Paintbrush is a simple paint program for Mac OS X, reminiscent of Microsoft Paint and Apple’s own now-defunct MacPaint. It provides users with a means to make simple images quickly, something that has been noticeably absent from the Mac for years.When Apple released the original Macintosh in 1984, they included two applications: MacWrite and MacPaint. Twenty-five years later, every Mac still includes a basic text editor in TextEdit, but a simple paint program is a thing of the past.
Enter Paintbrush.
Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and GIF. Full support for transparency is available for image formats that support an alpha channel (currently PNGs and GIFs). You can also paste images copied from many common Mac applications, including Microsoft Office and Apple iWork.
Last updated in December of 2017, Paintbrush 2 brings with it a multitude of new features, including (to name a few):
- An updated and streamlined new UI
- Transparent selection and marching ants for the selection tool
- A completely rewritten Text tool for pinpoint-accurate insertion
- Four all-new tools: Airbrush, Rounded Rectangle, Eyedropper, and Zoom
- Image resizing, canvas resizing, and cropping
- Countless bug fixes and speed improvements
And much, much more!
Disclaimer: Paintbrush is
not intended to replace Adobe Photoshop or other high-end image editors. Instead, it aims to fill the need for a basic, streamlined, and Mac-native image editor. Whether you need to quickly crop a photo, add some text to an image, or just have fun doodling, Paintbrush has you covered. Sporting a simple and intuitive UI, Paintbrush will have you discovering your inner van Gogh in no time. Just pick a tool, pick a color, and go!
Oh, and did we mention that Paintbrush has always been, and will always be, completely free? (That’s both free as in
gratis and free as in
libre: the full source is distributed under an open-source license.)
Interested yet? What are you waiting for? Click
here for a list of downloads.
Happy painting!
