Ever since the launch of MacPaint back in 1984, brush-based bitmap programs have shown that computers aren’t just useful for boosting productivity but can also be truly creative. MacPaint launched a host of imitators such as PC Paintbrush and Paint Shop Pro, but nowadays the paint side of things has almost been forgotten as bitmap editors have found their true calling: photo editing.

However onscreen painting remains one of the most creatively rewarding and enjoyable things that you can do with your computer – but only if you have the right software.

Of course all bitmap-based photo-editors still offer brushes for applying colours to an image, and a lot of effort has been put into making these accurately simulate their real world artistic counterparts as seen in the recent Photoshop CS5’s new Mixer Brush. The end results can certainly be impressive, but the way you go about achieving them is hardly spontaneous and natural. This is especially the case with the market-leading art program, Corel Painter 11, where it sometimes feels like you need a PhD before you can put pen to paper.

To emulate the real artistic process, it’s crucial that the software gets out of the way as much as possible and lets you get on with painting. You probably have just such a program on your current system, but the chances are that you haven’t bothered loading it. Microsoft has included a paint program with every release of Windows since version 1.0. Microsoft Paint certainly meets the simple and hands-on criteria – so much so that it has always seemed targeted at kids.

However if you are a Windows 7 user, it’s worth taking another look. What makes the new version of Paint interesting are its new brushes and in particular the new Oil and Watercolour options. Rather than laying down clearly-artificially, solid strokes these lay down semi-transparent, varying strokes to create the illusion that they were laid down by bristled brushes. Perhaps just as importantly, they run out of paint much as they would in real life.

Artistic Number Crunching

The new brushes are far more realistic and creatively rewarding as a result. However Paint will never be able to deliver a truly realistic artistic experience or results. The problem is fundamental – it turns out that traditional bitmap editors just aren’t up to the job. Bitmap-based painting programs are essentially RGB number crunchers, taking existing pixels’ colour values and the current paint’s colour values and determining end values based on brush behaviour. Real paint simply doesn’t work like this and the interaction of paint, canvas and brush can’t be captured by RGB values alone.

To mimic real paint, colour handling is not enough. Oil paint is thick and the software needs to be able to take this into account to determine how new paint and brushes will interact with it, how far you can smear it, how much of the canvas grain will show through and so on. Modelling watercolour is even more complex as whether pigment fringes at the edges of strokes or diffuses into existing strokes depends on how wet the brush and canvas are.

Corel Painter does work like this (storing the extra information in its extended RIFF format) and it’s the secret of the program’s artistic end results, but also the explanation for its intimidating complexity. However recently I came across a program that brilliantly combines advanced Painter-style processing behind-the-scenes with simple, hands-on, front-of-house handling that is more reminiscent of Microsoft Paint.

You can read the details in my review of ArtRage Studio Pro 3, but it’s especially important to try out painting software yourself so I strongly recommend that you download the 30-day trial version. There’s also a free Starter Edition, but the full Pro version only costs US$80 and is a vast improvement. In fact it’s the most artistic, creatively rewarding and enjoyable computer-based experience I’ve had all year.

Sadly, our test laptop isn’t touchscreen, so we’re forced to rely on the demos and a brief play with a HP Touchsmart PC to form our early opinion on the multitouch features.

Touch works well on the Windows desktop. As soon as you tap the screen with your finger, the now redundant mouse cursor disappears, and images of water droplets appear underneath your finger, providing an intuitive visual guide to the accuracy of your finger jabbing.

The new larger icons on the Taskbar are much more touch friendly that the slender bars of XP or Vista, making it effortless to switch between different open windows. As we mentioned in the interface section, the new Taskbar jumplists can be activated by swishing your finger upwards, instantly spooling out a list of recent items or commands that are available to that application. Microsoft has sensibly made the jumplist text 25% larger when it detects you’re using the touchscreen controls, making it easier – if still not easy – to select the desired entry.

Touch-friendly applications?

The novelty of the multitouch controls starts to evaporate when you start using them in regular Windows applications, however. In Microsoft Word, for example, you can swish your finger up and down the screen to scroll through documents, with the entire window visibly shaking when you reach the top or bottom of the page, providing a clever visual cue. Word documents can also be zoomed in and out using the now familiar pinch controls. (Incidentally, PC Pro’s Jon Honeyball asked Microsoft if it was confident of avoiding legal action from Apple over the use of such touch controls; the question was elegantly sidestepped).

But applications such as Word will always, always require the use of mouse and keyboard. And frankly, scrolling through documents with a flick of the mouse wheel is just as simple as daubing your fingers across the screen, and potentially smearing the display. It’s touch for touch’s sake. Ditto Internet Explorer, where you can manually drag down the address bar in IE8 with a swish of the finger, but need the digits of an eight-year-old child to accurately pick out the tiny URL required from the drop-down menu. Swishing the finger left and right to replace the back and forward buttons in the browser is reasonably satisfying, but hardly necessary.

The multitouch controls are more at home in applications such as photo editing and drawing, especially now that the new Paint application has an Office 2007-style Ribbon interface, but we can’t help feeling that Microsoft needs to put a lot more thought into touch-friendly overlays if it really wants this feature to take off.