Microsoft Details Upcoming Fresh Paint App Update, Partners With CanvasPop To Print Paintings

Microsoft today detailed the upcoming Fresh Paint app for Windows 8.1 devices that is coming on Oct 18th. The new Fresh Paint features watercolor support, a new graphite pencil set, new ways to work with photos and a new modern user interface. Microsoft has also made improvements to stylus pressure, more realistic rendering for watercolor.

The exciting part of the update is the ability to make high quality canvas prints. Microsoft has partnered with CanvasPop to print the paintings you make on FreshPaint.

Fresh Paint is the first painting app to integrate CanvasPop’s new printing API. We believe in pushing the boundaries of what is possible with art in the digital age. We’re bringing that to life by helping you turn your digital paintings and drawings into amazing physical pieces that you can hang in your living room or give as gifts. This new functionality is a direct result of user feedback. And, we’re making it easy.

After putting the finishing touches on your painting in Fresh Paint, just swipe up from the bottom of your canvas and tap print. You’ll get a customized page where you can select your size and framing options, and we’ll take care of everything from there including handing off a special, high quality version of your painting. CanvasPop then prints your piece, hand frames it, and ships it to you.

It is not just the simple print integration, Microsoft has developed a new technology that will scale your paintings on small devices to large canvas prints.

Our team and the folks at CanvasPop worked hard to make this experience seamless and simple. One of the challenges we tackled was how to make it possible to print large, high-quality prints from small devices. With many graphics programs the user needs to choose the file size before beginning. We felt that would interrupt the user experience, make the product more complex, and knew it would be challenging for small devices to handle very large files.

Instead, we developed a way to scale the paintings after they were completed. We do this by analyzing the painting pixel by pixel using bilinear filtering, and then smoothing out pixels as it scales. It is the equivalent of zooming in very close to the painting, taking a ton of pictures of it, and then stitching all of them together to make a giant rendering of the painting. This allows us to render very large prints even from small devices in a way that keeps the user experience simple, magical, and fun.

I’m also pleased to share that we are making some special offers available for our fan base. Check out our Facebook and Twitter feeds for special offers the week of Oct 18, or visit canvaspop.com/freshpaintoffer.

Source: Microsoft