Corel Painter 8 Windows/Mac

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   December 19, 2003
Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA)
7 out of 7 found this review helpful

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.


A fresh release   June 5, 2003
M. Hamoui (Accra, Ghana)
Today, a creative professional can only notice how mature the graphics software industry has become, new software are offering more and more features that are using more and more computer resources, without being adding real marginal benefits. New upgrades are only to keep the products alive, on the expense of making them more cumbresome.

Painter 8 is a different story altogether!
Corel has made a great effort to make this upgrade of a previously clunky yet powerful product, a much more versatile, standardised and user-friendly juggernault. Gone are the days where you have to hopelessly search among dozens of panels for a particular brush, style or method. A slick bar at the top dynamically changes according to the tool you're using, where you set the size, opacity, curviness..etc.
Another thing that was greatly improved is the process of choosing the brush (that used to be very annoying with the old selective dimming). The brush selector is tucked at the upper right part of the screen (also in that slick bar,) in a much more logical and standardised way.
One also has the feeling that painter 8 was given something similar to the Macormedia MX treatment, where the palettes can be customised into different panels and the layout saved according to the project.
The mixer panel IS useful, and is very consistant with the philosophy of this new painter release: the small things that make your work faster and stress-free. The os X over all performance is much snappier, not to mention the beefed-up photoshop compatibility, and o! have i mentioned that you get both a windows and a mac version with the license price ?

In short, If you thought painter was too eccentric and boggy for you, this is the upgrade you've been waiting for. Its new slick interface made me thank God that Corel had taken the torch from Metacreation.


Leave well enough alone! The bad first, then the good...   June 4, 2003
Simon (Ocala- Fla)
18 out of 19 found this review helpful

As the other reviewer noted, Photoshop users will be on home ground here, but some basic Painter functionality seems to be lost. The "new" brushes are not really worth spending money for a new version, if you don't have any version of Painter already. Painter 7 is a fine program, with a vast functionality, though its learning curve is steep. Along with my compatriot, I mourn the loss of the capable and extremely useful expressions palette. The mixing window is fun, and I would suppose it to be useful to those who cannot mix colors easily. Once again, mixing, then eyedropper choosing was very easy before.

The new brushes palette is not that hard to use, but what really new brushes are there? None that I can see. The Photoshop-like layout is not bad, but why change the interface so much, and not include some of Photoshop's best features? How about some really new filters that no version of Painter ever had? How about allowing difference, color, multiply, lighten, and so forth brush functions on the canvas, like Photoshop does? (If Painter 8 does this, I've missed it!)

Now for the good... if a new user wants to get a Photoshop interface, then this is the program to get, considering it's half the price of Photoshop. For those who want Painter's wonderful brush engine, this version supplies a great deal of it at a great lowering in price from the earlier releases. This really is a fine program, capable of incredible raster graphics. The brushes are great, and the capabilities it presents for designing one's own brushes is a great plus. I like Adobe's interface, but I also liked Painter's interface. Six of one, half a dozen of these over here for me. By the way, the color choosing palettes are still the same as any of Painter's earlier releases, which is vastly superior to Adobe's anemic, hard to use color palette.

Is Corel afraid Painter will supercede their raster graphics programs? (Corel Draw is a vector map graphics interface, hard to use, since it's a memory hog of colossal proportions.) I do not have the answer to that question. For my uses, I find Painter's earlier releases from 5 on up to and including 7 to be superior to ALL the other graphics programs I've ever used put together. That includes Adobe Photoshop, up to and inclusive of 6, Fauve Matisse, TV Paint, Ulead Photoimpact, XRes, Corel Photopaint, Pixia, Paint Shop Pro, and several others scarcely worth bothering to remember. All the named programs are fine, but only Ulead's program comes within sighting range of Painter for creating raster graphics. Adobe's fine program boasts excellent printing capabilities, and a suite of fine filters, but, even for editing photographs, I find Painter better, even this latest version.

My opinion? Painter 8 is a fine program at a reasonable price compared to Adobe Photoshop and Painter 7. For those interested in serious computer graphics and creating art, I will highly recommend it.