Hacker News Reader

Comment by pxoe | Hacker News Reader

Background removal is really useful though, saves a bunch of time.

Unfortunately, some of the regular paint tools like eraser don't erase in a smooth antialiased way and just end up looking jagged (also only a square shape for eraser...no eraser brush mode unfortunately), so it ends up being a better looking option (well, when it works properly, which it does often enough to be useful). For whatever reason a bunch of tools and transforms (scaling, rotating), just produce such garbage jagged looking results, it's not serviceable even for those basics.

View on HN

I've been using ComfyUI to do fine background and watermark removal. Might take a look into that as an alternative. Run Flux.2 Klein or Comfyui's own workflow.

Key point, saves a bunch of time. Copy, paste, click button, done in three seconds. The app is also just there, preinstalled. It's great precisely because it doesn't require "looking into" anything. Yes, there's a bunch of other apps and services, but that's all besides that point. It also works pretty much on any pc made in past decade and half without crazy gpu/vram requirements for a relatively miniscule task.

Pixelation was a feature back in the 90’s and 2000’s.

But yea, I guess it’s a bug in 2026.

It's been a "bug" for several decades now. Not everything was of shitty jagged quality in either 90s or 00s. Particularly when using some more capable image editors.

If you’re actually intended to Paint in MS Paint, as in create things from scratch, you need to limit the upper end of quality for it to be usable.

Otherwise you might as well use photoshop.

(But no I’m not kidding myself, I realize the days of using Paint to actually Paint are over)

There's a bunch of smaller editors that don't have such problems, like paint.net for example. It's an arbitrary "limit" (accidental even) stemming purely from bad quality implementation of basic features, not from how basic that feature set is.

I like the original commenter’s compromise.

> It seems like they could have left it as a pure “paint” app and added the fancy stuff to some new image editor or something.

Apple Text Edit vs Pages.

Again, even a "pure" paint app with very limited functionality can have it be implemented badly, and it has nothing to do with how "fancy" or complex or advanced of a feature set it has.

If you don’t mind CLI, rembg is a good option for background removal. It lets you swap between different models depending on the type of image so you can use something like `birefnet` for photorealistic images and `toonout` for illustrations.

https://github.com/danielgatis/rembg

Reply on news.ycombinator.com