Product Reviews

As the name suggests, Painter Essentials is a slimmed-down version of Corel's 'natural media' painting application, Painter X (Reviews, 2 March, p31). More than just a subset of Painter's tools and features, Painter Essentials is designed with novices in mind, though to take full advantage of the program, some basic drawing skills wouldn't go amiss.

In recognition of the fact that the starting point even for accomplished illustrators is very often a source photo, Corel has provided Painter Essentials with two workspace configurations, either one of which can be selected from the welcome screen when the application launches. The Photo Painting workspace provides tools for creating illustrations, using a photo source layer; Drawing and Painting sets you up with a blank canvas, colours palette, mixer, colour wheel and layers palette. You can switch between the two layouts and hide the palette dock but that's about the limit of workspace customisation.

The Photo Painting workspace displays Source Image, Auto-Painting and Restore detail palettes. Producing machine-generated illustration from a photo in Painter Essentials couldn't be easier. Select a style from the pull-down menu - there's a choice of 14 including oils, gouache, watercolour, pen and ink, pencil and chalk - click on the start button and a script applies paint in the chosen style, cloning from the source photo.

You can stop the process at any time but generally the longer you wait, the better it gets. Auto painting employs the new Smart Stroke technology introduced in Painter X, painting with brush strokes that follow the forms of the source photo and dynamically changing brush size, stroke length

ADVERTISEMENT

and pressure. Though they wouldn't get past a professional illustrator, the results are superior to anything you could expect to achieve with an effects filter and at the very least provide the basis for something that can be continued by hand.

As some of the styles tend to leave white gaps in the canvas, hand finishing is often a necessity rather than an option. It's then you discover that doing it yourself is no more difficult, albeit a little slower, than leaving it to the script. Unless you're a spectacularly talentless artist or using a mouse (a tablet is pretty much a requirement), the results are quite impressive. All the brushes in the Photo Painting workspace operate in cloning mode - taking colour from the source image - and a new dockable Brush Drawer makes it easy to quickly switch brushes, something you need to do quite a lot in the beginning. Brushes are grouped into tabbed categories and displayed using a good-sized sample stroke, so you can see what you're getting before applying it to the canvas.

Recently used brushes are displayed on the outside of the drawer, so you don't have to open it to select them. Restore detail brushes progressively knock back the over painting to reveal the original photo but unless you're simply removing paint for the purpose of starting over, they need a very light touch to avoid crude results.

RealBristle, Corel's trademarked technology that reproduces the bending and splaying of conventional brush hairs, is another Painter X feature that has made the cut; Painter Essentials includes six RealBristle brushes.

The new Mixer palette - which works like a real palette - additional brushes, pens and paper textures, and the ability to save source images within the Riff file are worthwhile improvements.

But the main event in this new version is the interface revamp, which will give Painter Essentials a much broader appeal among those who aspire to illustrate but lack the necessary skills and confidence.

One thing that still needs addressing though is the confusing setup where the cloned painting layer appears below rather than above the source image in the layers palette. Other than that, Painter Essentials 4 delivers what it promises on the box - an easy-to-use home art studio.