Well, fortunately for you, the dear folks at Microsoft have a built in bitmap editor that is absolutely terrible and almost useless. But, there is hope and a couple ‘o tricks are available to you if you find yourself in a pinch.

1. Image Resizer

Need to quickly resize an image? MS Paint can do that, sort of. Actually MS Paint does this really well with the latest version available. Just open, click the Resize button and tweak. This can save you if you need to create a quick thumbnail or need to send one of your 4 gig images to grandma.

2. Precision Editing with Grids

There’s an infinitely UNtweakable grid feature under View -> Gridlines. No, you can’t adjust the scale or size (psh! who needs THAT?!), but it does help when you need to align elements.

3. Clone Tool? In MS Paint?!

Not really. But you CAN copy sections of an image, paste, and move the pasted portion around until committing changes. This can work as a clone tool if you need to clean up portions of an image in a hurry.

4. Detailed Editing

Need to fix a red-eye issue? What about removing the background from an image? No problem. Just zoom in really, really far and use the Pencil Tool in MS Paint to clean up your image. No, it’s not as easy to use as the Photoshop version, but you shouldn’t leave your Mac at home, now, should you?

5. Image Rotation

You know how it goes. You take a shot with your iPhone and it insists your image is 90 degrees off. Just drop it into MS Paint and use the image Rotation Tool. Even better, it now has the ability to flip an image on its vertical or horizontal axis. Not too shabby.

6. Basic Shapes

You ever try to draw a circle in MS Paint? Don’t. It’s a waste of time. Here’s my best effort to date:

You’re welcome. But you don’t have to stress and strain like I did. Just use the new, built in shapes. You have circles, squares, stars, and other basic shapes. Not to get snooty, but most high-end designs only use these basic shapes, so in theory you could pull off some really great work using this set of tools…just saying.

7. Image Reformatting

Find yourself with a GIF and you really need a JPG? No problem. You can throw that GIF into MS Paint and save as any of the common formats, including PNG. This can come in especially handy when you just need a quick switcheroo.

8. Color Replacement

Believe it or not, you can actually use the Eraser Tool as a color replacer. With the Eraser Tool selected, choose the color you want to replace. Then click-and-hold the right mouse button (yes, Mac users, there’s more than one mouse button). This let’s you only erase the color you selected as your primary color (Color 1). Pretty slick…for MS Paint, I mean.

9. Custom Brushes

Well, not really. But you can use the Selection Tool’s advanced feature to make a custom brush-like experience. Draw the shape you want on a blank part of your canvas. Use the Select Tool to select your little drawing. Click the option drop-down menu and select “Transparent selection.” Now just copy and paste the design.

Do I need to remind you that this isn’t Photoshop, but who left what you know where?

10. Better Brush Sizes

MS Paint only has about three brush sizes micro, xxxx-small, and xxx-small. Useless. But you CAN resize the brushes incrementally using the CTRL and +/- symbols. This lets you get the size much closer to what could be considered reasonable.

Conclusion…

While not a fan, I do realize that MS Paint actually has some basic features that can save the day in a pinch. To their credit, MS has to develop software that anybody can use, so they have to strip the features down to their bare-bones. They succeeded! And with a few tricks and use of some advanced features, you can make it work for you when necessary.

1. Color Scheme Designer

http://colorschemedesigner.com/

This cool AJAX style color wheel lets you select a color from the color wheel, create various color schemes from your selected color, adjust the saturation/brightness or contrast of your theme, and view your color theme in action within a template layout.

2. Adobe Kuler

http://kuler.adobe.com/

Perhaps you would prefer to perform your color selection in flash? Adobe Kuler has a lot of cool features to help you do so. You can create a color scheme from a direct color, or from photo. Once your base colors are selected, you can apply rules to colors or “moods” to colors selected from a photo. There is also a cool feature in the photo color selection process that lets you drag your target around a photo until you find just the right color. When you’ve completed your color theme, you can add the finished palette to the community or browse through other user submitted schemes.

3. Color Rotate

http://www.colorrotate.org

Colors come to life in 3D! The first ever (that I’ve seen) 3D rotating color tool! You can rotate the 3D color model in all directions. Is this feature helpful to designers for selecting a color palette? Possibly. Is it wicked awesome fun? Absolutely.

