All Things Painter Painter Your Photographs by John Derry

You've learned how to use your digital camera and purchased a color inkjet printer. With these tools, you can produce good-looking glossy color prints that are indistinguishable from those supplied by the local one-hour photo lab. For some folks, this is enough: They astound family and friends with their techno-prowess and please a willing audience.

But for many others, the ability to match the output quality of the local photo lab is a hollow victory. For one thing, the lab can do the job more cheaply. Time is valuable, and producing quality prints takes time and effort. So how can you surpass the capabilities of the commercial photofinisher? Painter your photographs!

We think of Corel® Painter™ as an image-creation application, but it's much more. Its primary photo-altering technique is cloning, which reinterprets an existing image according to the currently selected brush. The expressive characteristics of the current brush directly affect the appearance of the reinterpreted image. You can translate a photograph into another medium: Chalks, Oils, Van Gogh, Impressionist—the choices are as diverse as Corel Painter brushes. Cloning automates the translation of a photo into a Natural-Media™ image, which is great for beginning Painter-philes.

For more expressive results, you can add your own nuances by brushing directly on an existing image, as if you were working with wet oil paint on canvas. You can use any number of brushes to modulate the photo-painting. With hand-applied brush strokes, you can alter the photo as subtly or dramatically as you wish. When you temporarily reset the current brush's Resaturation value (Resat slider on the property bar) to 0%, the flow of color shuts off, and the brush is restricted to modulating underlying color only—in this case, a photograph.

You can also add interesting edge treatments to photographs. Although other applications or plug-ins can be used, why not take advantage of the many brushes in Corel Painter and avoid the expense of additional software? For example, use the Square Chalk variant to apply a weathered character to the edge of an image. The range of possibilities is as broad as your imagination.

Recent coverage of Corel Painter IX in Rangefinder, Professional Photographer, and Studio Photography & Design shows the growing interest of photographers in this software. Marilyn Sholin, Fay Sirkis, Nomi Wagner, Helen Yancy, Rod Evans, and other innovative artists who use Corel Painter are blurring the line between photography and painting. To see the work and profiles of some of these artists, check out the Painter Masters section of the Corel Painter IX Web site.

Many excellent resources are available. Longtime Painter gurus Jane Conner-ziser, Cher Pendarvis, Karen Sperling, Jeremy Sutton, and Jim Zuckerman all offer exceptional Painter-specific learning opportunities. Tanya Staples and I have produced Getting Started with Corel Painter IX, which is available at lynda.com. In this set of movie-based tutorials, I specifically cover cloning and photo-painting. Additional information on training materials, interactive content, schools, and workshops appears in the Training and Education section of the Corel Painter IX Web site.

So, partner Corel Painter with digital photography and take personal artistic expression to the next level: Painter your photographs!

John Derry
Somewhere in Kansas

John Derry is a pioneer of digital painting and one of the original authors of Corel® Painter™. Since 1985, John has leveraged his background in drawing and painting to advance the look and experience of traditional art-making tools on the computer. John has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in Fine Art and is a practicing artist and photographer. John is the Art Director at Strauss Peyton Imaging, a fine art printing company.