Most professional designers aren’t all that familiar with Corel’s line of imaging software since Adobe products tend to be industry standard. But when it comes to replicating natural painting techniques digitally, Corel has always had a leg up with its Painter application. 2007’s release of Painter X is extremely powerful, simulating the look and feel of real painting with tons of digital brushes and textures. Granted, this isn’t something that you need to do often in design projects, but it can add new dimension to your work or broaden your repertoire.

With Painter, you can draw or paint images freehand, or apply painting techniques to existing photos or other images. So far, this doesn’t sound like anything Photoshop can’t handle, but the difference lies in Painter’s ability to very accurately simulate various brush types (lots of different bristles, palette knives, and so on) and media (like oil paint, watercolor, and ink). Strokes blend together with remarkable likeness to real painted strokes. Did you drag a red stroke through an area of green paint? Your brush will actually pick up a some of that green!

The interface has many features similar to Photoshop’s, but an incredible number of brush options.

Painter’s greatest feature is its enormous range of brushes, media, and textures. It’s almost customizable to a fault, as you may find yourself spending more time clicking settings and trying brush types than actually painting. But when you are painting, it’ll feel unexpectedly real, especially if you are using a tablet and pen, rather than your mouse. In fact, it’s advisable to have a graphics tablet if you plan to use Painter often.

One feature that Corel touts with Painter is its automatic photo painting, which essentially takes a photo and applies colored paint strokes to it, working like a Photoshop filter but on a much grander and more realistic scale. I find this a little tough to use and to “get right,” and instead prefer sampling colors from a photo and painting over it with the usual Painter brushes.

In just a few minutes, I whipped up a painting based on a photo using simple brush strokes and the Dropper tool to sample colors.

If you’ll do a lot of fine art style painting in Painter, you’ll want to check out the composition tools. The Divine Proportion palette overlays your painting with the Golden Rectangle, Golden Spiral, and axes that help you create the most aesthetically pleasing composition possible, just like master painters.

The Divine Proportion palette offers several options so you can choose the overlay that best fits your work.

If you create custom illustrations for clients, need a new way to present your photos, or love painting and want to incorporate it in your designs, Corel Painter X may be just what you’re looking for. Though with a price tag at around $400, you’ll likely want to download the 30-day trial from Corel http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite/us/en/Product/1166553885783 before you decide whether this program is right for your toolkit.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 4:51 pm and is filed under Design, Web Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.