A picture opens on its Look tab, fitted to the window, and most pictures are only ever looked at, so nothing about the editor is allowed to slow that down. Click Change and you have the editor, which is built the other way round from the ones people know. There is no Filters menu and no wall of tools. A click means one of four things—point, box, freehand, brush—and that's the entire toolbar. What can be done is on the right-click menu of whatever you pointed at: right-click a red pixel and the menu is about that red—select everything like it, replace it, make it see-through—and then goes on to the whole picture, the file, and the folder it's in. Every change is kept as a step, so undo is cheap and a change made ten minutes ago can usually be taken out on its own.

Looking

Opening a Picture

Double-click a picture, in a folder or in a launcher pane, and it opens in the View on its Look tab. JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, WebP, TIFF and icon files open this way, and so do the HEIC and AVIF pictures phones take, which Windows can't always read. A photograph is turned the right way up from the camera's own note; an animated GIF or WebP shows its first frame.

The picture is fitted to the View, centered on a dark gray ground, and never blown up past its own size. Double-click it for one to one, with scroll bars and the wheel to move about; double-click again to fit it. Looking has no tools and no zoom keys on purpose. The Properties panel on the right-hand strip gives the size, and a folder of photographs can show the camera's own facts as columns: date taken, dimensions, camera maker and model, F-stop, exposure time, ISO speed, focal length, rating and tags.

The Next Picture

When you open a picture from a folder's listing, the Ahead arrow opens the next file in that listing, in the order the listing shows. A folder of photographs is a slide show. Back returns to the one before, and the Up arrow, labeled Up to the folder, goes back to the listing however far along you've been taken. Hold Back or Ahead down, or right-click it, for the list of where you've been.

What You Can Do With the File

Right-click a picture on its Look tab and the top of the menu is about the file; the folder it is in is a submenu below. Besides Cut, Copy, Copy as Path, Rename, Delete, Properties and Show in File Explorer, a picture offers:

• Set as Desktop Background makes it the wallpaper of the desktop you're on. A copy is kept inside that desktop's folder, so moving or deleting the original can't spoil it.
• Set as Album Cover, when there is music in the same folder, asks whether to put it into every recording there as the cover, in place of any cover they have, and then does.
• Create Icon makes an .ico beside the picture, in all the sizes Windows uses, keeping see-through parts. It works on any number of pictures at once.
• Convert to makes a copy in another format beside the original: JPEG, PNG, GIF, Bitmap, TIFF, WebP, AVIF, Icon or Targa. Any... opens a box that also asks for the quality and whether to leave the camera, date and location out. If the new name is taken, it asks before it overwrites.
• Resize... hands any number of pictures to PowerToys' Image Resizer, if that is installed.
• The trash can at the left of the bar does what Delete does, and asks first if the picture has changes that haven't been written.

If the picture has changes waiting to be written, the commands that work on the file as it is saved are grayed, and say so.

Making a New One

There is no New > Picture yet: no blank canvas, and no dialog asking for a size and a color. The nearest things are these:

• Paste a picture. Copy one in any program—a screen capture, a phone's picture, Sticky Notes' Copy image—and paste it onto a folder. It becomes a PNG named PastedImage- and the moment.
• Edit Selection. Select part of a picture, right-click, and choose Edit Selection: the selected pixels open in the View as a picture of their own, with no file yet. Its bar has Save As..., says Not saved as a file yet, and the trash can waits until it is saved. If you close one you've changed it asks whether to save it. Such a picture survives closing the program.

Changing

Click the Change tab. The bar gains four buttons, in words rather than pictures, because "Freehand" says what it does and a lasso has to be learned.

Four Tools

• Point moves the picture around when you drag it, and tells you what's under the pointer when you right-click. Press inside a selection and drag, and you carry away a copy of what's selected.
• Box selects a rectangle. A click without a drag clears the selection.
• Freehand selects what you draw round; it closes itself.
• Brush paints the selection on, or off with Alt. [ and ] make it smaller and larger; its size is in screen pixels, so it feels the same however far you've zoomed.

