Corel Painter Essentials 3
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While Corel Painter is an excellent product, it can be rather daunting for the novice user or those who are just interested in dabbling in the media. As a result Corel has come up with Painter Essentials 3. This home art studio product is based on Corel Painter IX and has been designed to provide an environment that will lead users into the world of digital art.
Once the program's installation procedure, which requires the entry of an 18-character serial number, has run its course, an option will be available for electronic registration which brings the bonus of a training video. By default the program opens with a ring-bound notepad presenting various options. You can use this to open documents and templates plus work through one of the ten quick start tutorials. These tutorials cover topics such as transforming a photo into a painting; applying a surface texture; painting with artist's oils; and painting with digital watercolour. Each of the tutorials consists of step-by-step instructions displayed in Internet Explorer. The various tutorials can be called up anytime from the Help menu.
Painter Essentials make good use of floating palettes including one for Quick Guides which I found more useful that the previously mentioned tutorials. There are palettes for restoration; under painting; auto-painting; colour; and photo painting. You can paint on various paper textures. Different types of paints and other forms of colour are available for applying with a range of brush types and sizes. Individual brushes can be assigned with specific properties. You can even turn a digital image into a Van Gogh style painting with a minimum number of mouse clicks.
When painting with oils, the media will act naturally so that you can blend and mix colours while watercolours will stay wet between sessions so that the user can continue where they left off as if there had been no break in the painting process. Cloning is quick and easy to implement using the whole image or a user-designated area. Other tools include those for erasing any type of paint, cropping images, flooding with colour, and adding text using any of your fonts with standard formatting controls.
As you would expect, there is support for other Corel applications such as Paint Shop Pro and Photo Album. You can also exchange files between Painter Essentials, Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements. There is also support for the recent advancements introduced by Wacom into its pen tablets including the Intuos and Contiq models.
Painter Essentials 3 can run on either the Windows or Macintosh platforms. For Windows you will need a Pentium 500MHz processor with 256MB of RAM, 150MB of hard disk space with 24-bit colour display at a resolution of 1024 x 768 running on Windows 2000 or Windows XP. Mac users require a Power Macintosh G3 500MHz system running Mac OXX version 10.2.8 of higher with 256MB of RAM, 150MB of hard disk space and 24-bit colour at 1024 x 768 resolution. While the use of a tablet is recommended, a mouse is a perfectly acceptable substitute. The product has been priced at £69.
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Comment by Jono, May 16, 2008 6:50