Corel Painter 8

Throughout its long and chequered career - first under the MetaCreations banner, then Procreate and now Corel - Painter has always stood out as the artistic and creative computer application bar none. The reason is simple: Painter's unique range of natural media brushes.

Of course, other software developers have jumped on the bandwagon simply by making a brushstroke grainy and calling it 'charcoal' or darkening its edges and calling it a 'watercolour', but Painter is different. It looks closely at how the brush, paint and paper work together to produce their effect and then tries to replicate it.

The trouble is that the interaction of natural media is inherently complex. To produce a watercolour brush that diffuses and interacts realistically with the pigment already on the canvas involves controlling factors such as wetness, drying rate, evaporation threshold and wind direction. And these are only the parameters unique to the watercolour. Add in shared parameters, such as opacity, angle, resaturation and grain, and there are dozens of factors at work. In other words, Painter's natural media power comes at a price.

The problem with this was that previous versions of Painter never hid this underlying complexity - the user was bombarded with the different brush and material controls. Painter's desperate attempts to undo the damage and make the environment friendlier, by grafting on the odd pullout drawer and throwing in some large but unrecognisable icons, just made things even more confusing. 'Idiosyncratic' is one word for Painter's previous incarnations, but 'dog's dinner' is closer to the mark.

The end result was a strangely paradoxical program: fantastically creative but at the same time intimidatingly technical - the one thing guaranteed to put off the intended artistic audience. Thankfully, Corel has recognised this fundamental problem and has completely overhauled the Painter interface. Overhaul doesn't do it justice; it's like opening a completely new program. The first thing that hits you is the space opened up by removing the old MetaCreations clutter. Your second thought is: but where is everything?

Tools of the trade

Let's start with the toolbar. In the past, this was a free-floating horizontal palette with scratchy icons in no particular order - it almost seemed like an afterthought. Now, the toolbar is central to your work in Painter and docked vertically on the left. It has also been rationalised and split into separate sections dealing with image editing, vector editing, formatting and display.

Below these are the current foreground and background colours, and lower down are small thumbnails for the current Paper, Pattern, Gradient, Nozzle, Weave and Brush Look libraries. Click on the thumbnail and you can choose from a drop-down list of presets, or call up the associated palette for greater control. It's amazingly streamlined compared with the old Art Materials palette, but it would be even better if options that weren't relevant to the current brush were greyed out.

Once you've selected your tool, you set its main parameters with the new Property Bar that runs under the menus. This is handy for swapping between major tool variations such as the various node-editing options and for controlling text without having to open the Text palette. For the different brush tool variations, it means you can quickly set size, opacity and other context-sensitive settings such as resaturation, grain and bleed (although this would be even easier if the settings were provided as sliders). There's also a useful Reset button to set any tool back to its defaults.