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(More customer reviews)If you are an artist who works with "wet media"--oils, watercolor, magic markers, pen and ink or if you are a digital artist who creates only with pixels of light on a computer, you should seriously look at Painter IX. This is without a doubt, digital art software at its very best.
I've used a form of Painter since its very first version, which was called Sketcher. This was back before 1990, I am pretty sure, and Sketcher, which was a Fractal Designs product, came in a snazzy cigar box (because many sketch artists keep their charcoals in this handy container.) The software did grey-scale renderings of drawings into charcoal, pencil or ink and it could be used to sketch on graphics tablets.
After Sketcher came Painter, which was sold amusingly in a paint can and did color rendering of oil, watercolor, pencil and inks. Eventually, Painter was sold to Corel, who had the expertise in graphics design software to take Painter to a whole new level. While previous versions of Painter had some idiosyncrasies, Painter IX has been revised to match current graphics capabilities of computers, and has been debugged to the point that it is a pure pleasure to use. As a result, professional designers of everything from brochures to fast cars use Painter instead of real media or in conjunction with art media to create some stunning digital creations. In addition, wet media artists now routinely use digital art software to visualize, compose and test designs before doing them by hand. I do this myself; I take photos or sketches and try out palettes to see how a certain color scheme works. Or I cut and paste elements of a composition to visualize the painting before I sketch it on paper. My own medium is watercolor, and I find it a lot more comforting to have a plan of attack before I hit that scary white (and pricey) piece of watercolor paper. Visualizing my composition on the PC screen is a very useful tool.
If you had tried Painter before and were less than thrilled, you should take a look again. If you have never used a digital arts package and want to be serious about digital art, I can't think of another product I'd recommend.
So, let's get a detailed look into Painter IX and see what it does:
Art Media:
1. Literally 100's of brushes that can be modified in size and quality (hairness, spray direction, stroke depth, and "taught" your personal stroke on the graphics tablet.) You can create brushes, and even make "image hoses"--a way to spray a graphic and paint with say, berries, leaves, architectural elements. You can make your own image nozzle out of any graphic element and even have it shaded with a drop shadow. The image hose is a lot of fun--scrapbookers can find a lot of uses for it as it's rather like a digital rubber stamp.
2. 30 plus media, like oil, impasto, charcoal, crayon, ink, gouache, watercolor, airbrush, oil and chalk pastel, pencil, photo filters, and even woodcut and sumi-e. They are realistic to the point where you can smear the oil around--the only thing is you don't smell the turpentine. The texture of canvas or paper comes through under the media according to the amount you choose, and you can light the finished work to highlight texture and shine.
3. Textured papers like canvas and watercolor. You can input your own textures to make a customized paper. There are pattern fills like cloth and pebbles, and you can make patterns to use as background fill. Any image can be captured to make a texture or pattern.
4. Wet media --like ink, wet oils, watercolor. A wet layer allows you to push the paint around as if the surface were wet. It can be "dried."
5. A mixing palette to mix paints as one would on a real palette.
6. Cloning--copying a picture and then rendering it as if you had a tracing paper over top a real picture. You can grab portions of the picture with your tablet stylus and brush them into oils, watercolors, chalk. You can auto-clone and create a sketch from a photo.
7. Photo filters: a good set of filters used to modify digital photos and scans are included.
8. Typical adjustment features to modify color, remove color, change contrast and light/dark.
9. Animation tools and web design tools. Many graphics software packages have these (Adobe Photoshop, Macromedia Fireworks) but these allow you to create web graphics with a handpainted or handdrawn look. For anime artists, this could be a huge plus.
10. A scripting engine that lets you record your own operations and play them back with one click to automate your work or create movies. Scripts are automatically saved --meaning you can recover work if your PC crashes.
The major improvements in Painter IX are noteworthy:
1. A 175 page printed spiral-bound manual to get you started and an online help that looks like a spiral-bound manual with everything from online videos, art examples to inspire you and recipes. The tutorial movies from Lynda.com are included in the license. The learning tools are amazing; the spiral bound manual stays open and is easy to navigate. The online tools are lavish and very helpful, because Painter is powerful and there IS a learning curve to get into the most advanced features.
2. Kai's Power Tools (filters for photography) are included. This popular standalone package of photo adjustment tools has Gel, Goo, LensFlare, Lightning, Pyramid Paint, Reaction, and ShapeShifter.
3. There are many new shortcuts, most welcome of which is Quick Clone, reducing the number of steps needed to clone a picture down to a single click.
4. Mixing oils on a palette is more like real media.
5. The watercolor has been sped up to lightning-fast; it was rather slow in previous versions.
6. I found far fewer bugs or crashes--my graphics card is not particularly new and could be bumped up a bit (I have onboard graphics and I could do with adding a better video card) but I still found Painter IX faster and far easier to use than Painter 8.0. The watercolor function was about 10 times faster, at least.
Summary: If you think you'd like to do digital art, this is the one package I'd recommend.
Minimum computer requirements:
· Macintosh: Mac OS X 10.2.8 or higher, 500 MHz, 128 MB RAM (256 recommended), 1024x768 monitor resolution, 395 MB disk space.
· Windows: Windows 2000 or XP, 500 MHz Pentium II (or higher), 128 MB RAM (256 recommended), 1024x768 monitor resolution, 380 MB disk space.
Recommended:
A graphics tablet is a must--you can use a mouse, but you won't get the benefits of real media feel without a tablet. The package can use various tablets, but is optimized for the Intuos (WACOM) line of tablets.
Update your graphics card and graphics memory if you have an older PC.
Click Here to see more reviews about: Corel Painter IX.5
For more than 13 years, Painter has been the world's pre-eminent Natural-Media painting and illustration software. Corel Painter IX offers the same breathtaking brushes and features that Painter artists have grown to love--but with significantly enhanced speed and performance. All brushes now operate at an average of twice their former speed, and some brushes are 10 times faster. Corel Painter IX also unveils the brand-new Artists' Oils Painting System, a revolutionary Natural-Media painting technology that enables you to sample multiple colors from the Mixer palette and apply them as wet oily paint to your canvas.
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