The printed tutorials directly correspond with the 14 video lessons built into the program. In the download version of the program, the guidebook is a PDF file. The boxed version contains a 130-page guidebook with reference and tutorial sections. I'm particularly impressed with how Corel helps novices learn the program. There's still more good news: Painter Essentials 4 now works with Windows Vista, and it's also a Universal binary program on Mac OS X. And should you want to revisit the photo-to-painting conversion at a later date, Painter Essentials now stores the original photo inside the native. This and a few other enhancements make it possible to turn a photo into a pretty convincing painting with a minimum of fuss, oversight, or even skill. Happily, Painter Essentials users can now benefit from Smart Stroke's increased realism. Version 3 delivered fairly haphazard results with photo painting, but when Corel carried the concept over into the professional-level Painter X, it added a bit of artificial intelligence with its Smart Stroke technology. The idea of turning a digital photo into a painting is certainly compelling, and Painter Essentials 4's Photo Painting workspace makes this an almost entirely automated process. But even if you lack talent, Painter Essentials still has a lot to offer. Just in case you weren't aware of it, painting takes actual artistic talent. Digital painting is what Painter Essentials is all about, and version 4 gives you more tools than ever to help replicate the real-world painting experience on your computer.- Next: Will It Make You a Master? Want more flexibility? You can also take several colors and then swirl them around in the new Mixer palette as you might on an artist's wooden palette. The new Color palette displays 88 preset colors like orderly dabs of paint on a canvas. In the Drawing & Painting workspace, there are two new ways to choose. Of course, it's not only the brushes (and pens and so on) that are important, but also the colors. I really liked the extra control this feature gave me, but if you find it distracting, not to worry: It's easily deactivated. This display remains on screen as you paint or draw. Basically, as soon as you touch pen to tablet, you get a visual representation of your current pen's size, shape, rotation, and paint flow. Confused? You won't be when you try it out, because it's much simpler than it sounds. The most innovative new brush feature, however, is the new Brush Ghost cursor, which helps you predict your pen's behavior before you even start painting and control it as you draw. Version 3 also had these trippy brushes, but version 4 gives you more things to do with them, though not as many as I'd like. Painter Essentials also comes with Painter X's Image Hose and Pattern Pen brushes, which spew out patterns and streams of little photographic images of objects like flowers and butterflies. Otherwise, I found the new brushes a much-appreciated addition. My only complaint: The new Sargent brush somehow didn't make me paint like another John Singer Sargent. Improvements have been made to existing brushes, and some brand-new brushes have been added, such as the hyperrealistic RealBristle category-carried over from the professional-level Painter X-as well as new charcoals and pens. When closed, the drawer displays your most recently used brushes and your designated "favorite" brushes in a column beside the toolbox for easy access.Īnd it's not just the new Brush Drawer that I like. Now expanding out logically from the toolbox, the Brush Drawer offers clearly delineated categories of brushes. I'm especially fond of the new Brush Drawer. Tool icons and slider controls are larger, therefore much easier to control with a pen tablet. Some enhancements pertain to both workspaces, such as the vertical toolbox that stretches down the left side of the screen. The bright yet nondistracting interface is divided into two tabbed workspaces: Drawing & Painting and Photo Painting. Not that there was a heck of a lot wrong with Painter Essentials 3 to begin with, but Corel has taken a very good program and made it even better. Not only is the entry-level digital painting program almost unrecognizable from version 3, but its new interface signals a reimagining of the program on Corel's part. Not so with Corel's Painter Essentials 4. However welcome the redesign may be, it usually amounts to nothing more profound than, say, the new "graphite" tones applied to the interface of Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. Nowadays, it seems that nearly every new release of a graphics application boasts a "redesigned" interface.
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