With Box, Freehand and Brush, Shift adds to the selection and Alt takes away from it; with neither, a new selection replaces the old one. That is the whole of the toolbar. A click has only ever meant one of those four things.

Moving About

The wheel zooms around the pointer, from 2 percent to 6400. + and - zoom too; Ctrl+0 fits the picture and Ctrl+1 shows it one to one; the arrow keys move it a little. The middle mouse button, or Space and a drag, moves the picture with any tool. Past one to one, pixels are drawn as the squares they are, and see-through parts show a checkerboard. The picture has to have the focus for the keys to work, so click it once.

Selections

A selection isn't just in or out: each pixel is selected by some amount, which is how edges can be soft. It's drawn as marching ants over a light blue tint. Ctrl+A selects everything; Ctrl+D or Esc selects nothing; Ctrl+Z, Ctrl+Y and Ctrl+Shift+Z undo and redo. Choosing a selection isn't a step in the history, since it changes no pixels. Delete makes the selection see-through. Ctrl+C copies the selection, or the whole picture if nothing is selected, as a picture with everything outside the selection see-through and its soft edges faded.

A Menu About What You Pointed At

Right-click and hold still for a click, and the menu is headed by what you pointed at, in plain words: This dark blue, with a chip of the color, or The selection, or The whole picture. (Plain words, because nobody right-clicks a pixel expecting to be told it is "Cornsilk.") Below that come submenus for the bigger things it is part of—the whole picture, then the file, then the folder—each offering exactly what it offers anywhere else. Not a copy of the folder's menu: the same one, which is why the two can never drift apart.

A command whose name ends in dots asks something first, in one small window that sits in the picture's top right corner rather than the middle, where it would cover the very pixels whose change it's previewing. Tick Show on the picture to see the change as you adjust it. OK or Enter accepts; Cancel or Escape puts everything back. A command that can't be done is grayed, with the reason as its tip.

A Color

Right-click a pixel and you're talking about its color. Tolerance, in each of these, says how near a color has to be to count as the same one.

• Select All Like This... selects every pixel in the picture of about that color.
• Select This Patch... selects only the connected patch around the pointer, measured against the color you started on, so a gradient doesn't leak.
• Replace With... changes that color, everywhere in the picture, to another you choose, keeping soft edges soft.
• Make See-Through... makes that color transparent, everywhere.

The Selection

Right-click inside a selection. First the commands that change what's selected: Select Nothing; Select Everything Else, which swaps what's in for what's out; Grow... and Shrink..., by a number of pixels; and Soften the Edge..., which fades whatever you do next across that distance. Then the commands that change the pixels inside it:

• Fill With... paints it with a color.
• Make See-Through clears it.
• Crop to It cuts the picture down to the smallest rectangle round the selection.
• Crop to a Ratio or Size... is described next.
• Make Gray and Invert the Colors.
• Brightness and Contrast..., each from -100 to 100.
• Copy, as described above.

Every change to the colors fades out across a softened edge, rather than stopping at a staircase of pixels. Making part of a JPEG or a Bitmap see-through is refused before you start—"Convert it to PNG first"—because those formats can't keep it, and the honest thing is to say so before the work is done.

The Whole Picture

Right-click outside any selection, or on the picture's own submenu: Select Everything; Make Gray, Invert the Colors and Brightness and Contrast...; Flip Left to Right, Flip Top to Bottom, Turn Left and Turn Right; and Resize..., which asks for a percentage from 1 to 400 and smooths well. Turning and resizing let the selection go.

Cropping to a Ratio or Size

From a selection's menu, Crop to a Ratio or Size... asks what shape to crop to: Any shape; an Aspect ratio, picked from the usual ones—1:1, 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, 21:9, 9:16 and more—or typed, as 16:9 or 1.91:1, with a Swap button to stand it on its end; or a Fixed size in pixels. It remembers your last answer. (To use the whole picture, press Ctrl+A first.)

