Microsoft Revives Paint: How the Iconic App is Gaining New Relevance

The recently introduced Recall feature may have dominated headlines related to Microsoft’s Copilot+ announcements, but another exciting addition is bringing renewed interest to Paint. Meet Cocreator—a cutting-edge AI capability that transforms your quick sketches, enhanced with text prompts, into strikingly realistic images in real-time. While it may not always nail it on the first attempt, patience is key, as providing detailed descriptions yields better results.

At the top right of the interface, you’ll find three options: Layers, Cocreator, and Image Creator. Unlike Image Creator, which generates images solely based on textual input, Cocreator combines both your drawings and text to produce a more refined image.

Additionally, a Creativity slider allows you to enhance or reduce image quality, while a Style drop-down menu offers a variety of artistic options, including Charcoal, Digital Art, Oil Painting, Watercolor, Pixel Art, Anime, Photorealistic, and Ink Sketch. An editor familiar with the tool noted the impressive responsiveness of the Creativity slider and the rapid image generation, highlighting the feature’s suitability for Paint, often overlooked in the software landscape. While some might liken Cocreator to a smaller version of Microsoft Designer, it accomplishes its intended purpose effectively. The catch? You’ll need a Copilot+ PC equipped with a neural processing unit (NPU). Despite the assumption that your laptop’s GPU or CPU could handle these tasks, Microsoft has chosen to limit this feature to its latest Copilot+ PCs.