6 Alternatives to MS Paint

Ever since the news about Paint to be removed by Microsoft came out, everybody went ballistic. Even I did too, but shortly after, Microsoft has announced that they will not be removing Paint and it will be available for download at the Windows Store.

If you’re one of those few people who want to try other photo editing softwares aside from the classic and beloved MS Paint, you are exactly where you’re supposed to be right now.

Author’s note: All softwares listed below are free. 

1.)  Paint.NET  10

For more than 13 years, Paint.NET is originally intended to be a replacement for MS Paint. Its creator, Rick Brewster, started this whole Paint programming idea during his last term in college wherein they were required to do a senior design project and one of the projects with that was from Microsoft.

One of the many features of this software is its simple user interface, fast performance (whether you’re working with an Intel Atom or high-end CPU), layers à la Adobe Photoshop, special effects (blurring, sharpening, red-eye removal, etc.), unlimited undo actions, and powerful tools (Magic Wand, Clone Stamp, Gradient Tool, and many more).

2.) GIMP

Also known as a popular alternative to MS Paint, GIMP has made a name for itself throughout the years. If you’re curious, GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program and it has a lot of great features such as photo retouching, image composition, and image authoring.

3.) Fresh Paint 

Fresh Paint is originally a Microsoft Research project known as Project Gustav and was coded by Opoku James Agyemang. He wanted to integrate the behavior of physical oil paint on a digital medium. It features an intuitive UI (supports touch, mouse, and stylus input), draw/paint with watercolor, oil, pencil, pastel, and pen, and import images to use as an inspiration to paint with. It also has this cool ‘fan’ button that you can press to dry instantly all the paint on your canvas.

4.) Krita

Krita has been in development for over 10 years, offering a handful of common and innovative features to help the amateur and professional alike. Many of its highlighted features are its intuitive user interface (allows you to move dockers and panels the way you want), brush stabilizers, pop-up palette, brush engines, a resource manager (imports brush and texture packs), and much more. You can also open PSD (Photoshop) files here.

5.) MyPaint

MyPaint started in 2004 when its creator, Martin Renold, bought himself a Wacom tablet and noticed that the program he was using, which was Gimp at the time, would sometimes drop a stroke when scribbling too fast. Basically, it features a simple interface that allows you to set it to fullscreen mode, leaving you with just your brush and creativity, as well as a set of brushes that can emulate traditional media like charcoal, pencils, ink, or paint.

6.) Fire Alpaca 

Quite a unique name for a painting software, isn’t it? Fire Alpaca is highly recommended for the paint tool beginners, as mentioned from its website. It features a different set of brushes (a crisp stroke with pen and a soft edged watercolor effect as the popular ones), speedy performance, several comic templates, and 3D perspective.

7.) Photoscape 

I know this seems a little bit off among the aforementioned softwares, but I think we’re all guilty of the fact that Paint has been our go-to friend whenever we need to resize images. But, Photoscape is here to save our noob skills. Not only do Photoscape is capable of resizing images but you can edit your photo as well. It can also make collages, animated GIFs, and much more.

Well, that’s about it. I hope you find these suggestions helpful. What are you waiting for? Go ahead and try them now! Did we miss anything? Leave us comments down below.