Product ReviewsMultimedia software
For producing digital artwork that emulates natural media - oils, acrylics, pastels chalk and the like - no application has ever matched Corel's Painter. Its strength as a niche program lies in its ability to emulate these materials in their real-world behaviour and appearance: wet paint smears and smudges can be manipulated on the canvas impasto-style. Although the price tag places it firmly in the professional realm, Painter also caters for hobbyists with options such as Auto-painting: a script-based feature that goes way beyond what can be achieved with filters, automatically creating paintings from a photographic source. While you can paint from scratch, many of this application's features are designed for working with photographic reference material. It's almost exactly two years since the release of Painter X, so expectations for this latest release were running high. However, it's hard not to be disappointed at the lack of both the quantity and quality of new material in Painter 11. Every version of Painter has introduced additional brushes and this release is no exception. Corel has extended the Real Bristle painting system, which more closely emulates brush strokes, to some of these brushes. Of the 40 new Hard Media variants, perhaps the most useful is the Marker. This simulates the wetness of its real-world counterpart, while overlapping strokes produces deeper and darker colour. Pens produce narrower strokes when dragged more quickly across the canvas, and you can alter the application of pencil and chalk by adjusting the stylus angle. These features depend on a pressure and tilt-sensitive stylus and tablet, and Painter's support for Wacom tablets has been enhanced and extended to include the Cintiq and Intuos ranges. Corel has finally implemented support for a colour-managed
A free transform tool combines move, scale, rotate, skew, distort and perspective, and these changes can be applied to an entire layer or selected content. You can copy and paste from multiple layers, while Photoshop support has been further enhanced with import support for layer, groups, layer masks and alpha channels. These additions and enhancements, coupled with performance improvements, will all doubtless be welcomed by those who earn their living using Painter. If you spend hours a day making selections, then the introduction of a polygonal mode for the lasso tool could well save you a great deal of time and effort, but it's still a feature that's hard to get excited about. The same goes for resizable mixer and colour palettes, and support for the PNG file format. These are meagre pickings for a big number upgrade two years in the making. It's not as if the opportunity for improvement isn't there. When we reviewed Painter X, we were impressed with the Auto-painting feature, and thought that it would be even better with user-defined styles and the ability to apply different styles to selected areas of the image. This is one area in which Corel could have made Painter 11 much more accessible to new users and those who lack the necessary skills to create illustrations from scratch. By concentrating its limited efforts on features that will appeal mainly to experienced and professional illustrators, it risks losing those for whom £265 is a worthwhile investment for their leisure hours. Because of all this, it's easy to lose sight of the fact that if you want to work digitally with 'natural media', there's still nothing to touch Painter. It's just a shame that Corel didn't make more productive use of the time available to come up with something more inspiring. As it is, this is not an upgrade that's going to be snapped up by existing users. For commercial artists, the most useful new feature - colour management - is a fundamental requirement, albeit one they've lived without until now. The rest doesn't add up to enough to justify the upgrade price of £137. By Ken McMahon
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