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Paint magic

Posted on 8 Mar 2007 at 11:53

Tom Arah discovers some breathtaking and revolutionary painting power in the most unlikely of places.

Bleed and Dryout are particularly good for creating artistic effects, fully exploited in PD Particles' various traditional media presets, which also employ another crucial feature - the ability to deviate from completely smooth lines produced via circular dabs. The Brush Images palette displays a list of greyscale bitmaps to use instead of circles as the dabs the brush lays down, and you can even have the particle-based brushes use these bitmaps, instantly enabling a whole range of new and striking effects. The last of PD Particles' five palettes, Paper, lets you choose a texture to be impressed on each stroke as the canvas grain (filled recesses for wet media and unfilled for dry).

PD Particles has one final trick up its sleeve that combines both of its main strengths; namely, the emulation of traditional artists' media and state-of-the-art particle handling. The dedicated Bristles tab of the Particles palette lets you build a brush from up to 9,999 separate particles, each such "bristle" following the path to contribute its own one-pixel-wide line. With controls for colour bleed and mixing, this can produce realistic bristled brush effects or, by increasing the radius and spreading the bristles more widely, you can create shading, cross-hatching and abstract effects with just a few brushstrokes.

Let's not get too carried away - PD Particles has limitations, most obviously that it only really offers one creative tool, the Brush, and that Brush Images are restricted to a maximum width of just 35 pixels. In addition, its level of Undo is restricted, it has no layers and you're confined to one file open at a time - irritating separately, but worse taken together because they make it hard to explore all of PD Particles' many creative options. On the other hand, this lack of a safety net encourages you to go with the flow, and PD Particles offers another immediate, hands-on creative experimentation feature via yet another brilliant innovation - the ability to repeat your last stroke using the keyboard shortcut. You can quickly make a stroke bolder, change brush width, colour, bitmap image or any other parameter, even choose an entirely new preset, before reapplying the stroke - now why can't Photoshop do that?

PD Artist

PD Particles provides extraordinary power for its measly $19 asking price, so how does its (slightly) more expensive sibling, PD Artist ($39), compare? After the intuitive simplicity of PD Particles, first impressions were disappointing. For a start, the two most impressive features - the Particles palette and button-bar presets - are missing. However, after a search, I discovered you can right-click the Brush tool icon to call up presets and, although they don't include particle brushes, you can open the dreadfully named Optipustics palette to load and control particle and bristle brushes. It's nowhere near as accessible, but with a bit of digging, you'll find 90% of the power of PD Particles. What do you get for the extra 20 bucks, though? After a lot more searching, the answer is: a great deal.

First, PD Artist offers a much wider range of tools, including a full set of selection tools, a Paintbucket for flood fills, linear and radial gradients, and another excellent innovation: tools that use the current brush to draw straight lines, curves, rectangles and ovals. In addition, there are 80 filters, ranging from instant colour adjustment through to artistic effects (including real standouts like Wireframe Designer and Brush Strokes filters). You can even turn your static image into an animation as a sequence of bitmap frames and preview it onscreen.