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Developer:
Procreate
Price:
$479
(US) or $199 upgrade
Requires: Mac OS 8.6+ or OS X.1
PowerMac G3+, OS 8.6+ requires 64 MB RAM, OS X requires 128
MB RAM minimum. A full install is about 290 MB, but if you
start adding all the extra brushes and other options
available on the 2nd CD, Painter can take up to 600 MB of
hard disk space.
Have you ever seen the old Crusader Rabbit cartoons? The unique aspect about them was that they were written for adults as well as kids. That is, kids would enjoy the silly jokes while the adults were enjoying the wonderfully dreadful puns. In a similar, but very different fashion, Painter 7 provides tools and features for experienced painters and at the same time provides tools and features for those of us who haven't had all that much art training. More on all this later.
The program Painter used to come in a paint can. This was cute, but created no small headache for merchandisers who had shelves designed for boxes, not paint cans. It now comes in a box. While the package for Painter is a mainstream box, the program itself is far from mainstream .
The big new feature of Painter 7 is its use of "liquid technologies." That is, liquid inks now work very much like their real-world counterpoints. With the new Watercolor Technology, you can simulate painting with a watercolor brush. This means that as you re-stroke a given area, the paint around the region show and act just like real watercolors. If you look at the picture below, you can see how as colors are added, there is a bunch-up caused by the "re-wetting" of the past color. Although not shown here, depending on the settings, one can control the degree of bleeding of colors, wetness of paper and the speed of drying.
There are improved text controls that may take a bit of practice to find all the features, but you can have text follow bezier curves. Text remains editable after placement. The one limitation I found was that in the Text section on the Objects Palette, you are limited to viewing very few fonts. To see all your fonts, you must bring up a separate palette. The good news though is that although the list of fonts are not wysiwyg, the changes are dynamic. That is, as you select a different font, the text you are changing is automatically changed to that font so you can see automatically whether you like it or not.
The big news to Mac users is that Painter 7 is now carbonized and can now be run natively in OS X. In making the switch to OS X, Painter has utilized the Aqua interface and regrettably, they shouldn't have. Below is a screen shot of all the floating palettes from both OS 9 on the left and the same palettes from OS X on the right. What jumps out at you are the colors used in OS 9 to help distinguish the various palette types. Within OS X, there is no color distinction and simply: it's easy to get lost. While I do like the Aqua interface, there are times and reasons to break from it and this is an excellent example. One other negative aspect of the plain/white palettes is that they tend to get lost on the screen. If you have other programs or Finder windows open, it often becomes hard to see where one palette starts and a window behind the palette ends. Working in Painter, one quickly learns to "Hide Others" from the "Painter" menu.
As long as I'm on the topic of palettes, Painter has always used these dropdown palette groups. For example if you look at Art Materials palette (below left), you see that it is subdivided into 10 sections. To work in any section, you simply click on the triangle to open up that section (below right). It's an excellent utilization of space for a program that has over 30 different sections amongst the palettes. What's amiss is if you look at the bottom right corner of the palette, you can see a little thing that sort of looks like a backwords "u." This is a grow tab and you can lengthen or shorten the length of each palette. If you miss the fact that there is a little blue scroll box to slide up and down, you might miss the fact that some of your sections might be out of sight in a palette. I'm not sure how much of this is the Aqua interface or the Painter interface in OS X, but I hope that in the next version they darken the scroll bars so they are more noticeable when they are created.
Palette placement on the screen can be a challenge when a program has as many palettes as Painter. Their placement depends both on the size of your screen and the size of the document you are working on. Fortunately, if you find a place for your palettes in any given setup, you can save that screen arrangement. Thus if you move things around, change screen resolution or use a different size drawing, you can always quickly have your palettes jump back into an given preferred positions. I don't believe there is any limit to the number of saved palette positions you can have.
As mentioned, Painter 7 can help those of us who haven't had much training in art. Below is a simple sketch I made of one of my Corgies using Painter 7. Starting from a photograph, I used a Painter technique of creating a clone, and then using a cloning brush was able to "paint" over the cloned image. What was under the image came out using the brush characteristics selected (below on the left is a "camel impasto" brush and on the right is a "water color" brush). The challenge I had was selecting the width of the brush for any particular part of my "drawing." Cheating? I look at the result and I don't care!
In reality, while I'm learning how to move my hand to follow the various swerves and shapes of my dogs and selecting brush sizes, etc., I can learn how to draw better without using the clone.
