T he joy of painting is something keenly felt With the latest Painter Essentials from Corel, we get the best of digital combined with the experimental fun of painting by hand.Ĭorel has put an awful lot of thought into what the artist is missing in the digital painting experience. Undeniably beautiful, powerful and effective – one of the best ways to get in to painting, via your computer, for the first time.Get a taste for the most realistic painting software available The specsįeatures Updated Ul Symmetry Painting Tablet support Image Tracing Nevertheless, recent versions have worked hard to try and simplify the user interface while delivering performance efficiencies to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the program. There are also useful composition tools such as mirror and kaleidoscope as well as familiar concepts like rule of thirds.Īll of this power comes at a price – the program can be difficult to navigate at first, and some of the more realistic brushes will slow less powerful computers to a crawl.

Painter also provides a wide variety of effects to spruce up existing images, plus cloning and photo painting tools to transform photos into virtual works of art. Ultimately there’s something here for the purist and those who just want to produce superb results without tapping into their years of training or experience. Other brushes – such as Particle Brushes – aren’t quite as authentic, but provide shortcuts to producing beautiful – yet more subtle – effects such as fur or smoke. Painter’s success lies in its brilliantly realised papers and brushes, with recently introduced Real Watercolour and Real Oil brushes actually letting you watch the paint “dry” on the canvas to produce results even closer to those in real life. This is a powerful tool developed painstakingly over years to provide the digital artist with all the tools they could ever possibly need to simulate watercolours, oil paintings and more besides. Who needs canvas and paint when you have the perfect digital art room in the form of your PC or Mac? Of course, simulating natural paints and strokes using bog-standard image editors is not the most satisfying experience, which is where Corel Painter comes in.

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