Product Reviews

Dan Ritchie is a computer graphics expert who has worked on big-name projects such as Spider-Man 2 and Star Trek Voyager. He also happens to be a dab hand at programming and, in a lull between Hollywood blockbusters, he decided to create his own painting program.

Like Corel's recently released Painter Essentials, Project Dogwaffle Professional is an inexpensive painting program that enables you to reproduce the effects of painting with traditional materials such as oil paints and watercolours. It offers a wider range of materials and brush types than Painter Essentials, though, including options such as drippy pen, wet tempera and modelling clay, along with dozens of variations on the basic watercolour and oil brushes. These brushes work really well, producing realistic effects onscreen. The watercolour brushes give a genuinely watery appearance, producing a dark colour under the thick part of the brush and a thinner, lighter coating of colour on the outer edges.

You'll need a bit of artistic talent to get the best out of these tools - not to mention

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a graphics tablet - but there is some help for less-experienced artists. In case your drawing hand is a bit unsteady, there are options to help you draw straight lines and smooth curves, plus fill tools that let you outline and fill large areas with colour quickly.

Dogwaffle has a very wide range of effects filters you can use to liven up your work, including a Brush Strokes filter. This can apply any of the program's brush styles to a digital photo to give it the appearance of a hand-drawn sketch. Painter Essentials does something similar with its cloning brushes, but Dogwaffle produces better results. It even throws in some animation tools.

Dan Ritchie may be talented and creative, but he thinks like a programmer. Many aspects of Dogwaffle will seem complicated and confusing to home users and amateur artists. There's too much technical jargon. Documents and paintings are referred to as buffers, for example, and terms such as 'invert alpha' are used with no explanation of what they mean. The interface is also untidy. There's no Close command, so the only way to close an image is to create a new one. There's no Edit menu either, and to perform a simple task such as selecting and copying part of an image, we had to trawl through the online Help files for answers. We also found that the program crashed occasionally when we were working on imported photos.

Dogwaffle has enormous potential. Its basic painting tools are excellent and produce better results than those of Painter Essentials. However, the program's complexity makes it more suitable for experienced computer graphics artists than home users who just want to dabble.