Hands-On Windows 110 transcript

Please be advised this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word for word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-supported version of the show
 

0:00:00 - Paul Thurrott
Coming up. Next on Hands-On Windows, we're going to look at Microsoft Paint. No, really, I love it. You will too. Podcasts you love From people you trust. This is Twit. Hello everybody, and welcome back to Hands-On Windows. I feel like this entire show has been building to this moment.

This might be my favorite app that's built into Windows. It's the one I use maybe the most of the apps that are built in Windows. It's certainly one of the oldest apps in Windows that I've been using the longest. The other one would be Notepad, dating back almost literally, I think, to the first version of windows, although it had a slightly different name back then. But I am, of course, referring to microsoft paint, an app that doesn't get a lot of respect. I think that's true of a lot of apps that are built into windows, especially windows 11, but I've always used it. I've always used it a lot. It went through a rough period. When windows 11 came out, microsoft started screwing with it again for some reason. They made a lot of mistakes. It took a couple of years, but they got it back and it's actually better than it's ever been.

So what I wanted to do was go through the way that I use it because, like I said, I use it every single day for work. I also use it once a year to create my family's Christmas card, which I know sounds insane, but I'll show you how I do that. I do use Photoshop, photoshop elements, paintnet, the GIMP Affinity Photo. Actually, I've been using a lot lately Everything in between, apps that have come and gone that we don't remember the names of anymore, but I keep coming back to paint. It's just something that kind of satisfies a need and works well, and that's especially true today, and I bet a lot of you don't know that. So, um, let's take a look. So Microsoft paint um, I made this dark so it's not flashing in face with light, but, um, you know, sort of a fake ribbon interface. Uh, now, um, but a lot more going on. There's a lot more functionality here than there ever was before. We've talked about things like the remove background feature, which uses AI and is actually pretty good. The image creation functionality, which is pretty good. If you have a co-pilot plus PC, you'll also have a co-creator feature, which is, you know, hit or miss. But, like I said, I've been, I've been using it for a long time.

I do use other tools, of course, and in some ways some of them you know, photoshop or affinity can be more efficient in some ways. But if I had a brand new computer and I had to rush out the door and I didn't have a chance to install any apps, but I still had to get work done, um, absolutely use Paint for my day-to-day needs, and so, as an example, let's say I'm writing an article, microsoft announced something. There's some graphical asset that's attached to it. I'm going to pretend it's this thing here. I download that and I have to put it on my website, right. And so when I do that, I have to resize it.

But I also have to change the aspect ratio. Usually I mean sometimes it'll be the right aspect ratio. We use a 16 by nine aspect ratio. You would think there was some kind of computer science that would just handle this for me on the fly, but I'm told I have to do this, so I have to crop. That way you can see only part of this image, because it's humongous, and so the first thing I would do is resize this. The images on my site are typically 1066 by 600. That's a 16 by 9 aspect ratio. Obviously Paint has this tool, which has been updated in the past couple of years to support pixel resizing. It used to just be percentage. I typically launch this keyboard shortcuts I'm a keyboard guy, so Control W is how I get to this one. I would also do shift tab to go back, space to select and then type in that six, 10, 66 number, right, just to get this thing down to a meaningful size.

Now, as far as cropping in certain aspect ratios, that's actually one thing. They don't do very well in paint, and so for something like this I would actually just do something along these lines where sorry, hit control E to bring up image properties and then start resizing from here. So it's actually technically it's 1066 by 800 is what that said. So I might cut off the top I might go a little deeper there actually, because it's a lot of sky and then reverse this again and just cut the rest off the bottom, get to 16 1066 by 600. So there's your image. This is something that my website would be really good with um, and I can kind of go from there.

I often too, for the image that goes above the story, I might leave it in the original aspect ratio depending, depending on what it is, save that as one file and then do that cropping, get to the 16 by nine and then save as right. This is where the keyboard shortcut thing kind of fails me. Alt F will get me to here, but I can't. There's no. There's no save as option, and part of the reason is that they support all these multiple file formats, which actually is really good, because in the old days, well, it was bitmap originally and then they went to a PNG, a ping format, but now you can save in whatever, and so I can. I typically save to the desktop and I would rename it from here or whatever, but that's all I need. I don't. I don't have to engage a third party app, right? So for the day-to-day work stuff, I use this thing to create my Christmas card, and I know that sounds every time I say that I almost people usually like I'm insane. So this is what my Christmas card looks like.

This is the one from a couple of years ago, 2022. It's a grid and I try to be a little creative with it. You can see like one image spread across this, three squares at the bottom. This is an L-shaped one. That's actually fairly rare for me A vertical stack of two, a lot of ones I try to get you know. Obviously we want pictures of the kids and me and the wife and whatever, and whatever's going on in our lives. And then this is the one from last year. You know, similar. There's no, yeah, there's no images with that are three squares but a bunch of twos vertical, horizontal.

This is a first on here. I actually did like a bleed through, kind of like, uh, between the two squares, so I guess I'm getting experimental or whatever, but this is kind of the effect I'm shooting for, right, and I've literally been making this, like I said, in paint every year and I, I, I created this template that I use, and so I'll open this in paint and this is kind of the base. This is the. Let me just scroll that down as you can see all of it. Actually, you could use this button right here, as we'll do it automatically. Um, this could be transparent. Um, uh, paint does support that, but I want the solid white, because that's going to factor into how I edit this and the way I do this is I go through the photos from the year with my wife, we pick out our favorite pictures, and you can only fit so many pictures, obviously, so I'll kind of sketch it out a little bit and come up with ideas, and this is the background, and then I'm going to fill this thing in at the year and we're done.

