Product Reviews

Corel Painter X has long occupied a niche in the professional illustration market for digital tools that mimic traditional artists' materials. Unlike photography, which in many ways lends itself to digital representation and manipulation, painting presents much more of a challenge for software developers. Paint is messy stuff; it's as much about texture as colour, and modelling the behaviour of oils on canvas, watercolour on paper, or crayon on cotton has proved to be the biggest challenge of all.

Every new version of Painter introduces a feature that enables its digital brushes to more closely emulate the real thing. The Real Bristle painting system - introduced in Painter X - while probably not the 'major milestone for digital painting' it claims to be, nonetheless narrows the gap between 'real' and digitally produced brush strokes by reproducing the bending and splaying of individual brush hairs dependent on the pressure and direction of the stroke. In addition to the 16 new RealBristle brush variants, a new RealBristle palette allows customisation of existing Static Bristle, Camel Hair, Bristle Spray and Blend Camel brushes into RealBristle brushes.

Even professional illustrators need source material, and Painter's ability to produce 'art' from photos has been enhanced in recent releases. This version includes new photo-processing tools, designed to help produce a photographic reference more suited to natural media rendition. On the face of it, these are little more than crude tone-and-colour adjusters - brightness, contrast, hue, saturation, the unhelpfully named 'value' (an HSV brightness controller), and smart blur. At the very least, they save you a bit of preparatory work in Photoshop.

More useful are the colour scheme presets, which apply adjustments to the image to prepare it for rendition in specific media. The Watercolour scheme brightens the image, reduces contrast and washes out colour; Classical does the reverse; Chalk Drawing desaturates the colours and warms skin tones, and so on. These are useful starting points, however it would be nice to be able to create and save your own.

If you prefer to take a more hands-on approach, you can choose your own colour palette by referencing another image.

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Any open images are appended to the Colour Scheme menu, and selecting them subtly modifies the colour palette of the target photo. As you'd expect, this works best using a source with a limited colour palette; failing that, you can achieve good results by first posterising the source photo.

Painter's Auto-Painting feature remains one of the quickest and most successful methods of producing painting effects from photos. Unlike filter effects, Painter manages to achieve a hand-worked look that makes a good job of disguising its machine origins. Because it is script-based with adjustable execution speed, you can apply Auto-Painting in varying degrees, and even mix different brush styles.

A new Smart Stroke painting option changes brush size, stroke, length and pressure, based on detail in the original underlying photo. It sounds clever, and doubtless it is, but the results are often so close to the original that it looks exactly like what you're trying to avoid - a machine-manipulated photo. We'd have preferred to have seen more scope for manipulation of existing Auto-Painting styles. It would also be good to be able to apply different Auto-Painting styles to different parts of the image - broad strokes for background work, and smaller dabs for detail, for example. Currently, you can only do this manually, or by creating and masking multiple layers.

The other major new feature, the Divine Proportion composition tool, will find favour in educational environments. Divine Proportion, or the Golden Ratio as it's also called, is a formula that specifies proportions occurring throughout nature, which have been thought to be aesthetically pleasing since the time of the Ancient Greeks. The Painter canvas can also be divided according to the Rule of Thirds or to any custom configuration.

Painter integrates well with Photoshop and this has been enhanced with easier layer grouping and support for Layer Merge modes. Productivity improvements include a new Workspace Manager for the production of customised layouts, and performance increases on both PowerPC and Intel hardware. The critical performance bottleneck for Painter has always been the brush engine - it's impossible to work natural media tools in anything other than real time - and despite our best efforts, we found it almost impossible to introduce brush lag, even on a G5 single-processor machine.

New Dodge and Burn tools, improved colour management, sequential auto backup, enhanced support for Wacom tablets and the ability to retain more settings between sessions provide a handful of additional arguments in favour of upgrading for existing Painter users. For newcomers, this latest release provides the strongest argument yet for using digital tools to create digital illustrations that looks like they were made by applying a brush to canvas.