Other Sites

Provides: Painting and illustration software

Format: CD

Developer: Corel Corporation

Minimum Requirements: Mac OS X v10.3.9 with latest revision applied, 700MHz PowerPC G4/G5 or Intel processor, 256MB RAM, mouse or tablet, 24-bit color display, 1024x768 screen resolution, 280MB hard disk space, CD-ROM drive

Retail Price: Full box = $429.00; Limited Edition Can = $499.00; upgrade box = $229.00

Availability: Out now

Version Reviewed: 10.1

Demo Available: 30 day, fully functional

Corel's Painter X is the kind of the program that's so well designed and so fun to use that you wish your job required you to use it every day. The trouble is, most of you won't have such a job, and the price of this program prohibits many from buying it simply to have fun. This is a pity, because Painter X has the ability to make artists out of us all, even if your drawing skills, like mine, ceased development in fourth grade.

That's not to say that drawing skills aren't important, but rather that Painter X let's you circumvent them, if necessary. Still, if you are an expert (or at least familiar) with painting on a canvas, you're familiar with the concept behind Painter. At its most basic, it's simply attempting to recreate on the computer the process of applying paint to a canvas. Whether your work is for commercial design, entertainment applications, photography enhancement, or...well, art for art's sake, Painter X allows you to elevate your digital work beyond the confines of the computer.

Chances are, though, that if you're reading this review, you already know what Painter can do. So, how about Painter X? First and foremost, it's a Universal Binary, so it's amazingly fast. Brushes perform up to 35% faster, and opening and saving your files on Intel Macs can be up to twice as fast as previous versions. Previous users will also notice and welcome the new workspace manager, which allows you to customize the manner in which your toolbars are laid out. You can save these settings for future use, and even export them for use on other systems. This is great, as the toolbars basically behave in a fairly annoying way. When you expand a toolbar, it doesn't push the others down, it pushes them away. For instance if I were to expand the Color Sets toolbar in the image below, it would move up and cover the currently open Colors toolbar.

But, it's not until you dig into Painter X that you'll discover and come to love the new RealBristle™ painting system. This technology reproduces the manner in which individual brush hairs of a paintbrush will behave depending upon the pressure and direction of the brush stroke. You don't even need to be a painter to understand this; if you've painted a model airplane or even just your bedroom wall, you know that individual "hairs" of a brush sometimes don't behave as you want them to, and always will leave a unique texture on the surface. Painter X attempts to mimic this behavior, bringing another level of realism to digital painting. The program comes with 16 new RealBristle brushes, and also allows for customization of the traditional static bristle, camel hair, bristle spray and blend camel brushes to fit this new approach.

Another nice new touch helps with the process of turning photos into artwork. This has always been my favorite feature of Painter, mainly because I'm not much of an artist. However, there are also professional and amateur photographers out there who sell their ability to turn their photographs into paintings of various styles. It sounds nice, but it's never so simple that you could just take a photo, click "Impressionist," and suddenly have a painting worth framing. Not all photos are conducive to particular styles of art. To address this issue, Painter X now provides instant filters designed to prepare the photo for the style of painting you want to create.

For instance, if your goal is a water color painting, the water painting scheme will wash out the photo's color, brighten it, and reduce the contrast. Now, all of this can be done manually in Photoshop, of course, but putting the filters right in Painter X as a preset option speeds up the process for pros, and eliminates the guesswork for amateurs. And, of course, you're given the ability to override each setting. Unfortunately, you can't save your settings.

Also, you're given the ability to select your own color palette using a source photo of your own choosing. This will gear your available colors towards those in the source, and apply them to your destination image. Again, this is great for those who have an idea of what they want their final image to look like, but don't have the time or the knowledge to set up a color palette that will help them achieve it.

The Auto-Painting feature can then fairly successfully achieve a hand-brushed look on your image. After all, this is where Painter separates itself from your Photoshop filters. The aim is to not look "Photoshopped," and Painter will make sure you don't even if you're not applying the strokes yourself.

And yet, there is the new smart stroke painting ability that will automatically change the brush size as well as the stroke length and pressure based upon the underlying photo. I perhaps wasn't using this to its best capabilities, but I found that the resulting image ended up looking too much like its source image. It was too accurate, and therefore defeated the purpose of using Painter X to begin with. Using it in conjunction with manual strokes worked a bit better, but you may as well just use manual strokes throughout if you're going to resort to that.

Another key new feature worth mentioning are the dodge and burn tools, which again greatly increase the ability to get the results you want without having to first prep the photo in Photoshop. Educated artists will also be pleased with the Divine Proportion tool, while the rest of us will have to look it up in Google find out what it even means.

Actually, that's not entirely true. You don't have to look it up in Google because Painter X comes with a manual. A printed manual.

No, I'm serious. Stop laughing. I mean it, stop laughing. Both full and upgrade customers will receive a 300+ page spiral bound manual, complete with an art gallery to greatly intimidate you as you set out to create your own artwork. And if the printed manual is not enough, Corel also offers extensive online help and tutorials, which they encourage you to use right from the launching pad...

...and, upon registering, you'll be assigned a support representative at Corel. Even if you never take advantage of all of this, that Corel is working so hard to ensure you have a pleasant experience with Painter X is wildly encouraging these days.

There's still some room for Painter to grow, however. Although they've improved compatibility with Photoshop, I'd like to see them embrace some other programs, as well; such as Apple's iPhoto and Aperture. And although Painter X does a good job of letting you adjust their presets, being able to save these adjustments would be handy. Also, many of the stronger tools do require a drawing tablet to be used to full effect. This makes sense, but I would still like to see Corel figure out a way to bring complete functionality to those of us stuck with a mouse/keyboard combination.

But those requests don't detract from what is a solid, welcome upgrade for existing Painter users, and it now means that price is the solitary reason one should hesitate to buy and learn to use Painter X when getting into digital artwork. Jut be sure you set aside plenty of time to play with it; not because you'll have to, but because you'll want to.