Review: Corel Painter X image-editing software

Painter is an amazing piece of computer graphics software and provides a vast range of tools for simulating the appearance of natural painting materials, such as watercolours and oil paints.

However, it’s also vastly complex, with an endless array of menus and palettes, and it’s not easy for people who don’t have a fair degree of art training to master the program.

Painter X – the follow-up to Corel's bizarrely named Painter IX.5 – doesn’t do much to alter the status quo. The new features work well, and will certainly appeal to experienced existing users, but the program doesn’t make much effort to tone down its steep learning curve.

If you’ve got the skill to produce your own artwork – and a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet – you’ll probably love the new Realbristle brushes. They certainly provide greater control when painting by hand, and the mixer palette has been improved as well, making it easier to select and combine colours as you go along.

If you’re interested in classical composition techniques you can use the new layout tools to follow guidelines such as the Divine Proportion – the 3:5 aspect ratio classical artists identified as being particularly pleasing to the eye. Followers of more modern photographic techniques may prefer to opt for the new layout grid that can be used to apply the rule of thirds, which divides your canvas into a 3x3 grid.

Photography is a particular focus for this upgrade; or rather, the process of transforming photographs so that they look like traditional sketches or paintings. Again, this is an area where you’ll get best results if you have the confidence to paint over your photographs by hand.

However, Painter X also includes some new auto-painting controls that attempt to automate this process for you.

In previous versions of Painter, the auto-painting features didn’t work very well. They would apply brush strokes on top of a photo in such a random fashion that you just ended up with a blotchy mess. So, in this version, Painter includes a new Smart Stroke option; this uses brush strokes that more closely follow the lines and shapes found in the original photo. We found that this produced better results than the last version of Painter, although the results could be rather unpredictable at times.

In addition to the Smart Stroke option, there’s also a Smart Settings control that, according to the manual, “can be used to preserve detail from the source photo”. In practice, though, this option just seems to quickly slap brush strokes over the image without affecting the detail in the final painting.

For some reason when you select this option, Painter often switches to a completely different type of brush – for example switching from a watercolour brush to an oil paint brush – forcing you to go back and re-select your original brush once more.

To be fair, Corel does seem to recognise that Painter’s sheer complexity is a problem for beginners, so it includes an improved manual and a series of video tutorials with this version. However, we can’t help thinking that what Painter really needs is a bit of an interface makeover to try and streamline its endless list of palettes and settings.

While this upgrade will certainly appeal to existing users, Painter X could still do a lot more to appeal to new users.

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Ulead Photoimpact 12
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Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0
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