14 DAY TRIAL // Corel Painter IX.5 is a tool designed for amateur and professional digital artists - only your talent will determine if the final result will be a breathtaking one. There are a lot of somewhat similar products on the market and the competition is tough, but if you want to give to your artwork a natural look, this is the software you should try. If you decide to try it, you can learn to use its features for 60 days, which I consider a long enough trial period. In two months, every user should be able to decide if he is a Painter fanatic or not. According to the producer, if you work in fields like film making, game development, commercial design, illustration, photography, or fine arts, you can use this tool successfully.
We're talking about digital painting software... So let's start with what we use more often - the brushes. You can choose from the variety of categories, from crayons, chalk and charcoal to acrylics, watercolor, artists' oils and liquid ink. Some of them can be found in other programs as well, but the unique ones, like Artist's Oils, will help you create art with a natural look. Another interesting feature is the color variation - the brush variable is loaded with a finite amount of oil - or color and, as the oil runs out, the color faints.
Here interferes another aspect - this kind of software becomes more interesting if you are using a pressure-sensitive Wacom tablet, because the brushes are designed to respond to pressure.
Another important aspect in creating a natural-look artwork is the "paper" you work on. The canvas can take different textures and you will see the surface react to your brush strokes as you see it in real life. Its texturally rich materials, combined with the multitude of brush types, gives you an unlimited amount of combinations.
The interface is generally similar to other graphical tools from Corel - floating panels with features grouped after similarity. The Layers can be a difficult thing to catch, but after it becomes familiar, you can manipulate a painting easier - you can work with individual elements, change and save individually layers and alpha channels and exchange them between more artworks.
One of the praised enhancements to this version of Corel Painter is the speed. Apparently, it works up to 10 times faster than the previous version and the brushes twice as fast, which is a pretty good improvement. Unfortunately, the History is not praiseworthy - you can do only 32 steps back, which is a smaller number than it should be. Computers designers are working on become better and better, so the number of steps should be larger- or, at least, you should be able to define a maximum number for History levels.
If you need to work on your painting up-side-down, you can do that. If you need another tip profile for your brush, you can change it easily. You can mix oil colors similar to the traditional way, so you can feel what great painters felt when they discovered, by mistake, some beautiful new shade. A quick-clone tool transforms a photo into a painting, a feature increasingly offered at a price by photographers.
A new function in Corel Painter is the frames per second control, 1 to 40, which is designed to work with animations. But there are a lot of interesting and very useful features here - Rotoscoping enables you to work and change only one frame of a movie, The Onion Skinning allows you to see the previous and the future frame while working on the current one. And another important aspect - you can save what you worked on in different formats: animated GIF, QuickTime or avi. As you can save a painting in some of the widely used formats: PSD, TIFF, BMP, GIF, JPEG, Mac PICT etc.
For the newbies, there are a lot of solutions available - there is the integrated help, from which you can learn a lot. And there is Lynda.com, where you can have access to a selection of training videos from one of the best graphics training companies. If you are working on a PC, you might be interested in the Dual Monitor support for Windows XP and Windows 2000.
The Good
I was impressed by the variety of brushes, especially the Artist's Oils, and by the multitude of textures you can choose. The brushes and the tools in general are working indeed with greater speed than other graphic programs, even if we're testing it on large pictures. Quick-clone tool and other interesting features you will discover yourself might make it your favorite graphic editor.
The Bad
The History is not customizable - the Undo steps you can take are an important thing because it can save your artwork when you finally notice the mistakes you made.
The Truth
Corel's new Painter IX.5 is the closest software that has come to reproducing the effects of paints and brushes with a digital palette. You can try it for 60 days and you can learn some interesting tricks and maybe find you have a soul of an artist.
Please take a look at the screenshots below:
