Overall Summary: Functionally, Painter 8 is the premier artists media tool for new creations and 3D surface renderings. But both videographers and digital photo touch up artists will find Painter provides some wonderful touches not found elsewhere.
Pros: Brushes and Brush Creator, Surface Control effects, Impasto, Water Color media and Papers, Cloner tools, Weaves, ..... and on.
Cons: No Image Browser, limited previews. In general, great tools hidden by arcane access rules. Despite these foibles -
Overall rating: 8 out of 10

Figure 1 - The Painter 8 Bitmap Canvas & Color Mixer

It appears that Corel Painter 8 is taking over for its sibling product, PhotoPaint 12, as the premium bitmap paint program in the company's line-up. PhotoPaint 9 thru 12 have seen only marginal improvements especially when compared with major competitors - the Adobe Photoshop line and Jasc Paint Shop Pro. In contrast Corel Painter 8 has seen steady across the board improvements. This is reflected in Painter 8 where there are such features as a new Color Mixer, Sketch Effect, and Info Palette. Also new are a whole new Digital Water Color media type, the amazing Brush Creator, plus over 2 dozen new brush variants. And the interface improvements with substantially revised property bar, toolbox, layering and palette designs make Painter 8 easier than ever to use for the diverse missions it serves.

Review Strategy

Given the new expanded role of Painter we shall examine first its suitability as graphics editor and then examine its specific virtues as natural arts impresario. Right off Painter 8 has all the tools to do basic CAST-Crop, Adjust colors, Sharpen and Touch-up work. These are the basic core graphics editing operations that digital artists have to do for almost every photo or even newly painted images they work with. However there is one glaring deficiency - Corel still does not have an on-board image browser and given that Painter does not pick up thumbnails until you write a file out through Painter - this is a like a fall in ice skating.But Painter has a full rage of crop, scale, rotate, resize, flip, mirror - everything but perspective distortion; but some nice little extras like Photoshop's Liquid tools, one can apply a range of select area or image warps.

In color adjustments Painter has a full gamut of tools like curves, levels, hue saturation and value etc. And these controls allow corrections for the full color or individual R, G, B curves. But this reviewer found some color adjustment tools are quite powerful and others are just different. Since color adjustment is so important we shall examine this in detail here. But the bottom line is that Painter 8 has a rich set of color correction tools that are idiosyncratic. Users familiar with other graphics tools will find them different with a bit of learning curve attached. Also they lack the full previewing capabilities of Corel PhotoPaint or Jasc PaintShop Pro. For example users don't see a thumbnail split of before and after color adjustments. Nor is it possible to preview the color adjustments on the complete canvas. Finally the preview thumbnail is austere and as small as in Photoshop. Yet the Painter color adjustments are versatile. They provide effective solutions to a broad range of color correction problems - if you can't get it done in Photoshop or PaintShop Pro give Painter a try - especially dye concentration and external lighting problems.

In a similar fashion, sharpening tasks or what Painter 8 calls Focus Control, are again different and because of the inherent Painter model - every image has associated with it a paper surface (think of the default as being a uniform matte) and a texture (think of the default as fine grained sand). These auto or invisible layers can be invoked during sharpening and focus control operations to great effect. However, Painter lacks the stunning power of PaintShop Pro's Edge Preserving Smooth - so what users gain in sharpening special effects they lose a bit of smoothing sophistication. Finally, for retouches there is no Red-eye removal tool (just use a magnified image and the Broad Wheel Airbrush tool set at 30% opacity and 250 flow values). Check out the many neato Cloner brushes and note that you set the File | Clone Source to be the existing canvas. Oh and don't forget to set the the Clone Color button in the Color Palette. And last but not least go to the clone source window (if it is not the current canvas) and set the start point for cloning by pressing Options key in Mac (Alt key in Windows) and clicking with the mouse at the source point. Let me go over this one more time .... Absolutely great features in Painter are snuggled away almost as if by green jealously-guarded-secret design. The cloner brushes are just such a pleasure to work with; but the arcane Dungeons and Dragons way of accessing them are certainly not. And having a healing brush/scratch removal tool like in Photoshop and PaintShop Pro would be nice because their algorithmic wizardry cannot be easily matched in Painter's Clone Tools.

Image Editing Beyond CAST

There are a broad range of simple image correction tasks that - resizing, rotation, borders and canvas extensions, distortion corrections that generally apply to the whole image. This has been a source of great innovation in graphics editors recently. And Painter is no exception.It has a full range of tools. The perspective Grid is unique and very useful for artist and sketchers. Also there are some novel and handy warp/distortion effects. However there is a lack of control in Painter sometimes. For example, the Canvas | Canvas Resize command does not allow users to choose the color of the added canvas background - it is white. The commands themselves are spread over Canvas, Effects, and Windows menus. Again nice tools especially Effects | Surface Control and Effects | Orientation. In sum, image correction is a mixed bag at Painter not because of missing functionality but rather some obscure paths to control it all.

The Professional Level

Up to this point we have discussed tools and techniques for simple to medium complexity CAST and other photo corrections. Now we examine the painting tools, masks and shapes that make up the professional side of Painter 8. This will play to the programs strengths in brush control and vector shape creation and manipulation.

First and foremost,lets look at the pre-existing brushes and tools available to Painter 8 users. In the

screenshot above we see a list of about 2/3rds of the brushes available to Painter users. Five brush types are of particular attention since they have special requirements. First, the Liquid Ink and WaterColor brushes work on their own layers and do not allow other brushes to operate on their layers. This is because the run and pooling effects of the Liquid Ink and WaterColor brushes at the moment cannot be duplicated with other brushes. So interaction between brushes is reduced when using WaterColor or Liquid Ink. But overlay and transparency effects between layers still do apply. For example in the screenshot above the skater figure is an overlay of Liquid Ink with the burlap ice layer. By selecting darken mode the Liquid Ink figure comes through the ice layer modified by a mask for feathering the edges.

