Product Reviews

Everyone has a creative side, but it's often well hidden. If you want to let loose your inner artist, here's a cheap and easy way to do it with the help of your PC.

Like its big brother, the expensive and rather daunting Painter X, this simplified edition realistically mimics traditional art media such as oils, watercolours and pastels. In this long-awaited new release (version 3 appeared in 2005), the range of brushes on offer has been further expanded with new charcoal, calligraphy and sumi-e options. (Sumi-e is the traditional Oriental art of ink painting.) A number of the existing brushes have also gained Corel's new RealBristle technology, which goes even further to reproduce the interaction between paint, canvas and bristled brush.

There are so many brushes that it can be hard choosing the right one, but Corel helps you get started with a new Brush Drawer palette. This is divided into eight tabs for categories such as pens and pencils, dry media and thick paint, each providing access to a dozen or so variants, all shown as stroke previews. It's also a lot easier to reselect a brush you used earlier in a session, as these are automatically listed as icons next to the Drawer.

Once you've selected your brush, you need to load it with paint. Previously you did this using a colour wheel selector based on hue, saturation and brightness, but Painter Essentials 4 has two better alternatives. First up is the Colours palette, which offers a range of 88 ready-to-go swatches based on real

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paint colours such as Cobalt Blue and Cadmium Orange. Below this is the Mixer palette, where you can smear and sample your colours much as you would do on an artist's palette. The whole process is much more like real painting, and the end results, based on mixing a restricted range of colours, look more like traditional art too.

It's all very well for serious artists, but starting from a blank canvas is a challenge for the rest of us. Fortunately, Painter Essentials 4 encourages you to base your picture on an existing image. Select the new Photo Painting workspace and the palettes for choosing your paint are replaced by ones for working with photos, starting with the Source Image palette, which lets you select a currently open image or load one from disk. This source image is also stored as a hidden layer when you save your work-in-progress, which makes it much simpler to carry on from where you left off.

Picture perfect

The core of Painter Essentials' photo-to-art power is found in the Auto-Painting palette. This offers 18 preset effects, ranging from Classical Oil Painting to Watercolour Sketch and taking in various pencil sketches and artistic styles. Select one and hit Start, and Corel Painter Essentials 4 automatically prepares the image accordingly before recreating it in front of your eyes using dabs of paint applied with the appropriate brush.

Thanks to the new Smart Stroke technology, which dynamically changes factors such as brush size and stroke length based on the underlying image, the results really do look as if they were done by hand. Even better, you can customise the process by preparing the image differently, choosing a different brush, or changing parameters such as stroke shape and pressure. Once the auto painting has finished, you can go in and add thefinishing touches yourself using the current brush, or switch back to the Drawing & Painting workspace to use any other.

Painter Essentials 4 is rewarding, great fun and excellent value. If you're interested in making art on your PC, this is a great way to do it.