Paintbrush is a Cocoa-based painting and illustrating program for the Mac, very similar to the Paint application on Windows. Paintbrush is easy to install and can support BMP, PNG, JPEG, and GIF. Paint programs even though work like bitmap programs, in general sense they are software that is supposed to give traditional painting medium feel and effects. On the right is an example of what an artist can do with a paint program. SmoothDraw is an easy, natural painting and digital free-hand drawing software that you may use to produce high-quality pictures. It supports many kinds of brushes (pen, pencil, dry media, airbrush, bristle brush, image hose, etc.), retouch tools, layers, etc.

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2. Mac Paint
3. Best Paint Program For Mac

What FREE software (included with Mac OS X, or public domain) would be a good, simple way to take some existing PNG clipart files and do some simple editing?

I really only need to do 3 things:

1. Rotate the image.
2. Clip the image.
3. Set a 'transparent' color.

I don't need anything that takes weeks to learn or is super-powerful or super expensive.

Hello71

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9 Answers

Mitch DempseyMitch Dempsey

Have a look at http://sourceforge.net/projects/paintbrush/This is a simple little tool.

Pierre WateletPierre Watelet

Not free, but I like Pixelmator a lot; it's a native Mac Photoshop clone, and it's reasonably cheap (about $60; it was on sale for half price at MacUpdate over the weekend, I'm hoping it shows up there again).

On Windows at work I use Paint.NET, but the Mac port of Mono isn't up to running it yet.

You could do most of those things with the Preview application on OS X.

ayazayaz

Have you looked at iPhoto? I can't remember if iPhoto does transparency.

But the Gimp is available for mac and easy to install. You can use Mac Ports or download it at the Gimp on Mac.

Gimp requires x11. Which is included with Snow Leopard. It's isn't a big deal to use or install. You do not have to do anything special to use it. Just launch the Gimp and it will launch x11.

If xll isn't on the machine, you can find it on the Snow Leopard install disc.

Let me stress this, you are not gonna find anything else that's open source (free) that does what the Gimp does. Running X11 is a SMALL price to pay to get all that free functionally.

There are several cheap alternatives to Photoshop too. Like Pixelmator. If you want a native mac app.

pixen looks like it has those features (but - I'm not any kind of a graphic artist!): I see 90-deg (but not arbitrary angle) rotation, transparent color layers, cutting and cropping.

You could try ImageMagick. It's command-line software rather than an app, and the learning curve is concomitantly steeper. But, since you have such a well-defined set of actions you want to take, learning how to do just those manipulations wouldn't be too hard.

blahdiblahblahdiblah

Preview has a transparency feature

All you have to do is pull up the image in preview, making sure it's in PNG format, then widen the preview window on the bottom right to see other buttons not readily seen in normal frame.

Simple Free Paint Program Review

You will see select button, click the pull down menu where you'll see instant alpha. Put the cursor on the area you want to make transparent, hold mouse down on that area and move mouse to fill area while holding mouse. The area will turn a orange color. Then hit delete, while holding mouse or orange will disappear, for areas to tiny or missed just use the rectangular selection and hit delete.

It actually works great I use it all the time.

Mokubai♦

For changing all of a specified colour to transparent, pngweasel is excellent. From the developer's page:

pngweasel is a fun little Mac OS X utility we put together to handle a common Web developer's task: converting an image to the PNG image format and making parts of the image's background transparent. It's lightweight, it's free, it's easy to use, and yes, there is a weasel.

Mac Paint

Also reviewed at https://www.macupdate.com/app/mac/27448/pngweasel

Best Paint Program For Mac

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