At the immediate left readers can see the number of choices of predefined brushes are available for each brush type. The Sumi-brush type is typical - its has 25 variants that users can choose from. This is where the real learning curve come to bear with Painter. There is no simple way to learn all the brushes available in the program. Just like artwork, nothing pays off better than dabbling with the brushes and practicing your style.

In the screenshot above, there are on the property bar 5 settings available to modify the Flat Sumi 15 brush. The two most important are the opacity of the brush(how much does it cover the underlying image and color - 100% means complete coverage, 0% means no brush stroke appears). Of course the size in pixels of the brush determines the size of the stroke. And the bleed and Resaturation settings determine how much the current stroke reacts with other brush strokes on the same layer or lower layers (for some types of brushes). The last setting is the stroke type - either straight line or freehand. Click the straight line segment button the right for strokes that follow a straight line with little "hand" jitter. use the left freehand curve button for smooth curves.

One of the most popular brushes in Painter 8, which has received the sincerest form of flattery from competitor(because they have copied it), is the Image Hose. The image hose has brush variants just like all other brushes. The variants control the size, orientation and spacing of the images that get spewed out of the Image Hose. But where do you get the images ?

The last special brush type we have already covered above - the Clone brushes which pick up their styling from other brushes and their HSV-Hue/Saturation and Value from the clone source's HSV values. So with cloners I borrow color and tone from another picture (or a different place on the current canvas) and the other brush properties like opacity, size, bleed, and others from the clone brush. It makes for some spectacular styling effects. In fact, users of Painter 8 can get a really good introduction to the tinting and other effects of brushes at the Corel Painter resources page with Painter co-designer John Derry's free Visual Guides. They are a must for mastering Painter 8.

The other half of working well in Painter involves layers and masks or selections. Masks work in Painter much like any other graphics program. You have 4 principle tools for creating them - a rectangular, circular, magic wand and freehand tools. In the screenshot above we applied a mask around the skating figure and then feathered that mask by 8-10 pixels - we were than able to brush the ice around the figure and give it a smoother finish prior to adding the burlap effect. The burlap effect was applied to the inverse of the mask that allowed all the ice to be changed but not the figure of the ice skater. And so it goes with masks in every graphics program - they are used to protect certain areas from the color adjustment, brush stroke or filter effects while leaving other areas exposed and changeable. Masks are like stencils in silk screening - vital to producing your art.

Layers we have already seen are required by the Liquid Ink and Water Color brushes. Layers allow artists to paint on a digital onion sheet that can be made completely transparent. This allows trying out some brush stylings or variants and then tossing it out or just leaving it in the work as an invisible layer. Layers can be dragged up and down in the dialog so that the topmost layer get the least modification. However, if you want to "expose " lower layers the use of transparency layers allow portions of a lower image to come through (white areas of the transparency layer let all of the image layers below through) and others to be masked off(the black areas of the transparency layer). Use of the transparency layers can be as sophisticated as Photoshop or PaintShop Pro. In sum, artist can create subtle compositions with many layers. because it is possible to create movies or animations within Painter 8 ( a whole tutorial in itself), I have seen spectacular "movies" that slowly turn on and off different layers - giving portraits a haunting life-like character straight out of Harry Potter's Hogwarts school.

The Shape of Things to Come

i really did not expect to see a vector drawing capability in painter. But its been in for some time. However, shapes stand alone - literally and figuratively. Literally, because every time you create a shape its placed on its own layer. Highly non-standard. And then it it hit me as as I worked more with Shapes in Painter 8 - like shapes in Photoshop they also figuratively stand alone. Sure you can fill shapes with all sorts of colors, gradients, even textures; but there is very little interaction between shapes and bitmaps except through layers and their transparencies plus the ability to convert bitmap selections into shapes and than after transformations back into masks/selections. As the screenshot below show, Shapes and vector graphics can do lively things in Painter 8.

Yet interaction between bitmaps and shapes is happening in more diverse ways. Macromedia Fireworks and Deneba Canvas allow bitmaps to be placed inside shapes and grouped shapes either as a single or tiled bitmap image with controls for their placement, rotation, and scaling. Several programs allow color adjustments and effects to be applied uniformly to bitmap or vector/gradient fills. Right Hemisphere's Deep Paint allows illumination of 2 1/2D bitmap textures to show the depth and relief of painted on gels, acrylic, and impasto media - similar to the impasto effects in Painter 8. Finally the whole world of 3D relies on the the projection of bitmap images onto 3D surfaces defined as mathematical surfaces with bumps, ripples and curves - but this world is coming to 2D. Or vice versa. Yes it is good to see the advanced shape transformations, scaling, rotations and combinations that are allowed in Painter 8. But having waited forlornly for Corel PhotoPaint to get vector and bitmap together, this party is hoping for a better meeting of bitmaps with shapes to come in Painter 9.

Summary

For the range of things that can be accomplished in Painter 8 (we have not even scratched the surface on the Brush Creator, keyboard shortcuts and scripting, tessellation and mosaics, video and movies, dynamic plugin layers and others) and the sheer absolute fun of working with the program - at times Painter 8 can frustrate you. Like I keep waving my mouse over icons and buttons waiting for a tooltip hint to popup explaining what that button does - all in vain. Or the tiny as Photoshop previews for color adjustments and effects. Or wanting to do more with shapes. Yet part of the virtue of Painter 8 is that it is unique and idiosyncratic. Like the eccentric Aunt who can be so darn entertaining at the holidays and then peeve some family member a month later - Painter 8 is always unique and mostly wonderful to work with.