Paintbrush for Mac

Used Paintbrush for Mac? Share your experience and help other users.

Key Details of Paintbrush

Paint app similar to MacPaint & Microsoft Paint.
Last updated on February 21, 2024
There have been 2 updates
Virus scan status:
Clean (it’s extremely likely that this software program is clean)

Editors’ Review

Download.com staffFebruary 21, 2024

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 files.

The Paintbrush interface is very simple, with a floating menu with basic tools selectable for drawing on the left, and a menu bar at the top. If you've worked with Paint, Paintbrush looks and behaves the same. It takes only a few seconds to select a tool and draw with it. Paintbrush is all freehand art, although there are the traditional handles for things like circles and rectangles. While not as powerful as third-party illustration tools, Paintbrush can do many basic illustrations. It is also good at importing screenshots and highlighting areas or manipulating the image.

Paintbrush is easy to work with, and if you work on multiple platforms it is handy to have a familiar tool on both Windows and Mac. Having said that, Paintbrush is a basic illustration tool, and as long as that's the way you want to use it, it's great at that task.

Paintbrush for Mac

Used Paintbrush for Mac? Share your experience and help other users.

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Full Specifications

GENERAL

Release: September 16, 2019

Latest update: February 21, 2024

Version: 2.6

OPERATING SYSTEMS

Platform: Mac

Operating System: Mac OS X

POPULARITY

Total Downloads: 185,176

Downloads Last Week: 3

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Last Updated

User Reviews

3.5/5

19 User Votes

Weird counterintuitive behaviour
snthFebruary 16, 2013
Pros
free [We're required to enter at least 10 characters, so this here's a bonus-line. Enjoy.]
Cons
confusion is also free
Summary
I use select rectangle and expect to cut, and get a red rectangle. took me only 5 minutes to realize this thing was even worse than the previous version, which was merely slow, awkward and crash-prone. But what it could do actually made some sense.
primitive and some features not working at all
roninzokuDecember 18, 2012
Pros
looks like windows version paintbrush
Cons
It is NOT Paintbrush and it's a little primitive in this era. (1) Canvas size could not be resized by dragging the edge of the window frame, instead we need to specify the dimension which is a challenge. (2) Font colour could not be changed - it's always BLACK!! (3) Cutting and pasting from another picture, and changing canvas size crashed many times!! (4) "Contact Us" is as good as not giving us the email address as they never respond to our queries/feedback.
Summary
Disappointment!
no good - won't cut and paste after 2 hrs into a dwg
mhpellerinJuly 5, 2012
Pros
simple like paint - to bad it doesn't work as well as paint
Cons
won't cut and paste after 2 hrs into a dwg
Summary
Absolutely needed, clean and simple, some rough edges
JohnGableMarch 17, 2012
Pros
Very simple to use and very similar to PaintBrush on Windows or the old Mac Paint app. 90% of the time I only have very basic things to do, and this let's me do that. Other apps are much too complex, do way to much, and therefore make simple things hard.
Cons
A bit rough on the edges. When copying and pasting within Zoom mode, it would not have what I pasted selected in any usable way.
Summary
If you need a simple paint program, that does get drowned in lots of advanced features, layers, photo effects, etc, get this.
Unstable and Glitchy.... and too simple
HugeEugeOctober 28, 2011
Pros
relatively easy to use
Cons
tools randomly change color, missing important functionality like being able to rotate image 90 degrees. When image is selected there is no way to stretch it like in every other paint program out there. Trying to resize selected image causes the program to crash 9 out of 10 times.
Summary
The developers have a good idea but the software just needs ALOT more development. This is the first time since I've gone MAC that I'm reminiscing about the good-old days of Microsoft Paint
A good and fun program. Reminds me of the old MacPaint.
JohntheDragonSlayerJune 11, 2011
Pros
Easy to use!
Cons
It is so simple that one would think it to be more than it is.
Summary
Very good program. Get it if you can.
Very frustrating product
wordsmythe99April 3, 2011
Pros
It has most of the basic features you would want.
Cons
Colors keep switching when you do not want them to; the eraser is terrible, sometimes adding color rather than subtracting; changing between instruments/options and the zoom arrows are sometimes very unresponsive. In dire need of a user's manual.
Summary
Still needs a lot of work.
Succeeds at what it sets out to do
ThomasHarteMarch 17, 2011
Pros
Simple, well written, fits nicely into the OS environment, fun.
Cons
Limited functionality, I guess, but that's sort of the point.
Summary
It's a fun little play around tool that does exactly what it intends: provides a slim, light MacPaint/Microsoft Paint-style piece of software for the modern Mac.
perfect little image prog
westhendon_dotmacJanuary 29, 2011
Pros
saves me firing up Photoshop for those little jobs
Cons
none - simple little image editor
Summary
always useful to have
Just OK...
mwjacobsJanuary 13, 2011
Pros
Looks nice. Works fine.
Cons
Nothing really wrong with it.
Summary
Not what I was looking for.

Developer’s Description

By Soggy Waffles

Paint app similar to MacPaint & Microsoft Paint.

Paintbrush is a Cocoa-based paint program for Mac OS X, similar to Microsoft Paint and the now-defunct MacPaint. The project's ultimate goal is to recreate the basic functionality of Microsoft Paint, which has been noticeably absent from Mac OS X for years. Paintbrush can open and save to most major image formats, including BMP, PNG, JPEG, and GIF.