Talk:How do I keep MS Paint from messing up my colors?

Paint in Windows 10

I am an electronic technician, and for about 25 years I have been creating and editing circuit diagrams as GIF files in Windows Paint. This worked fine in Windows 3.1 and everything up to XP and Vista.

But now I have a Windows 10 PC. Every time I use Paint to edit and save one of my GIF diagrams (keeping it as a GIF), Windows Paint totally messes up some of the colours, resulting in solid lines and areas appearing in mottled mixes of colours.

It is not just a simple matter of one colour being substituted for another, solid colour lines and areas are changed to to a mottled approximation of the original colour. This now makes it impossible to change the colour of lines and areas with the fill tool, which is desperately inconvenient !

Why has Microsoft decided to massively sabotage it's customers files ? Is this a trick to force people into paying for one of their ridiculously complicated and expensive graphics programs ?

Is there another (preferably free) image editor that does not mess up basic image files ?

GIF is paletted and is limited to 256 colours (although an animation can include multiple palettes). GIF is not as good as PNG; unless there is some reason you require GIF and PNG won't do, you should save it as PNG instead. I don't know what Windows Paint does, unfortunately. However, it would seem from your description that it is dithered to make the palette, which is why filling won't work. That doesn't seem to be a "trick to force people into paying for one of their ridiculously complicated and expensive graphics programs"; it is a consequence of needing dithering since the palette is limited. PNG does not have this limitation. Another thing to consider (I don't know what Windows 10 does), look to see if it has an option to disable palettes and use true colours (and then don't save as GIF, since GIF doesn't have true colours). --Zzo38 (talk) 23:18, 7 June 2021 (PDT)

Bird: Those blurry edges are "optimisations". To make your picture smoother. Hey! 90% of the customers are happy with that, so why aren't you too? If your workflows are optimised with the old MS-Paint, you can try to copy an old version of Paint to your new Windows 10 machine. And run it. The Windows 98 version of Paint complained about something irrelevant at the start if I recall correctly, but it worked. Maybe you can download it somewhere.