Product Reviews

Painter Essentials began life as an application designed specifically to be packaged with other products, most notably with Wacom's range of graphics tablets. However, Painter Essentials 3 has now become available as a stand-alone, boxed product.

As the name suggests, it's a stripped-down version of the natural media application Painter IX. It uses the same basic engine, and although there are fundamental differences between Painter Essentials and the full-blown Painter application, the most obvious one is that Essentials has a smaller range of media. Although, the core tools such as pencil, chalk, and acrylic are all still available, and the oils and watercolour have received updates to make them even more realistic.

There are two distinct ways of using Essentials 3, although you can - and should - mix the two when producing artwork. At its most basic, you create a digital canvas, pick your medium, and begin manually making marks, which works well.

Essentials 3's headline feature, though, is its ability automatically to convert your photos into works of art. The box claims it's a three step process: simply load up and clone your photo, use the Auto-Painting palette to apply 'hand-painted' strokes to the piece, and restore fine detail or focal points such as a portrait's eyes.

If that sounds a little to good to be true, you should congratulate yourself on your acute perception. You need to work a lot harder than that to produce pieces which are either convincing or attractive.

That's not because the digital media is in some way lacking. Although it's not a perfect simulation, most do produce believable results, and the physics of some of the more advanced tools are particularly impressive.

No, the problem here is the same one that has dogged Painter from the beginning: you need a modicum of talent to make the best of the application, and a real-world knowledge of how to use the various media it contains, as this will enable you to create much more plausible pieces.

The Auto-Painting palette, for example, allows you to define the nature of the strokes it applies, based on a predefined list of shapes such as Sweeping S Curve and Splat. Fair enough, except that, unless you're specifically

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trying to subvert a thousand years of Western art, you would be unlikely to apply oil paint in Sketchy Squares for example.

Watching these paint stokes being applied can be entertaining, but it's a slow process, even on a moderately powerful G4. This isn't helped by the program's insistence on applying strokes randomly, which leads to gaping holes of untouched canvas while some areas are consistently reworked. Such reworking aids the creation of a properly random background, but we would rather Essentials 3 focused on filling the canvas before going back to overpaint existing areas.

More fundamentally, though, we would like to see it applying the strokes in a way that's more sympathetic to the original photograph, and in a way that more closely mimics how a bona fide artist would do it. Rather than merely covering the canvas in an indiscriminate splatter of strokes, we see no technical reason why it couldn't analyse the photo, find the edges, and apply strokes that follow those contours.

At the moment, you have to do that manually after the Auto-Painting function has filled in the background of your painting, unless you really want painted lines smearing right across a portrait's jawline.

Trying to touch up a piece using a mouse can be extremely tricky. It's not just that it is more difficult to control the shape of painted lines, but there's no way that during a stroke you can alter its pressure. Adding a graphics tablet - even a cheap one - will make this an infinitely more rewarding process.

The Clone tool used to restore detail is also very simplistic: it merely copies in the photographic detail from the original, and such unpainted patches can look out of place without some 'bedding down'.

And even when all this is done, you still need some artistic talent to give the piece its final sparkle. Trying to knock back shadows or bring out highlights is rather tricky to do convincingly if you have no knowledge of colour theory.

A decent help system is at hand, though, along with a few sample training videos to get you started, but it's a little patchy, and we would like to see Corel commit to explaining some basic artistic concepts.

If all this sounds negative, it's only because of Corel's claim that you can create great and realistic art with just a few clicks of the mouse in Essentials 3. The natural media engine is very competent, and if you're armed with a graphics tablet and have a few art classes under your belt, you should be able to produce some genuinely impressive mini masterpieces. While not as accomplished as ArtMaster Pro at producing artwork automatically (see Reviews, 16 September 2005, p29), the finished pieces, following manual intervention, are much more convincing, the process is more flexible, and this application is a fraction of the price.