So I just have a few images here. So I have this like headshot of me is kind of a good one, because it's not the right shape. These things are square, but if I open that and paint again, humongous, just like my actual head, so that makes sense. If you select this thing, you can kind of see it roughly how big it is. It's actually 342 or something, 340 by 340, let's call it. But 350 by 350 is kind of what we're shooting for. So when I resize this image, control W with pixel I'm going to go to the vertical because it's bigger horizontally right. So I'll just select 350 roughly and you get kind of an idea for that thing. So what I want to do is select. I'm going to pretend I want it to be in that square. So I've sketched this thing out. I want the picture of me to be up there, for whatever reason. I select that thing and now I'm going to paste it here Now.

If I just paste it now it's just pasted over my face. But what you can do is use that orange color in the square as the background color and then enable transparency, and then you get that transparency effect right. So you know, this is just a rough edit thing, it's no big deal. But I'm going to go in and just kind of crop this to the outside of the square. It doesn't have to be perfect actually, but I can go inside of this because you know the rest of it's going to be there in the background and I Ctrl-X that, but Ctrl-C it, c it. Now I could just paste it. But in fact this is how. That's the only way I could do it in the past.

But actually paint supports layers now. So when I turn on layers, you have this background layer and I can add a layer and what I'll do is paste it into that layer. And the reason is, as I go through this image, I often years, years, many years I'm 70, 80% of the way through and oh, it's not quite right. I want, maybe I want to move things around and by using these layers you can hide and show the layers and then you can make a copy and put them in new locations. And I and there's been many years where I've had two versions and I can show my wife both of them and she says, okay, I want this one. Looks better, or maybe move this around, whatever it might be, right, um?

So I'm going to paste that headshot thing into this document, except that before I do that, I'm going to zoom in so I can actually see it. I'm using the keyboard and the mouse here. I'm sorry you can't actually see that, but hold down the control key mouse wheel. You could use these controls down here. There's also a control that appears over here for zoom, but this is pretty good, you can see, it's pretty big, and then I just move in there. That's probably correct like that.

So, so, there's one you know. There's one image you know, easy, so doing this for um, images where you might be filling two, three, four squares, whatever. It might be just similar. I'll just make this simple because you know you don't have to sit here and watch me make the. This is not the actual christmas card, I mean, who cares?

But select this area down here. You can see it's roughly 10. It's actually closer to 10, 50, but we'll call it 1060 by 350, right, we know it's already. 350 is the height, so I can open this image in paint. Um, and this is just a random photo. It's not a particularly good picture necessarily, but it's something I grabbed.

Um, same thing, control w I said 1060, did I say 1060, 1060, something like that, and then we can paste. Oh, got the wrong one. I'm sorry To the control, sorry the control C for copy. Get the new layer ready and then go back and then I will paste it over here. Except I just made a mistake because I selected the new layer. I have to select the layer that that thing is in. So I'll do that again. Let me tell you, I use this thing a lot. I knew exactly what happened. Um, do that one more time, all right. So now, when I paste it in same effect, uh, change the background to the orange, change it to transparent selection, and then I can just kind of, you know, move this thing around where I think I don't know't know somewhere in there, actually maybe something like that. It's kind of random. Um, you know, same as before.

I normally I would zoom in a little bit. I obviously, for something like chris subscribed, I'd be a little more careful, but um, I'll just do like a rough edit here and then you know, see what the actual size of this thing is. So 1051 by by three, 40,. You know 10, 51, but let's say three, 40. Right, copy, and make sure you select the right, um, the right layer. Uh, zoom in. I used to the wrong zoom the first time and, uh, just get it up in that corner so that it matches up. It's easy when you zoom in just to kind of match it exactly, and then you can zoom out and see what it looks like.

So you know again, I and I'll just actually, I'll just, uh, actually, before I do that, let me make another. Let's say later on, I think well, actually, that's, I don't think I want it there, I want this to be somewhere else. So I could do this again. I'm going to no point really worrying about it too too much, but that's probably roughly maybe somewhere like that. So now I have it in two different places so I can go down here and hide that layer. Now I could save as and get a version of this that has it over here, or I could come here and go back to the original version, right, that's kind of the neat thing about the layers. So the past I guess last year might have been the first one. Uh, now, when I do this, I, I do it this way specifically to make it easy to move these things around.

So, this stuff, you know the transparency which has been in paint for a while, actually, um, the uh, resize and skew with pixels, awesome, the. I don't even know how you find image properties honestly, I only use that from the keyboard. But the control e um ability or uh, that's actually that would crop it, but the ability to do that it's been there for a long time. Layer support, fairly new, um, you know, these are features that I think a lot of people would think you would need. You know something more well, something that was more expensive than zero, right? This is something that's just built in um to windows and I think I've made I, this is my. We might be on the 18th year that I've used paint for this. I mean it's it's been a long time. The kids were little babies when we first started doing this. So, um, it's interesting, uh, seeing that it's gotten better over time as well.

You know, paint isn't the only app in Windows that I use to this degree. I use Notepad every day as well, and as Microsoft has improved Notepad, they never ruined it. At least they went through a rough patch, like I said, with Paint, but they've actually always done a great job with Notepad and I have a similar relationship with that app, and so maybe in a future episode. Anyway, I hope you found this useful. I hope you respect paint a little bit more. I suspect you don't right now, but there's some good stuff going on in here and we'll have a new episode of Hands on Windows every Thursday. You can find out more at twittv, slash H-O-W. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you especially to our Club Twit members. We love you. We'll see you next week. Thank you.