Customizing Paint
You can remove or add the Status Bar (bar on the bottom of the screen that displays messages and help), Color Box, Tool Box or Text Toolbar (only used while adding text) under the view menu. Also under the View menu, you can view your bitmap, and add a grid or thumbnail (but only when zoomed in) or zoom in and out. Paint also has a function to edit colors. The "Edit Colors" function is under the Colors menu at the top of the screen. To define a custom color, click on a space you want to change in either the "Basic Colors" or "Custom Colors", then click "Define Custom Colors >>". This will take you to another screen where you can set the custom color values. Red, Green and Blue values range from 0 (none) to 255 (full). These specify the amount of each primary color used to make your color. For example --> 255 Red, 255 Green, 0 Blue = Yellow. Click on "Add to Custom Colors" when you are done.

If you don't like where your toolbars are on your paint screen, you can move them. Just click within there box and drag to a new location.

Opening Files And Using Copy / Paste
Opening a file in Paint is like opening in any other Windows program. Open is located under the file menu. Paint can open and save images in 2 formats - a bitmap (.bmp,.dib) file or a jpeg (.jpg, .jpeg) file. Bitmap files were designed two store pictures for 3D programs and were supposed to be monochrome images, but Windows changed this. A Bitmap picture can be used for presentations, documents, Window's backgrounds, or web pages being viewed through Internet Explorer. Jpegs are used for high color images on the internet. A Jpeg picture is compressed, degrading the images clarity and sharpness, but reducing the size. In comparison, a 400x400 blank pixel image stored as a Bitmap has a size of 468kb, but a Jpeg is only 3kb. That's 156 times smaller!

Copying and pasting images in paint is extremely easy. Paint has two tools designed specifically for the job, Select and Free-Form Select. After selecting the image by clicking and dragging, right click and hit Copy from the menu or use the Edit menu to copy. Note that if you have the bottom option selected in the Paste and Text Styles Menu, any white will be set to transparent when pasting. Pasting is done by using Edit --> Paste or right click menu, then Paste. If your drawing area's size (clipping volume) is less than the image's, you will be asked on whether or not you would like to resize. That's up to you. If you do resize, your drawing area will be the exact size of the image's size.

Saving Files
Paint can save files in 2 different formats, a bitmap (.bmp,.dib) file or a jpeg (.jpg, .jpeg) file. The bitmap files can be stored in 4 different ways: Monochrome (black and white), 16 Color, 256 Color, and 24bit Color (around 16.5 million colors). The larger an image is, or the more colors the computer saves it with (24bit color is higher than 256 Colors which is higher than 16 that is higher than Monochrome) the larger the file will be. Take a look at this chart I made to display quality to size. Remember that the pictures aren't completely accurate because I had to save the whole file as a Jpeg. This chart was made in paint!

 

Remember that you cannot have two files of the same name and extension in the same folder. If you try to save like this, one file must be written over!

Fixing a Mistake
To fix a mistake in paint, use the Undo function under the Edit menu. Undo resets the drawing to its previous state. It can also be accessed by holding "Ctrl" then hitting "Z".

Moving Images
Moving images is done with the same opening process as copying. You must select what you wish to move. After that, just click-and-hold on the image and drag it to where you want it. Whenever you paste an image, it will show up aligned to the top left portion of the drawing area and will stay highlighted until you click outside of the image. You can drag the pasted image from this point.