Dec 1995 Features

Grab Your Brush! We're going out to paint the town this month, because our next stop on the Windows 95 road trip is the Paint applet. Whether you are a dabbler or a designer, you can become a Paint professional in just a few minutes. Here's our guide to all the tools you need to spiff up your system with homemade wallpaper, or to get your feet wet at drawing and painting.

1.The pull-down menus let you access all the functions and features of Paint. Similar functions are grouped under a related menu. For instance, features that help you manage your graphics documents are located under the File menu. The other menus are Edit (to edit your graphics), View (to customize your work area), Image (to change or modify the attributes of your picture), Options (to modify your color palette) and Help.
2. The tool box contains buttons that let you access a variety of tools and shapes that you can use to create and edit a picture.
3. The color box provides a palette of 28 different colors that you can select and apply using the tools in the tool box.
4. If you don't know what the button or feature that you've selected does, look at the status bar for that information and for the specific position of the mouse pointer.

1. You can open an existing monochrome, 16-bit color, 256-color or 24-bit bitmap file or create a new picture with the New and Open commands. Select Save to write the active document to disk
2. Choosing these options allows you to output your file to a printer, preview your picture before it prints and change your default print settings.
3. The Send command allows you to send a copy of the current picture to another person or location.
4. These selections let you substitute your picture as the background for Windows 95's desktop. You must save your file before you can use the image as wallpaper.

1. The Tool Box/Color Box/Status Bar options allow you to customize your work area by hiding or showing various tools
2. To alter the magnification of the picture, select the appropriate Zoom option. The Custom feature allows you to choose 100, 200, 400, 600 or 800 percent magnification. This feature also lets you show a grid and a thumbnail view of the image at high levels of magnification.
3. This selection displays a full-screen view of the entire picture.
4. Choose to show or hide the Text Toolbar when you are entering text into your picture.

1. With this option, you can flip or rotate the picture or a selected area.
2. Choose this feature when you want to stretch or skew the selected area or the whole picture in a horizontal or vertical direction.
3. Invert Colors replaces each color with its color complement in either the selected area or the entire document. For example, white becomes black, red becomes blue.
4. This choice lets you define the size of the picture, the specific unit of measure used and whether the picture is in black and white or color.
5. To start with a clean slate, choose Clear Image to clear your picture or a selected area of all data.

1. The Flip Horizontal command swaps everything on the left side of the picture or the selected area to the right side. The program does this by creating a horizon line using a vertical line down the center of the picture. The pixels are then switched from one side of the axis to the other and vice versa.
2. Flip Vertical is similar to Flip Horizontal except that a horizontal axis (a line across the middle of the selected area or the entire picture) is used to swap the pixels vertically. The top pixels are swapped with those on the bottom, and the bottom pixels move to the top position
3. You can turn your picture or a selected area 90 degrees (one-quarter turn), 180 degrees (a half turn) or 270 degrees (a three-quarter turn) using the Rotate by Angle option.

1. The Stretch attribute allows you to stretch a selected area of a picture either horizontally or vertically by a specific percentage. A positive percentage makes the area larger, while a negative percentage compresses the area.
2. You can slant a selected area horizontally or vertically by a specific angle using the Skew command. A positive number of degrees slants the area up and to the right, while a negative degree setting slants it down and to the left.

1. You can specify the exact size of your picture, in inches, centimeters or pixels, by entering the appropriate measures in the Width and Height fields.
2. The Units attribute lets you set your measurement preference to either inches, centimeters (Cm) or pixels (Pels).
3. The Colors option determines whether the picture uses color or just black and white.