Feature: Corel Painter Essentials 3 brings creative media to
Motivation: It reveals the essential power of its senior sibling Corel Painter IX
One of best kept secrets of savvy photofinishers has been the power to do just amazing creations with Corel's Painter IX. First as a natural media painting tool with brushes approximating such effects as oil impasto color mixing, acrylic rake and waterpaint color washing, Corel Painter IX sets the standards that other graphics programs strive to imitate. For example, Adobe Photoshop CS2, Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint and even Corel's own PaintShop Pro with its Art Art Media brushes - all try to match in fidelity and realism the natural media brushes and prowess of Painter IX. But just as the rivals get close, Painter IX adds even more power with new WaterColor effects, Impasto brushes, plus tracing paper and Quick Cloning so that creating an original or using an image as a paint backdrop is easier than ever before to do and full of natural media richness. But Painter IX costs about $330US - so enter Corel Painter Essentials 3 for $80 US.
Corel Painter Essentials 3
Corel Painter Essentials 3, like Adobe Photoshop Elements, is a simplified version of the major product - Painter IX, but costs 1/4 the price for about 2/3rds of the functionality and features. Even more important for photofinishers and new digital camera users, Painter Essentials is a lot easier to learn. As well Painter Essentials provides its users not only a taste of the syntax and commands of Painter IX; but also a good sampling of all the brushes, patterns , and textures that are part of the natural media whiz-craft of the senior Painter IX. Think of Painter Essentials as an Adobe plugin for natural painting on steroids.
Now there are a least 4 major plugins (Right Hemisphere Deep Paint, Virtual Painter , Xaos Paint Alchemy and PhotoArtmaster Classic) for adding painterly renditions to all or parts of an image or a collage of images. For example, read our tutorial on Virtual Painter 4, one of the more flexible and automated of tools. But all of these tools do not allow what Corel Painter Essentials does - to apply various brushes to a clone or trace canvas to bring out the underlying image in new and inventive ways. See the screenshot above for an example of just such work using a flat impasto cloner brush.
What's in the Box
Corel Painter Essentials 3's printed Getting Started guide is a fast dwindling rarity in graphics software as vendors convert to all electronic documentation. This reviewer really appreciates printed documentation - I like to master a feature not by brute force trial and error but rather reading all about the features in detail away from the computer. This prevents rushing in and trying tools without getting an appreciation for the design ideas behind each tool and their cohesion with each other. The Getting Started Guide is short, 50 pages, but delivers that overview.
In contrast, the electronic Quick Guide (see the upper right panel in the screenshot above) is too terse - its like having an electronic version of the Getting Started Guide. I would like it to explain each of the tools in the toolbox or controls in the currently active property bar, etc. But at least the Quick Guide points where to get additional info in the main Help which is well organized and has many nicely illustrated examples.
As well, Painter Essentials electronic help also has a set of nine quick start tutorials. Do these. They are quick one page step by step instructions that show some of the key features of the program. If you don't have a Painter IX background or find yourself getting lost take the 6 Workspace tutorials first. These will give you the lay of the Painter Essentials land and tools very quickly.
And here is what you will discover. Painter Essentials provides almost all of the key brush types used in Painter IX including the special texture, color-blending and effects associated with the Acrylics, Blenders, Digital Water Color and Impasto brushes among others(see screenshot to the left). So a full sampling of the Painter X brush effects has been brought to Essential users. And with an extra bit of helpful simplicity - users do not have to create the special layers required in Painter IX for watercolors and other brushes. One can mix and match different brushes on the same layer as much as desired.
But Painter Essentials has really simplified the properties one can use to adjust for each of the brushes - just the size, opacity, and perhaps one other property. Contrast this with the nearly two dozen controls that are available in Painter IX. Two sorely missed control are the ability to control the rotation of the brush and its flatness - the orientation you see in Painter Essentials is the one you get all the time. Thus in the image above, some of the vertical brush strokes are quite thin in comparison to the horizontal ones.
In addition, Painter Essentials takes away all brush creation capabilities - one of the delights in Painter IX because users can tune or even create quite novel brushes for their specific uses. But Painter Essentials has retained the use of layers and selections. Layers are quite essential when you want to control how overlapping colors blend. Many of the brushes interact with underlying colors on the current layer; but not at all with colors on layers above and below. One uses the Layers palette to create and delete layers as needed. users are strongly discouraged from painting on a photo image directly because erasing can prove problematic. Always create at least one additional paint layer. In the case of a clone tracing - not to worry. The clone source is kept safe and unchanged by Painter and is available for a added operations like effects and fills as if no changes were made to the original (which is exactly what is happening).
And for those who want to get an automated demonstration of what Corel Painter Essentials 3 can do there is an Auto-painting palette to get users started and demonstrate live the program's painting prowess. For the advanced user there is the ability to select portions of an image and only apply brush strokes and effects in that region using classic selections and masks. Finally, Painters Essentials shows off the new Artistic Oils brushes and some of the nifty natural media effects available here.
Summary
There are some disappointments with Painter Essentials. One of the biggest was the lack of the ability to change brush shapes and orientation. On the other hand, Painter Essentials works with a Wacom Brush which reveals some of its pressure and motion sensitive prowess. As well, Corel Painter Essentials 3 was more stable than its parent - it ran out of memory only once in extensive testing of features and never crashed.
In sum, Painter Essentials certainly delivers the goods - users get a good hint(I have to say "hint" because the brush control and creation capabilities in Painter are awesome)of what they can achieve with Painter IX while being able to produce some outstanding paintings, painterly images and collages with the program. If you have been looking to go to the next level in your paint programs or digital photo finishing, Corel Painter Essentials 3, at $80US street price, certainly shows you how you can get there.
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