulder, at least when it comes to quick and dirty edits.