Editing a picture in Paint from Publish by Zaweba

Page layout and photo editing are different jobs, and the best tools for each are different too. A layout app is good at placing, cropping and wrapping text around a picture; an image editor is good at changing the pixels themselves. Publish by Zaweba and Paint by Zaweba are built to work as a pair, with a round trip between them for any picture in your publication.

Send a picture from Publish to Paint by Zaweba, make your changes, and save in Paint. The picture in Publish updates, and the update is an undoable change, so you can step back from it like any other edit. If Paint is not registered on your PC, Publish offers its download page instead.

When to reach for Paint

Publish already has quick adjustments of its own: recolouring to greyscale, sepia, washout or black and white, brightness and contrast, and picture shapes. Those cover a lot of everyday needs. Paint is for the work those adjustments cannot do.

Paint by Zaweba is a full image editor with layers, masks, selections, retouching tools such as content-aware fill, healing and the clone stamp, and one-click removal of plain backgrounds. That means you can take a stray bin out of a village fete photo, cut a product out of its background for a sale flyer, or tidy a blemish on a portrait for a member profile, and then carry straight on with your layout.

How the round trip works

Select the picture in Publish and send it to Paint. Paint opens with the picture ready to edit. Work on it as you normally would in Paint, then save. Back in Publish, the picture in your layout is updated with the new version.

Because the update in Publish is an undoable change, you are never stuck with an edit you regret. Undo in Publish and the earlier picture comes back. That makes it easy to try a bolder retouch, look at it in place on the page, and decide.

Your crop, frame, wrap and position in Publish stay as they were. Only the picture inside the frame changes, so a carefully placed photo does not need to be placed again.

Getting Paint if you do not have it

If Paint by Zaweba is not registered on the PC, Publish does not leave you with an error. It offers the download page so you can install it. Like Publish, Paint is free software that works offline without an account, so adding it to the same PC is straightforward.

A sensible order of work

It usually pays to place pictures roughly first, then decide which need real editing. A photo that looks wrong at full size might look fine once it is cropped into a small frame, and a picture that seemed fine may show a problem when it is the main image on a poster. Seeing it in place first saves editing pictures that did not need it.

Do the pixel work in Paint and the page work in Publish. Remove the background, retouch and correct colour in Paint; then crop, shape, add a border or set the wrap in Publish. Keeping each kind of job in the app built for it keeps both simpler.

If you plan to recolour a picture in Publish, such as setting it to sepia, do your retouching in Paint first and add the recolour afterwards. Publish recolours without changing the stored picture, so the two kinds of change stack neatly.

A worked example

Imagine a cafe menu with a photo of a cake on a busy table. Send the photo to Paint, remove the background so the cake stands alone, and save. In Publish the cut-out cake now sits in its frame, and with tight text wrap the menu items can curve around its outline. Add a soft rounded frame elsewhere for a photo of the shop, and the page comes together.

Working this way, Publish by Zaweba stays focused on the page while Paint takes care of the picture, and the round trip keeps the two in step.