Paint keeps two working colors ready at all times: a primary, or foreground, color and a secondary, or background, color. A third color sits in reserve for when you hold Ctrl. You can set any of them from the row of swatches in the color box, copy one straight out of your picture with the Pick Color tool, or replace a swatch with a shade of your own. Whole palettes can also be loaded from a file and saved for later. The steps below walk through each of these in the order you are likely to need them.
Set the primary and secondary colors from the color box
You'll find the color box stretched along the lower edge of the window, holding 28 swatches in two rows of 14. Two squares overlap at its left end to show what you are using now. The one toward the top left holds your primary color, and the one sitting lower and to the right holds your secondary color. Every new picture begins with black as the primary color and white as the secondary one. Dragging with the left button makes most tools use the primary color, while a right-button drag switches them to the secondary, and the secondary color is also what fills the areas you erase.
- Left-click a swatch to use it as your primary color.
- Right-click a swatch to use it as your secondary color.
- To trade the two colors with each other, click the pair of overlapping squares.
Bring back a hidden color box
If the swatches are not on screen, open View > Color Box to show them again. Choosing the same menu item a second time hides the color box. If the tools are missing from the left edge of the window, View > Tool Box shows them again.
Keep a third color ready with Ctrl
Beyond the primary and secondary slots, Paint stores one more color. Hold Ctrl and click a swatch to set it. To draw with it, keep Ctrl pressed while you work with any tool that paints in a single color.
Copy a color from the picture with Pick Color
When the shade you want already appears somewhere in your image, the Pick Color tool lifts it so you can paint with it.
- Click Pick Color among the tools at the left edge of the window.
- Press a mouse button down on the picture and move the pointer across it. While you move, the options area just below the tools previews whatever color lies under the pointer.
- Let go of the button once the preview shows the color you are after.
Choose which slot a picked color goes into
The button you press with Pick Color decides where the color lands: a left-button pick fills the primary slot, while a right-button pick fills the secondary slot. Holding Ctrl while you pick sends it to the third color instead. Letting go outside the picture gives you white. A picked color also carries over any transparency it had in the image. After each pick, Paint switches back to the tool you were using before, so you can go on drawing with the new color at once.
Change a swatch by pressing it twice
Any of the 28 swatches can be swapped for a color of your own. The chooser is your browser's own, so it looks different from the color dialog in Windows.
- Click one swatch twice in quick succession, inside 0.4 seconds, and the color chooser opens.
- Choose the new color in the chooser.
- The swatch now shows your color. It also becomes your primary color if you pressed with the left button, or your secondary one if you pressed with the right.
Create a new color with Edit Colors
The Colors > Edit Colors... command opens the same browser color chooser. Whatever you pick there takes the place of the swatch you most recently chose as the primary color, and it becomes the primary color too. So to change one particular swatch this way, left-click that swatch first and then open the command.
Load a saved palette with Get Colors
Choose Colors > Get Colors, pick a palette file in the file picker, and the swatches are replaced. Paint first tries the reader that matches the file's extension, then falls back to the others. By default a palette may hold anywhere from 2 to 256 colors, and the new colors are laid out in two rows. If the file can't be read, Paint tells you it does not recognize the format or found no colors in it. These file types are supported:
- Paint Shop Pro: .pal and .psppalette
- RIFF PAL: .pal
- ColorSchemer: .cs
- Paint.NET: .txt and .pdn
- GIMP: .gpl, .gimp and .colors
- HPL: .hpl
- StarCraft: .pal and .wpe
- Other files with colors written in them: a general reader looks for colors inside .svg, .css, .html, .xml, .txt or .etc files
Keep your palette with Save Colors
To hold on to the swatches you have built up, choose Colors > Save Colors. Your browser saves the palette as a file named colors.json.
Switch the palette to black and white
Open Image > Attributes... and find the Colors setting, which offers Black and White and Color. Picking Black and White replaces the swatches with 28 grays drawn as patterns and sets the primary and secondary colors back to black and white. Only the palette changes; the picture already on the canvas is left as it is. Choose Color in the same setting to switch back.
Why your colors return to black and white
Starting a fresh picture with File > New, or opening a picture, puts the primary color back to black and the secondary color back to white. If you were working with other colors, choose them again from the color box or pick them up from the picture with Pick Color.