Real World Computing
Paint magic
Again, it's the innovative brush handling that really makes PD Artist shine. A Custom tab on the Brush Settings palette lets you create your own circular brushes right up to 200 pixels wide, and you can interactively control their greyscale drop-off to create smooth airbrush effects, or change cell size and density to break up the stroke smoothness and create clumpy, bristly effects. Alternatively, for complete control of your brush head, create your own simply by dragging a rectangular selection from the canvas via the Custom Brush Selector tool - the resulting brush can either apply the colour present in the original selection, or use this as a matte to apply the current foreground colour. You can also save and reload the brush heads you create.
This offers serious creative power, but it wouldn't be much use if every custom brush head was obviously rectangular, so PD Artist automatically drops out any white from the background - fine if you're painting onto a blank white area, but what if you're not? Again, it took some searching to find, but if you right-click the Custom Brush Selector tool, a dedicated Keying dialog appears where you can select any colour to drop out and control the surrounding clipping. This is extremely powerful and lets you subtly or radically alter your brush on-the-fly.
But what if you don't have any solid area of canvas to use your brush on? Here's where another PD Artist innovation comes in, called the Buffer. This starts off as a simple blank canvas the same size as the main image - hit the Swap Buffer command and your image disappears to be replaced by the buffer on which you can quickly create a brush, try it out, then swap back to the image to use it for real. You can also copy the current image to the buffer to store a snapshot you can return to, and even temporarily store multiple buffers while you work. Or you can switch on Swap Mixing, choose a blend mode and the main image and buffer contents will combine onscreen so you can try out creative effects before deciding whether to merge them or not. In addition, a wide range of buffer-based filters let you combine, composite, displace and emboss the current image.
I'm still getting used to this whole concept of the buffer, which certainly isn't a complete equivalent to Photoshop features like having multiple images open, history states or layers, but it offers many similar capabilities and some unique ones too, plus a more direct, hands-on creative approach. Overall, PD Artist doesn't have quite the immediate impact or intuitive simplicity of PD Particles, but if you're prepared to work at it there's no doubt it's worth the extra $20 several times over.
PD Pro
So what about the final and most powerful version, PD Pro, at $119? In interface terms, it proves a mixed blessing, with the return of the button bar with its easily accessible presets, together with quick control over the size, opacity and spacing of the current brush. On the other hand, it has no central, tabbed Brush Settings and Particles panel docked down the right of the screen - instead, there are no fewer than 18 separate and highly idiosyncratic floating panels, with no options for storing layouts, docking or grouping, which means the palette you want is inevitably obscured by others. This is a program crying out for rationalisation and simplification.
On the positive side, you gain more creative power. This time, there aren't any new tools, but plenty more filters - more than 140 - and the buffer capability has been extended, with support for multiple layers (although don't expect them to act as they do in Photoshop). The biggest changes are the animation features, which are far more comprehensive and seriously useful. In particular, there are options for onion skinning, handling exposure sheets, time shifting, and for saving and loading AVI video files, not just image sequences. Most impressive is the Timeline window, which lets you apply a range of filters - including buffer-based compositing options - to all the frames in an animation, and also make keyframe property changes.
