Corel Painter is a sort of more artistic alternative to Adobe’s Photoshop. While the functionality of Photoshop and Painter overlap to some extent, the Adobe product is probably best thought of as an image processing program that also does some artistic stuff. In Painter, the emphasis is the other way around.
Painter specialises in creating digital art that looks a lot like the sort of thing you would paint or draw using watercolours, oils, pen and ink or pencils. It has all kinds of tools for applying realistic media effects and its digital inks and paints even interact with one another and with the ‘paper’ onto which they are applied to blend and fade just like the ‘real thing’.
Painter 12 can be used to enhance photographic images by sharpening and smoothing, adjusting colours and applying textures and effects such as motion blurs and zooms. You can select among alternative user interfaces (workspaces). Here I have selected the ‘What’s New’ workspace.
In this new release there have been various changes to the user interface and improvements to the fundamental features. There are new tools such as the mirror painter for creating simple bisymmetrical images and the kaleidoscope tool for creating complex symmetrical images. There is also a quick brush-selector that let’s you choose one of the ten most recently used brushes.
You can configure the workspace to a large extent and you can also download ready-to-run workspaces from the Corel web site (if you have a slow connection, however, bear in mind that the download is 116MB). A workspace can substantially change the Painter user interface. Once you’ve imported some workspaces, you can switch from one to the other by making a menu selection. This may change the arrangement and content of toolbars, windows and palettes. The provided workspaces include some which are, in principle, best suited to artists working in ‘digital watercolour’ or ‘concept sketching’ and there is one that, to some extent, mimics Photoshop. There is also a new Navigator panel which (in a Photoshop-like way) lets you move around a large image with the help of a small preview pane.
To get to know your way around the new features in Painter 12, there is a ‘What’s New’ workspace plus a tutorial to go with it. The links to the workspaces and tutorials are all on the opening screen of Painter 12. Windows users may find some tutorials a bit Mac-centric. They show the Mac interface and refer to the Mac keyboard’s Command-and-Option keys instead of Control-and-Alt.
There have also been some improvements to artistic functionality. These include a set of new ‘real watercolour’ and ‘real wet oil’ brushes with names such as ‘Real wet wash’, ‘Fractal wash’ and ‘Liquid oil’. The default configuration of each brush can be customised by setting properties such as ‘wetness’ and ‘water viscosity’ which affects the way in which the digital ‘paint’ flows and interacts with the virtual paper and other pigments. For example, when I create a watercolour brush with low viscosity and high evaporation, the paint fades very quickly after each brush stroke; when I change to high viscosity and low evaporation, it fades much less. The only downside of all these brush properties is that there are so many of them that it is often hard to guess what will be the effect of making fine adjustments to each.
The real speciality of Painter is, as its name suggests, its painting capabilities. It has all kinds of ‘natural media’ effects that can be applied digitally. One addictive new features is its kaleidoscope tool which I’ve used here to draw a symmetrical flower just by painting a single petal which Painter 12 replicates automatically.
If you are an artist and need a computer program that lets you express your creativity, Painter 12 is the perfect choice. If you are an existing Painter user, while the range of new features is not enormous, they may be sufficient to warrant an upgrade. Though, it has to be said that the upgrade price (at about 50% of the full cost of the program) is not very generous.
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