Painter X

Painter is one of those apps that has been around for as long as we can remember, and it has always been aimed at people wanting to replicate the look and feel of traditional mediums in a digital way.

Put simply, this latest Painter release offers the most complete range of brushes, pens, pencils, oils, charcoals, watercolours – and basically any other medium you can think of – we’ve seen in a piece of software. It’s almost like having an art studio installed, and if you imagine the real-life complications and costs of owning and working with all these materials you realise what a valuable tool Painter can be.

The main addition to Corel’s latest release is a new set of brushes called the RealBristle Painting System. This adds 16 brush variants (more can be created using Painter’s Brush Creator), all of which aim to replicate the look and feel of real brushes further by bending and splaying bristles as they hit the canvas.

These brushes are no doubt useful, even more so with a Preferences option ticked to enable Enhanced Brush Ghosting. The latter shows you where the tip of the brush is, as well as the angle, tilt and rotation of your stylus as you move around the canvas. Our only gripe is that you’ll need a really fast machine to make the most of these great features, and while your minimum requirements might be set by Corel at 256MB of RAM, Painter can sap up as much memory as you throw at it. To really get it moving you’ll need at least 1GB of RAM under your machine’s hood.

As you’d expect, Painter is in its element when coupled with a graphics tablet, and it makes the most of Wacom’s technology. The 6D Art Pen and the rest of Wacom’s upper range enables Painter to take advantage of 1,024 levels of pressure sensitivity and 360-degree rotation, which increases the RealBristle Painting System’s impressive power and versatility.

Brush control
These capacities are at their best when twinned with Painter’s new brush sets. The brushes can be tweaked and edited (just like any other brush in Painter) and you have control over the profile of the tip of the brush, length of bristles, roundness, rigidity and even the friction of the brush as it paints on the canvas. What’s more, Painter enables you to save your creations and tweaks as predefined and custom presets – so, if you stumble across a particularly favourable preserve their state from project to project. Talk about control.

Other major additions include the new composition tools, the first of which is the Divine Proportion palette. Divine Proportion is a ratio of around 1:1.61803 that has been used by many famous artists in their compositions – Seurat, da Vinci, Michelangelo, to name but a few. The Divine Proportion palette helps you set up compositions from the offset, or crop your images into place later on. It overlays a grid on top of your image (you can change orientation, colour and so on, and also save and load presets) and then you simply adjust the grid using the Divine Proportion tool in the main toolbox. It’s an extremely simple composition tool and a neat addition for any artist.

The same goes for Painter’s new Grid palette, which divides the canvas into equal areas. There are three presets: Rule of Thirds, 3x5 or 5x5. Again, you can save and load your own presets. And again, it’s simple but effective in use.

One of the most impressive features for artists working on a collaborative project is the Workspace Manager. This enables you not only to save and load workspaces, but also to package up your entire workspace, including brushes, patterns and so on, and save it as a loadable file. This means a team of concept artists could synchronise their workspaces for particular jobs.

Transform your photos
A great revision of an old Painter favourite comes in the form of Painter’s enhanced Photo Painting System, which enables you to quickly transform photos into paintings with more control than a filter. This ability was first introduced in Painter Essentials 3 as a simple and fast way of adding an artistic tint to existing photos. In Essentials 3, the paint strokes that were applied were hit and miss to say the least, but here Corel has made a fine job of implementing its Smart Stroke features, which essentially apply each stroke intelligently using edge detection, rescuing the feature from the gimmick-bin and turning it into a genuinely creative tool.

A further new tool, and an impressive one at that, is the Match Palette, which enables you to take the colour scheme of one image and apply it to another – rather like Photoshop’s Match Colour tool. The latter is very useful for artists wanting to quickly change the mood of a particular piece.

Painter X is a great app, and it’s faster than before – especially when saving and loading files. It’s a highly recommended purchase for anyone involved in digital art.