Painter 5.5 Web Edition

In its previous five releases, Fractal Designer Painter has built up an unrivalled reputation as the leading application for creating art on the computer. This half-point upgrade - the first version under the new MetaCreations label - is designed to build up a similar reputation for unrivalled Web creativity and control.

The heart of Painter's success has always been its natural media brushes and, as with every previous release, the range on offer has again been expanded. To keep memory overheads down, the two new sets of brushes aren't loaded automatically but are made available through the Shortcut to New Brushes palette. The first group of more than 30 new calligraphic brushes is typical of the way Painter's brush technology mimics traditional media. The new Wet Extreme Diffusion Calligraphic option, for example, produces a wash of colour with built-in tonal variation that interacts with itself and the underlying paper texture, creating an effect in which the paint seems to diffuse to the edge of the stroke.

The result looks completely natural, like a Japanese watercolour. In fact it's difficult to believe that the effect has been created using a computer rather than with pen and paper. The problem is that much of the natural look of the effect is due to subtle variations in colour. That's not an issue for print, but for Web use it means higher file sizes and, for 256-colour GIF work, it's also likely to lead to unwanted posterisation effects. In many ways, the demands of continuous-tone naturalistic art of this kind and the demands of Web graphics are diametrically opposed.

MetaCreations' solution is to offer a new set of more than 50 dedicated Web brushes divided into five main groups. What makes these brushes special is that they aren't anti-aliased, so their edges are completely hard with no subtle shading off. This cuts down on colour variation and thus on file size, but inevitably it also leads to cruder effects. This means the airspray, for example, is more like a sugar duster. Even so, the brushes still interact with the paper grain and continue to look much more natural and creative than the basic tools available in other packages. Beware, though: MetaCreations couldn't resist offering some Web brushes, such as the Big Loaded Oils option, which are built on colour variation. However, you can make these Web safe by using the clumsy Posterize Using Colour Set command.

Successful Web imaging makes unusual demands as far as traditional bitmap programs are concerned. It requires advanced handling of features, such as objects, buttons and text. In fact, despite Painter's emphasis on brushes, version 5 was already ahead of much of the bitmap competition in these areas with its vector-based Shapes technology and its use of image objects or floaters. Using the plug-in Bevel World floater, for example, it offered unrivalled creation of 3D-style buttons, with control over everything from lighting direction to cliff and rim slope. This is undoubtedly powerful, but it would be even more useful if it was simplified and made easier to access.

One weak area in version 5 that 5.5 addresses is text handling. In the past, every letter you typed in Painter was managed as a separate floater, but now it's left to a dedicated dynamic text plug-in available from the Object palette. Again, the dialog for controlling text is unnecessarily intimidating but it does offer basic control over typeface, size, leading and so on, together with advanced features such as pattern fills and automatic drop shadows. Painter's dynamic text still isn't suited for long sections of text and it doesn't offer local formatting, but its great strength is that it offers future editability - just double-click on the floater name in the Objects palette and you can change both text and settings.