Product Reviews

Corel's new creative professionals brand Procreate has just released Painter 7 the first significant upgrade to the application since it was acquired from MetaCreations two years ago. Following on from 6.1, a small service upgrade last year, Corel has taken a long hard look at Painter. This latest version is easier to use and includes several significant new features such as better Photoshop integration, new natural media features and better colour and text management.

Each new version of Painter has improved on its ability to simulate realistic natural media effects such as inks, oil paints, chalks and pastels. Painter 7 adds two effects, Watercolours and Liquid Inks, which are powerful tools and enhance the program's ability to simulate real-life painting.

Previous versions of Painter featured watercolour brushesand were painted on an uneditable Canvas layer. Painter 7 featuresa watercolour layer so you can edit the layer as you would any other non-destructive layer. The watercolour technology simulates all aspects of watercolour painting - you can blur paints, erase and set opacity without changing anything on the main canvas.

Watercolour challenge

Once you've created a new watercolour layer you can select from more than a dozen prebuilt watercolour brushes or, by changing the settings inside a watercolour dialog box, you can manipulate virtually every aspect of the brush and paper settings.

Typically for Painter, the setting controls are extensive. You can set the overall wetness, drying and evaporation rates along with diffusion, as well as the wind direction to simulate painting outdoors. The watercolour brushes are stunning and very realistic. Colours bleed together and actually run on the screen creating a lacework of coloured strokes.

The only down side is that some of the larger watercolour brushes can be processor intensive and, depending on the type of watercolour brush you are using, some of the strokes are not in real time, which can make the feature difficult to judge accurately.

The Liquid Ink feature imitates the viscosity and surface tension of thick ink. When you apply multiple liquid ink strokes next to each other, they congeal in the same way as conventional thick ink. You can also apply a negative version of the ink so that you can carve out or remove ink from an image. Using different brush settings, liquid ink can create woodcut, enamel and scratch board type images.

If you are using Mac OS 9.1 or earlier, the improvements in the usability of

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Painter will appear minimal at first glance. The look and feel of version 6 has been retained with the same reliance on floating palettes with collapsible function commands.

Painter 7 is native to Mac OS X and running the Carbonized version makes maximum use of the Aqua interface, with semi-transparent palettes and Aqua buttons and sliders - the look is stunning. However, under Aqua the palettes do not automatically extend as they do in the Classic version.

Both the Classic and OS X versions include a new feature that allows you to build customised Brush, Object or Art Material palettes. On the surface, this may sound like a fairly small improvement, but actually it minimises the amount of screen palette clutter Painter is renowned for.

Brushed aside

Without doubt, the most significant new usability feature is Painter's Brush Library Architecture. In previous versions, you had no way of moving brush variants from one brush category to another either within the same library or to different libraries. You had to use a brush mover to move brush categories around different libraries and a Copy Variant command to move brush variants from one brush category to another.

Painter 7 has rationalised the process, making it simpler. Now all the brush variants are saved as individual XML files, which means they can be shared in the same way as a data file. Custom brushes that were created in earlier versions of Painter are fully supported and are converted into XML when you load them into Painter 7.

Colour management was not one of the main strengths of previous versions of Painter and configuring it to accurately use colour devices was something akin to a dark art. Painter 7 has greatly improved its colour management capabilities by combining all the essential settings into one dialog box, making it intuitive and easy to configure.

Three predefined colour management styles are available for the Web, desktop printing and professional output. You can set ICC profiles for monitors, scanners, digital cameras and printers.

Painter's improved colour management has yet another beneficial spin off: the program's RGB and CMYK colour space accurately matches other bitmapped programs such as Photoshop. While Painter is a natural partner to Photoshop, moving documents between the two applications was previously problematic. In addition to improved colour compatibility, Painter can finally open and save native RGB and CMYK Photoshop files, keeping layers intact.

Apart from these big improvements, Painter 7 has dozens of new features. These include better text handling that adds control for shadows and text on a path, a new perspective grid and new tools for adding colour reduction effects. Overall, this is an excellent upgrade that will certainly please existing Painter users who have been concerned that, under Corel, the program would be forgotten. Thankfully Painter looks set to be around for quite some time to come.

NEEDS: PowerPC G3 or higher, Mac OS 8.6 or higher, 64Mb RAM, 128Mb RAM for OS X, 24-bit (800 x 600) colour display, (1024 x 768 for Mac OS X)