Help with MS Paint

[coolkid]

There's a major problem with Microsoft Paint on my comp. You see, the colors are all messed up (Royal blue is grey, darker blue is black, dark red is black, dark purple is grew, ETC) and it can't be anything because of where it says "Edit Colors" because, upon opening another window of MS Paint, I noticed that all of the color's Hue, Saturation, and whatever Lum is (I forgot) settings are the same. However, here's the kicker: When editing on one window with an image I haven't changed yet, the colors are all messed up, but when using an other one. Everything is fine.

[jdaster64]

Are you editing a GIF file?  If so, it makes the colors change to the closest shade originally in the picture to the one you try to use.

[penguinwizard]

Same thing happens if you open a .BMP image that's 256 colors rather than 24-bit. The colors you get match the colors used in the image (just like .GIF), not the colors you see in MS Paint. You'll experience this if you try to edit Clouds.bmp, the default wallpaper that comes with Windows 98.

So nothing's messed up, you're just using a different color bit depth or indexed colors. It's recommended whenever you're editing a picture to change it to 24-bit color (either save a copy of it as 24-bit Bitmap or, if you're using GIMP instead, switch to the RGB color space), make your changes, then save it back to whatever format you originally had.

But I strongly suggest you don't convert back to 256 color through MS Paint because it will try to match the colors to some predefined 256 colors (I think), which will make the colors a little bit different than usual. Use something like GIMP to go to 256 colors (convert the color space to Indexed) so it can use the colors closest to the ones in the image.

[coolkid]

Are you editing a GIF file?  If so, it makes the colors change to the closest shade originally in the picture to the one you try to use.

D'aw, crap! It is a GIF! What can I do now? Use GIMP, which is a bit too hard to figure out for me and, like Microsoft Photo Viewer, blurs everything when ZOOM-ZOOM-ZOOMed in?

[jdaster64]

Save it as a BMP or PNG, then open it again and it should be able to be edited normally.  I recommend PNG, though I've known it to have that problem also (albeit only once in a blue moon).

[penguinwizard]

Well, you won't get that blurring problem if you zoom in with MS Paint or GIMP (I've never had zoom problems with it). They blur the image so it still looks good when it's bigger than normal, but there's a point where it's too big and looks ugly. If you really want to make an image bigger without blurring it, resize it with no interpolation (MS Paint does that whenever you resize). If you resize it to 200% or 300% (generally any multiple of 100%), it will look fine. Anything else though, and it might look blocky - which is why interpolation is recommended when resizing so you smooth out the image. MS Paint doesn't do interpolation.

Saving the image as a BMP is simple. In MS Paint, go to File > Save As. In the window that pops up, look at "Save as type:" near the bottom. Change the box next to it so it says 24-bit Bitmap instead of GIF. In GIMP, do File > Save As, then type in some filename and type .bmp at the end of it (or type in a filename, then select Bitmap Image from the dropdown list of file types).

Complaints about GIMP being too difficult to use are common. It has so many features, and ease of use probably wasn't a priority. Adobe Photoshop has the same problem. That's why Adobe Photoshop Elements exists, to make frequently-used features easier to find and use, but that's something you pay for. I would recommend Paint.NET (download link's in the upper-right corner), but from screenshots it looks like it has GIMP's interface, so that isn't much help.

By the way, a few terms when using other image editors:
Resizing the image may be called "resampling", changing the image size to crop part of it might be called resizing the "canvas", and the usual blurring method when zooming in or resizing an image is either cubic or bicubic interpolation. If you want to actually blur an image without resizing it, the typical method used is Gaussian Blur. If you just want sharp edges to be smoothed out rather than smoothing the whole image, use Anti-alias.