Corel Painter Essentials 3

Corel's Painter is the artist's tool of choice for PC users, but it's relatively expensive and difficult to master. That's where Painter Essentials 3 comes in, providing a simpler and cheaper alternative.

The emphasis on ease of use is apparent from the moment you load the program, with a spacious new Welcome Screen, access to recent documents, templates and a selection of training videos. There's also ongoing help from a new Quick Guide palette that gives a brief introduction to the toolbox and major palettes, although this would be more useful if it was extended to cover the individual brushes and tools.

However, the real secret of Essentials' ease of use isn't so much what it puts in, but what it leaves out. Where Painter IX has nearly 40 categories of natural media brushes, Essentials offers 18. More significantly, while Painter offers more than 800 brush variants, Essentials features just 76. And where Painter offers comprehensive but intimidating control over every possible brush parameter, Essentials has control over just size, opacity and grain.

Compared to Painter, the creative power on offer is limited. Crucially, though, you can still achieve impressive end results. With the new range of Artist's Oils, for example, the thick, bristly brushes smear on finite amounts of oil paint - as you drag, the paint runs dry revealing more of the underlying paper grain. By comparison, the new Digital Watercolour brushes stay wet even between sessions, while the new range of Art Pens let you create fluid calligraphic effects, reacting to every movement of the stylus if you're using one of the latest Art Pen 6 or Wacom Intuos 3 tablets. In fact, even if you're using an older tablet or a tablet PC, all Essentials' brushes feel more responsive, with Corel claiming that most now work twice as fast and some ten times faster.

Essentials also adds some useful new tools: the Rotate Page tool lets you temporarily rotate the canvas to make it more natural to draw angled strokes; the Eraser tool makes it simpler to remove paint and reveal the underlying paper; and the Rubber Stamp tool works like its Photoshop namesake, letting you pick up paint from one area of the image and apply it elsewhere.

Clicking on the new Cloner tool will automatically select the most recently used Cloner brush variant. This dedicated Cloner tool is the first sign of Essentials' focus on helping to convert existing photography into artwork. Although this is an obvious use for art software, such cloning has always been complex. In Essentials, the whole process has been reworked. The new Sketch Effect is particularly handy, helping you to pull out the outlines of your photo either to stand on their own as a pencil sketch or as the framework for further work.

The biggest change is the introduction of three new dedicated Photo Painting palettes. First is the Underpainting palette, which lets you set up your original image ready for cloning. Using the drop-downs at the top of the palette, you can adjust your photo's contrast, brightness and saturation, apply a vignette-style effect and some blurring. When you're happy with the effect onscreen, click on the Quick Clone command. This applies the changes and automatically creates a cloned version of the current file ready for painting.

In the past, it would then be left to the user to manually apply all cloning brush strokes, but now much of this can be done with the Auto-Painting palette. Here, you choose from one of 19 stroke types and then set five key parameters - Pressure, Length, Rotation and Brush Size, plus the degree to which each of these is randomised. Finally, you hit the Play button and Essentials automatically applies the current Cloner brush accordingly.