There are legions of users who, when asked which Windows application they value the most, They decide on Painting, a remarkably simple program that has accompanied Windows since its inception in 1985, when it was still years away from becoming an operating system, and was content to be a graphical interface used on top of MS-DOS. The days, yes, when it was still called Paintbrush.

For some reason that we still don’t fully understand years later, Microsoft decided to remove it in 2017, although, as you can see in the same publication, Redmond later relented and limited the changes to what Paint would no longer install by default in Windows, although it will continue to be available in the Microsoft Store. Of course, we will always have doubts as to whether this was the original plan and it was all a misunderstanding, or whether there really was a change of heart as a result of public reaction.

Be that as it may, Microsoft has stated that Paint has a lot of future ahead of it, and as we’ve seen since then, They are faithful to this postulate. And not only because the application is indeed still alive, but also because with Windows 11 we saw the arrival of a new and much improved design with more than remarkable features. And it didn’t stop there, because it seems that Paint will also benefit from the popularity of artificial intelligence.

Now, not everything in the world is artificial intelligence (even if it sometimes seems that way), and it looks like another example of this will be the next arrival of new features to Paint. And as we can read on the official blog of the operating system, Paint will get new features that are actually already being tested among insiders. More specifically, these new features are available in version 11.2402.32.0 of Paint for Windows 11, which is present in the latest version deployed in the Canary and Dev channels. Of course, Microsoft expects that we will face a gradual rollout, since not all insiders, even if they are on these channels, will already have access to this version with new features.

The most notable of the new features is now Painting has a slider to adjust the size of the pointer, a method that offers both a high level of accuracy and a fairly comfortable fit. This selector will be available when using the pencil, brush, and eraser tools, and the mouse pointer will preview the size as we adjust it.

On the other hand, there’s also news regarding one of the most notable features to come to Painting recently, layers. First of all, it will now be possible to define the background color for the canvas, a background that we can also activate and deactivate at any time as needed. And the second news in this sense is that a quick function has been added for duplicating visible layers, as well as the currently selected layer.