Product Reviews

The latest version of Painter includes a completely revamped interface along with some powerful new features that significantly improve workflow, usability and access to many of the deep inner features of the program.

Past versions of Painter were criticised for their stubborn and cluttered interfaces. Although version 7.0 made some important improvements to the overall usability of the program, version 8.0 should finally silence many of the series' critics. The program sports a redesigned vertical toolbox that contains all its key drawing and painting tools. You can now rapidly access and select all of Painter's main libraries, such as papers, gradients and brush nozzles, directly from selection icons at the bottom of the toolbox. This feature alone greatly reduces the amount of on-screen palette clutter.

The new Property bar now replaces the old Controls palette. Docked just below Painter's main menu, it displays control settings for each active tool. For instance, when you select the Brush tool, the Property bar changes to reflect the current brush settings - size, opacity and grain and so on - all of which can be numerically set on the fly or with the pop-up slider adjusters. The Property bar makes tool refinement and adjustment quicker and more user friendly.

More new buttons

Another interface addition is the new Brush Selector. This is a small floating palette that offers rapid access to Painter's vast brushes library, which has now been increased to over 400 default variants using 30 different media. From the Brush Selector you can choose a brush category, such as watercolour, and then set its variants. Like the new Property bar and toolbox, Painter's Brush Selector palette can be undocked and moved to any position on the screen. In another move to reduce the number of on-screen palettes and to improve workflow, you can now group any combination of palettes together, which means you can access

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only the palettes used regularly.

An annoying trait of all drawing and paint applications is the methods you're forced to use in the selection and mixing of new colours. Painter 8.0 addresses this issue properly with a new Colour Mixing palette. The main colours you want to mix are contained in a set of colour wells at the top of the palette, and a resizable brush tool enables you to you add colour to the palette mixing pad where you blend and mix colours in the same way you would in the real world. Colours can be blended further using a Palette Knife tool and to get the exact colour required, Pan and Zoom tools allow you to accurately pick a colour using a Pipette tool.

Design your own brush

One of Painter's most powerful features its its ability to create custom brushes. This feature has now been made much more accessible with Painter 8.0's new Brush Creator. It comes in three parts. A Randomizer lets you select an existing brush variant and then randomise its properties, creating a complete new set of brush variants instantly. The Transposer enables you to change the properties of a brush variant based on properties of another. So, you could take a square conte crayon brush and create brush variants that are mutated towards chunky oil pastels. When you need to fine tune a new brush, the Stroke Designer offers a user-friendly interface into the deep and advanced complexities of Painter's Brush Engine. Here, you can change every single variation of a brush's character using 16 different settings. A useful Stroke Preview is included inside the Brush Creator to help you visualise what the new brush variant will look like, and you can also try it out for yourself on a small mixing pad. The Brush Creator is almost a separate program within Painter and certainly makes the task of building complex brushes easy, intuitive and fun to do.

There are other notable features available in this upgrade. There's a new Sketch Effect that converts photographs into simple pencil drawings. Also, a new Tracker palette keeps a record of the brushes you've used recently, and Painter's Layer controls are a great improvement on Painter 7.0's. There's good news for Photoshop users, too: Painter can now read and write in native PSD format, including layer masks and alpha channels, meaning that translation to the Adobe program is seamless.

The last upgrade of Painter addressed some of its shortcomings, but Painter 8.0 is the best version yet and should put to rest the misgivings of professional users.