Hacker News

points by pasteleft 2 days ago | 0 comments

Honestly I like layers in Paint. Even pixel art programs have layers.

I remember when I was doing pixel art, there were some purists that insisted that using layers and transparency/opacity to create windows for your buildings is more or less cheating. According to them, one should manually figure out what the color palette should be for things seen through a window.

Anyway, I continued using layers and transparency/opacity. Pixel art was hard enough already for me, so I didn’t feel that it made sense to artificially make it even more difficult for myself at the time. I had enough other aspects of pixel art to work out already in order to try to get better at it.

[–] rkachowski 1 day ago

XP era mspaint with layers is really all I want. Rudimentary image editing and drawing but with layers.

[–] IAmBroom 1 day ago

Add threshold select (magic wand), and I'll agree 100%.

[–] breakwaterlabs 1 day ago

They should have just hired the paint.net guy and rolled it in.

The point of paint is a tiny pixel editor. If you want layers there are better programs.

[–] card_zero 2 days ago

But is Windows 11 paint capable of pixel art? I'm reading that it antialiases everything.

[–] Measter 1 day ago

You can draw single pixels. I'm not sure where whoever told you that got it from.

[–] jasomill 1 day ago

And create single-pixel images. My most used application of Paint by far is creating single-pixel PNG files to work around the fact that "solid color" is not an option for lock/login screen backgrounds.

[–] card_zero 1 day ago

But can you resize without antialiasing, and does pasting trigger antialiasing?

There's this https://www.windowsphoneinfo.com/threads/why-does-resizing-m... (made confusing by the next person talking about Paint 3D, a different application) and this https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/3991946/... (made confusing by the person being an artist and talking in peanut butter metaphors).

There's some suggestion there that shapes (including lines) are separate entities from pixels. Wikipedia references a now-deleted answers.microsoft.com version of the first question https://web.archive.org/web/20250203164656/https://answers.m... with a couple of people saying that resize is useless. Wiki also says "re-copied" images blur, which is why I wondered if that meant pasting. Also this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/answers/questions/5673783/... a complaint that the tool for drawing pixels doesn't indicate exactly which pixel it will draw to.

[–] Measter 1 day ago

I can't reproduce any of those issues. When drawing the indicator snaps to a pixel, so it's perfectly clear where it's going. When I draw a line, it's pixel-perfect when moving the control points, likewise after it finalises. And when I copy a section of the image and paste it back in, it's pixel-perfect as I move and when I finalise. There doesn't seem to be a true resize; all I seem to be able to do is change the size of the canvas, which doesn't add any kind of aliasing.

But I've only used the program for less than 5 minutes, so maybe it's configured differently?

[–] IAmBroom 1 day ago

Yes, resizing within Paint preserves pixel-level color. I just resized a single pixel dot to about 14x25 without aliasing.

I don't know why you are so concerned, but it's incredibly easy to test these questions if you really want to know.