Then it lays a frame on the picture: the biggest frame of that shape that fits inside the selection, in its middle, with the outside dimmed and thirds lines to compose by. Nothing has changed yet.

• Drag the middle to move the frame; pull a corner to resize it. A ratio keeps its shape; a frame of any shape can be pulled from any edge; a fixed size only moves.
• The arrow keys nudge it a pixel, ten with Shift.
• Enter, or a double-click inside it, crops—as one step in the history. Esc lets it go.
• Right-click offers Crop, Ratio or Size..., Keep as Selection and Cancel.

What Has Been Done

The history isn't a pile of snapshots. Twenty undos of a twelve-megapixel photograph kept as copies would come to a gigabyte, so instead the picture on screen is the picture as it was opened, replayed through every change made since. That makes undo cheap, and it allows something the big editors don't quite have: a change made ten minutes ago can be taken out on its own. Once you've made a change, the picture's submenu offers:

• Undo: made gray and Redo, which name the step.
• What Has Been Done, a numbered list of every step. Each has Go Back to Here (or Redo Up to Here) and Take This Step Out.
• Back to How It Was Opened.
• Write the Changes Now.

A step can't be taken out once later steps have worked on a picture at the size it left, which is why a crop, a turn or a resize stays; the menu says so. A new change after an undo discards what could have been redone. The history lasts as long as the picture stays open.

There Is No Save Button

A line on the bar always says how many changes are waiting—"3 changes, written to the file when the picture is put down"—because a photograph is the one thing people most need to know that about. A picture is written when you open something else, close it, switch desktops or close the program, or at once if you choose Write the Changes Now. And since a photograph can be overwritten the moment somebody switches desktops, writing it is done carefully:

• Nothing is lost for good. The first time a picture is written in a sitting, the original goes to the Recycle Bin as Sunset (before changes).jpg.
• Nothing is half written. The new picture is written to a file of its own first, and swapped in only when it's complete.
• Nothing the camera wrote is thrown away. The date, the camera, the color profile, the keywords and the rest go into the new file. A JPEG keeps the quality it was saved with, though never less than 75.

On a drive with no Recycle Bin—a USB stick, a network share—there's nowhere to put the original, so Desktop Minder asks instead, when you leave the Change tab, close the picture, or close the program: Do you want to save these changes to Sunset.jpg? They'll be permanent. Yes writes over it; No lets the changes go and gives you the picture as it was last written; Cancel stays where you are. Where there is a bin, nothing is asked.

Taking a Selection With You

With Point, press inside a selection and drag: you carry away a copy of the selected pixels, with everything around them see-through and the soft edges faded, and the picture is left untouched. Drop it on a folder or a launcher pane and it becomes a new PNG there; drop it on a contact's photo, or into another program that takes pictures. A selection can only be copied, never moved.

When It Won't Change

Some pictures can be looked at but not changed, and the bar on the Change tab says why. Icons, because working on one would throw away the other sizes it holds; HEIC pictures, which can't be written back; pictures with several frames, motion photos, and pictures with more color depth than the editor keeps, because writing them back would lose something. A read-only file gets no Change tab at all. Everything else goes back as the kind of file it was: JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, WebP, AVIF or Targa.

Not Yet

• A blank picture to start from.
• Painting with a brush (the Brush only selects), drawing, shapes, text and layers.
• Turning by any angle but a quarter turn, and adjustments beyond Make Gray, Invert the Colors and Brightness and Contrast.
• Resizing to an exact size rather than a percentage. For now the file's Resize... uses PowerToys.
• Writing the changes to a copy, instead of back to the picture.
• Camera RAW files and SVG drawings, which will each get a document of their own.
• Dropping one thing onto another: an open picture takes nothing dropped on it. Text should become a layer of words on it, and a picture dropped on a picture a layer of its own, which means layers come first.