Windows XP in a Nutshell, Second Edition

Name

Paint — \windows\system32\mspaint.exe

Synopsis

A rudimentary image editor, used to create and modify .bmp, .jpg, .gif, .tif, and .png image files.

To Open

Start → Programs → Accessories → Paint

Command Prompt → mspaint

Description

Paint is a basic image editor (often called a “paint program”) capable of creating and modifying most Windows Bitmap (.bmp), Joint Photographic Experts Group (.jpg), Compuserve Graphics Interchange Format (.gif), Tagged Image File Format (.tif), and Portable Network Graphics (.png) image files. In essence, Paint is to image files as Notepad is to text files (see Figure 4-72).

Figure 4-72. The Paint utility provides a few rudimentary tools for working with image files

The first time you start Paint, you’ll get a blank (white) image, 400 300 pixels in size. Depending on the size of the Paint window, you may see the entire canvas, surrounded by a gray border. To change the size of the image, go to Image → Attributes, and type new values. The default units are pixels, but if you choose inches or centimeters, the size of the image will be calculated using the resolution displayed at the top of the window. For example, if you specify an image size of 8” 11” at 64 dots per inch (1 dot = 1 pixel), the resulting image dimensions will be 8*64 11*64, or 512 640 pixels. The pixels are the only thing that is important if the image is to be displayed on the screen ...