4. Colour Lovers

http://www.colourlovers.com/

Colour Lovers is a cool site that may only be pronounced with a British accent. It is an amazing resource for browsing through user submitted colors, patterns, and

palettes. The site even lists color trends from magazines and websites.

Additionally, Colour Lovers offers 2 sweet color tools, most noteworthy: COPASO, an incredibly complex and full features flash color tool, which is listed below:

COPASO by Colour Lovers

http://www.colourlovers.com/copaso

 
COPASO is one of the many reasons to love Colour Lovers. The site’s author provides this description: “With a scratch pad to save colors you’re working with, a photo tool to extract colors and an advanced color picker and color theory wheel to give you tons of color inspiration. Using COPASO you can save your palettes to a private folder or download them to your local computer. When you’re ready, click publish and share your color palette with thousands of other color enthusiasts.”

5. Toucan by Aviary

http://aviary.com/tools/toucan

Aviary is very creative, vibrant, and stylish bird themed website that has a variety of useful tools http://aviary.com/tools named after species of birds. Their Toucan color tool allows you to pick and analyze up to 20 colors per palette, create color associations, grab colors from images, and a whole lot more via a tidy flash interface.

6. Color Explorer

http://www.colorexplorer.com

If you’re going to import colors from an uploaded image, why not do it with a little style? Other noteworthy features include a color palette library as well as manual color palette chooser. This site also hosts a color analysis and a color conversion tool.

7. ColorMunki

http://www.colormunki.com/munsell

Generate color palettes in Munsell and PANTONE. Select colors from library colors, from photos, or using existing user generated user color palettes.

8. W3-Palette

http://w3-palette.com

Set your colors free! Create a color scheme from a ton of different pallets that you can adjust in a variety of ways.

9. Colors Palette Generator by CSSDrive

http://www.cssdrive.com/imagepalette/

Our friends at CSS drive have put together one of those neat-o photo color extractor tools, that works from file upload or URL. This tool has a nice enhancement of providing light, medium, and dark palettes for each photo uploaded.

10. Color Wizard by Colors on the Web

http://www.colorsontheweb.com/colorwizard.asp

Find matching colors for the colors you input. Simple to understand, easy interface, and works quite well. If you just want to find a set of matching colors for one you already have selected without the intimidation of more complex color systems, Color Wizard is a winner.

11. Colr.org

http://www.colr.org

Simple and functional. Grab colors from a website, from a photo, choose your own, or check out color schemes created by others.

12. Color Jack

http://www.colorjack.com

ColorJack offers 3 different conceptual tools for your color selection needs including: Color Sphere, Color Studio, and the interesting Color Galaxy. If you’re a color voyeur, you may also get a cheap thrill from their color spy feature (ooh la la).

13. Color Hunter

http://www.colorhunter.com/

A simple tool when you need to quickly grab the colors from a photo. This site’s self description says it all: “create and find color palettes made from images”, well almost all – you can also save a color palette to your favorites. The most relevant 5 colors are picked from the url of a photo on the web.

14. GenoPal

http://www.genopal.com/

Genopal offers 3 interesting color tools: 1. pick a color to create a scheme. 2. Create a color scheme from a photo. 3. Apply the color scheme from one image to another (whoa – trippy).

15. DeGraeve Color Palette

http://www.degraeve.com/color-palette/

An alternative photo color extractor. This tool provides color palettes in dull and vibrant.

16. GPeters Color Schemes

http://www.gpeters.com/color/color-schemes.php

I’m not sure how useful this tool will be to design, but it is a fun color tool to goof around on. You can enter literally any word you want, and it will search yahoo, grab 5 related images, and extract 6 colors per image. Something about not seeing the images you’re grabbing the colors from makes this tool a bit provocative.

17. I Like Your Colors

http://redalt.com/Tools/I+Like+Your+Colors

Like the colors of a particular website? Just enter the URL of that site and grab em!

18. Color Toy

http://www.colortoy.net/

The author of this website says it best: “ColorToy 2.0 is a Flash based color scheme generator and picker. It generates complementary color schemes based on your inputted color values or randomly, which is much more fun.”