Paint gives you two ways to pick out part of a picture: Select for a rectangle and Free-Form Select for any outline you trace by hand. Once an area is picked, you can drag it to another spot, nudge it a pixel at a time, stamp copies of it, change its size or remove it. This guide goes through each of those, with the mouse actions and keys that do them.
Mark an area with Select or Free-Form Select
After you release, the chosen pixels are lifted off the picture so they can travel. The spot they leave takes on the secondary color, or turns see-through when Transparent is chosen under Transparency in Image > Attributes... (Ctrl+E).
- Click Select or Free-Form Select in the tool box on the left. The tool's options appear in the area just below the tool box.
- With Select, press at one corner of the region, drag to the opposite corner and let go.
- With Free-Form Select, hold the button down, trace a closed loop around the part you want and let go. A rectangle fitted around your loop marks the selection, yet only the pixels inside the loop belong to it.
- Changed your mind? A single click with Select, without dragging, ends the current selection without changing anything on the picture.
Choose Opaque or Transparent for the selection
Both select tools show the options Opaque and Transparent just below the tool box. They decide which pixels travel with the selection and which drop out.
- Opaque keeps everything in the selection, background-colored pixels too.
- Transparent hides each pixel that matches the current secondary color, and only the remaining pixels are laid over the picture. To set the secondary color, right-click a color in the color box at the bottom of the window.
- Image > Draw Opaque is the same switch in menu form. A check mark next to it means Opaque is on.
- You don't have to decide before selecting: switching the option or picking a new secondary color changes a selection that is already on the canvas straight away.
Drag the selection to its new place
The selection is also set down when you switch to another tool or click the gray area around the picture. If the result looks wrong, press Ctrl+Z to undo.
- Point inside the selection, hold the button down and pull it to its new spot. It may hang partly over the edge of the picture.
- For fine placement, tap the arrow keys. Every press shifts the selection by one pixel, and the status bar shows its position and size as you go.
- When it sits where you want it, press Enter or Escape. The selection is then painted onto the picture at that spot.
Stamp a copy or smear the selection as you drag
- To copy, hold Ctrl as you press on the selection, then drag. The original spot keeps a copy, and the part you hold goes wherever you drag it.
- To smear, hold Shift while you drag. Every position the selection passes through is left on the picture, so you get a smear of repeats.
Resize, flip or rotate only the selected part
With a selection on the canvas, these changes affect only that part. The Image menu commands act on the whole picture when nothing is selected.
- Pull any of the small handles on the selection's border to make its contents wider, narrower, taller or shorter.
- Press + on the number pad to double the selection's size, or - on the number pad to cut it in half.
- Turn the selection a quarter turn to the left with Ctrl+, or Ctrl+[, or a quarter turn to the right with Ctrl+. or Ctrl+].
- Image > Flip/Rotate, Image > Stretch/Skew and Image > Invert Colors also work on the selection alone.
Select the whole picture, delete a part or crop
- Edit > Select All (Ctrl+A) switches to the Select tool and selects the entire picture in one go.
- Edit > Clear Selection, or the Delete key, removes the selected part. The gap it leaves gets the same fill as any lifted area: the secondary color, or transparency. The menu item stays greyed out until something is selected.
- To crop, hold Ctrl while you drag a rectangle with Select, then let go. Everything outside that rectangle is cut away. Free-Form Select can't crop, and a single Ctrl+Z brings the full picture back.
Copy, cut and paste a selection
Use the keyboard for the clipboard. In an ordinary browser tab the Cut, Copy and Paste items in the Edit menu stay greyed out, but their shortcuts still work.
- Ctrl+C copies the selection, and Ctrl+X cuts it out.
- Ctrl+V brings an image from the clipboard in as a new selection, ready to drag into position.
- Edit > Copy To... stores just the selected part as a PNG file named selection.png. It is available only while something is selected.
- Edit > Paste From... lets you choose an image file, which then appears as a selection in the top-left corner of the picture. A file that isn't an image is turned away with an error message.
- When the image you paste is larger than the picture, Paint asks whether the canvas should grow to fit, with the buttons Enlarge, Crop and Cancel.