| | Click on Product Listings for Details!
Avg. Customer Review: 
 Excellent for painting...
I come from years of experience using Photoshop. I was VERY pleased to find out that the interface is VERY similar to Photoshop, so the learning curve was very very low. I find it extremely easy to learn.I find it interesting that in some areas it is the BEST program, and in other areas it stinks. It has by far the most powerful painting/drawing brushes anywhere. Simply amazing. It puts Photoshop to shame. But then simple things like Transforms (rotate, scale, etc) are just plain bad! For example, when you scale or rotate something, all you see is the bounding box... you cannot see how the image looks until you commit to it. Also, if you have a layer mask on a layer, and you then scale or rotate the layer, the layer mask is deleted. If you're looking to use Painter as a total replacement for Photoshop, you will be disappointed. Use Painter for your artwork (painting/drawing), and do most everything else in Photoshop! 4 of 5 stars is pretty high... that's because the brushes are soooo good! :) John
 Slimmed down, slicked up--big improvement
I've been using Painter since it's very inception as "Sketcher"--a b&w; version that was sold in a cigar box to imitate a sketcher's kit of charcoal and pencils. The ensuing versions added virtual artists' media like oils, chalks, pencils and pens and textured papers to allow digital artists to create some astounding work. Painter 8.0 is now marketed by Corel, and it's definitely been slimmed down; the loading time for installation was very fast, indicating that the program overhead had been lightened considerably. Some improved features: 1. Mixer Palette allows mixing of colors interactively--a big plus. Before, you only had the option to mix colors with a kind of blending algorithm and no control at all.
2. Brush controls now are on a slider panel; you pull down the brush after loading the type of brush (oil, water, chalk, for example) and then can change the size with the slider. No need to pull down a menu to do this.
3. The watercolor brush has been improved tremendously; the effect is like watercolor and wash, not just a smeary or blurred effect. It looks wet.
4. The Image Hose (a brush that sprays or paints images rather than a stroke of paint) now has a fun cousin; a brush that lays down a flat stroke of patterns in a similar way. You can paint with feathers, stucco pattern and this is a very good enhancement to the idea of a digital image brush. For the image hose, you load pre-created images as the nozzle or make a custom nozzle from your own images. The pattern brush uses pre-loaded patterns (like the stucco) or you can create a pattern, capturing it from a graphic, and load it instead. This pattern brush is a wonderful addition. This program got an award from MacWorld (it comes in Win or Mac versions) and I think it deserves the award. While I use Photoshop Elements for photo manipulation, I still prefer Painter for digital art creation. This new version really impressed me.
 Stay away from this one
Corel offers essentially no support for the Mac. According to their website, there is no support after 30 days, except for customer discussions which are inaccessible to OS X (because OS X will not accept websites beginning with "news"). The program in version 7 is incompatible with Wacom drivers, according to the Corel website. Our copy will not open at all in Panther. Furthermore, the supposed upgrade for version 7 will not download from the Corel website. Clearly, Corel is in trouble -- and why should you get involved and founder with a sinking ship?
| |
shopping cart
Enlarge View
