Product Reviews

The latest version of Painter is the most ambitious to date. Over the past five years, Fractal has upgraded the program almost annually. Now, its new owner, MetaCreations, is attempting to attract new users who may not necessarily need 'natural media' painting capabilities, with a revamp which focuses mainly on special effects.

Painter 5.0 includes more tools, brushes and image manipulation effects than any other program of its type on the Mac. One of the most significant features of this upgrade is the redesigned open architecture, which allows third-party developers to extend the program's capabilities.

The first examples of this new technology in action are Painter's expandable plug-in brushes, some of which have filter-like capabilities. More than 100 new brush variants have been added to the program and, significantly, they are designed to work with existing images rather than used to create original artwork. Previous versions of Painter lacked basic retouching capabilities, for which users often had to resort to other programs. Painter's new Photo brushes mean you can blur, sharpen, dodge and burn without migrating to another application. You can also paint out scratches while simultaneously adding a paper texture or graduation. A set of Super-Cloning brushes allows you to clone images and simultaneously scale, twist, skew or place perspective effects.

While these brushes offer powerful transformation effects, using them effectively is another matter, as they are not intuitive, particularly if you need to create four-point transformations such as perspectives. The best new brushes - and arguably the most fun to use - are the Gooey ones. These are functionally similar to Kai's Power GOO and Valis MetaFlo, allowing images to be twirled, twisted, bulged and stretched with an amazing degree of control.

Three years ago, Painter 2.0 was the first application to support floating selections, known as Floaters. But with the release of Photoshop 4.0 and its powerful layering capabilities, Painter's Floaters seemed a chore, as they meant you had to carve an image into multiple layers using the selection tools.

With version 5.0, however, you can create a new separate transparent layer and paint directly onto it using Painter's brushes. The downside is that you

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need to use an entirely different set of transparent brushes to paint on the layer. This makes the process much more complicated and clutters Painter's busy interface. While transparent Floaters let you paint over an existing image without harming it, a new set of dynamic plug-in Floaters allow you to apply special effects and image processing adjustments to underlying image layers without altering them. This means you can experiment with special effects without having to worry about your original image being altered.

In contrast to Photoshop's Adjustment layers, which only offer simple tweaks such as image levels, Painter 5.0 can create amazing effects. The Burn and Torn Floaters apply scorch marks and tears to selected areas, while the Kaleidoscope and Distortion Floaters create lens effects similar to those found in Kai's Power Tools' F/X filter.

Bevel World will appeal to Web designers who need sophisticated control over the creation of 3D buttons, with adjustable bevels that can be changed on the fly. The best dynamic plug-in and arguably the coolest painting tool available anywhere is Liquid Metal, which provides a metallic paint that is not only shiny and runny but also reflects the underlying image. Each metallic blob you paint is a discreet and editable object that you can pull and push around like real liquid metal. You also have a choice of metals to paint with, with settings that include chrome and 'indoor' metals.

Dynamic plug-ins are also part of Painter's open architecture, so expect to see some existing third-party effects appearing soon. One of the problems with many of the dynamic plug-in Floaters is that Painter actually copies a selection directly into the Floater before the effect has been applied, so technically, they don't actually float above an image. This can cause some problems when experimenting with an effect, because the new Floater obscures the original image. However, the plug-ins that do float above an image, such as Brightness and Contrast, work well and are relatively fast.

There are other improvements which bring Painter closer to established industry standards. Masking and selection is now much easier thanks to the revamped Magic Wand tool, and there's also the ability to create up to 16 Alpha channels. The upgrade still doesn't support CMYK, however, and to address this, MetaCreations has added support for the Kodak Color Management System (KCMS).

Like other Painter upgrades, this latest version includes a good mix of practical improvements and powerful new tools. Existing users will love it, but new users are likely to find the program's cluttered interface difficult to use. MetaCreations should be commended for squeezing in so many features, and you certainly get value for money, but as the program has grown in complexity, the need to create a more manageable interface has become essential.