Microsoft Paint was an app all of us took without any consideration. That is, we did till Microsoft tried to place it out to pasture a number of years in the past. After the general public outcry, Paint didn’t just get a reprieve. It received a brand new lease on life—no mere keep of execution, however relatively, recent options began being added to this system. The newest additions: help for transparency and layers.

Announced in a Windows Insider blog post, these superior modifying options at the moment are rolling out to the Canary and Dev channels with Paint model 11.2308.18.0 and better, forward of a wider potential rollout. Layers behave as they do in different picture editors: You can create a number of, with the power to point out or conceal them, duplicate them, and merge them collectively. Meanwhile, help for transparency implies that while you erase elements of a layer, components from layers beneath will develop into seen. Before, erasing elements of a picture solely stuffed them in with the lively background colour. You can now additionally open and save clear PNG recordsdata in Paint.

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When mixed with the just lately added background removal tool, these new options now allow you to create rudimentary composite photographs in Paint. Or at the least, that’s the expectation—updates launched to Windows Insiders are by no means assured to make it to the general public. Still, as common and beloved as Paint is, the probabilities of seeing its glow-up in a common launch are good. And it stirs the hope that extra options (like a blur device and a crop device with the choice of mounted ratios) might make an look sometime quickly, too.

In the meantime, in case you’re searching for a extra highly effective picture editor, you possibly can take a look at our top 5 recommendations for Photoshop alternatives. They’re not fairly as dead-simple and approachable as Paint is, however they’re simple sufficient to determine—and better of all, they don’t price something to strive.