Speaking of learning, Painter comes with a variety of tutorials, most of which are very good. The manual is also good as it is not only a guide to how to use the aspects of the program, but it is also written as a teaching guide. The Manual does a good job of leading the user through the various aspects of the program. Despite the manual being very good, there were curious lapses. For example, it does point out that you are much better off to create your picture AND THEN apply a paper surface as opposed to selecting a paper surface and then start painting. This is good. What was not so good is that they failed to let the user know HOW to get the paper texture onto (into) the picture. After some searching I realized it's "Command-/."
For those of you already capable of creating the type of drawing above, you will be able to utilize the vast storage of tools available with Painter 7. That's not saying that those of us who are more "graphically challenged" can't use these features; in fact it should be encouraged. Consider the flower I painted following one of the tutorials. While this is certainly not a spectacular work of art, this was my first try with watercolors. I expect to get better.
There are literally hundreds of drawing mechanisms of both wet, oil, and dry media. Thick, thin, scrape it, spray it, wipe it, or dribble it. Drawing in Painter is like taking pictures with a digital camera--you never have to buy a new roll of film and you never have to go to the paint store and get one extra tube of lilac to finish your painting. You have an endless supply of ink, water paints, crayons, chalks, oils, canvases, and on and on. And, there are so many combinations of all these, you will never be able to try all the combinations.
Painter supports layers and these layers are directly compatible with Photoshop--you can transfer drawings back and forth with no problems or loss of anything except paths. Painter no longer supports paths and automatically converts the paths to shapes.
Like Photoshop, images can be maintained in either RGB or CMYK. Also, if you are comfortable with Photoshop's Blending Mode, you will be very comfortable with Painter's Composite Method.
One of the major tools for using Painter should be a Wacom tablet. Regrettably, the first release of Painter 7 wasn't all that compatible with the Wacom tablet in OS X. Fortunately, there is now an updater that not only resolves this, but speeds up many actions within Painter (Painter update). If you do not have a Wacom tablet, do not despair as you can also use a mouse. (My paintings above were done with a mouse as the updater was not available while I was reviewing the product.) To provide some level of tablet control with a mouse, Painter provides mouse control so that you can vary the amount of "pressure," "angle," and other tablet attributes to mouse use.
But alas, I do have a few gripes (the vast majority of my testing was done in OS X. Some, or all of these problems may or may not appear in OS 9 or earlier unless otherwise stated):
- Although I am able to get the help in OS 9, I am unable to get the online help in OS X both in IE and Netscape. In IE, the left pane shows blank. In Netscape, the left pane shows a request for a plug-in, but I've been unable to find what plug-in is required to satisfy the page.
- You can save in a variety of formats, but when you change the format type, the suffix does not change accordingly. That is, if I save a JPG image as a Photoshop image, the suffix doesn't change from "picture.jpg" to "picture.psd."
- Although there is a "Preferences..." in the Painter 7 menu, it is grayed out. The preferences are in the same menu as for OS 9 and are found in the Edit menu. While this doesn't particularly bother me, it does bother me that of the 10 different preference types, you have to go back to the Edit menu for each one. That is, there is no Preference palette where you can select from any of the 10 preference categories. This gets tedious rather fast.
- I found occasional screen re-draw problems. When moving an image around or changing the magnification, I would occasionally see extra repeats of the image. A forced screen re-draw quickly removed them, but I'd like to think they shouldn't be there to begin with.
- All web designers should go to the Procreate web site to see a wonderful example of how NOT to do a web site. Let me say that it is beautiful and has some wonderful examples of what Painter can do, but it is totally Flash 5 run and is working so hard to be creative and feature laden, that the message of what Painter is and what it can do overtakes getting information to the viewer. I don't feel they should remove the site. Rather they should create a new site with all the necessary information and a link to this site to see the neat "cool" things it wants to show off about Painter.
In short, Painter 7 continues to lead above the other bitmap painting programs. As long as you are not overwhelmed with the incredible number of palettes and you learn various techniques to manage them, you will be OK (you can save palette types and locations for various workflows). If you already own Painter 7, DO GET THE UPDATE (the update brings you to 7.1.357). Painter is not only fun to play with and brings out the artist in you, it is a wonderful tool for bringing art to your computer.
___________ Gary Coyne has been a scientific glassblower for over 30 years. He's been using Macs since 1985 (his first was a fat Mac) and has been writing reviews of Mac software and hardware since 1995.
Tags: Reviews ď Graphics/Design ď
