All Things Painter The essential application between your digital photo and color printer by John Derry

It is no secret that digital camera sales have exploded in the past few years— digital cameras now outsell traditional film cameras. Purchased side by side with these digital cameras are inexpensive ink-jet photo printers. It is now possible to shoot and print your own photographs without making a round trip to the corner one-hour photo-processing shop. The real excitement, however, is what happens in between the photography and the finished print.

Corel has just released Corel® Painter™ Essentials 3, an application that borrows from the best of its professional Natural-Media® sibling, Corel® Painter™ IX, and streamlines its workflow for folks just getting their bearings in the world of digitally created art. All of the tools that made Painter famous are present: oils, chalks, pencils, watercolors, airbrushes, thick impasto, cloning brushes, and more. So, what's different?

Becoming oriented in a new medium takes time. To aid new users, Corel Painter Essentials debuts its context-sensitive Quick Guide palette. Think about traveling in your car. Which highway is the shortest route to your destination? Do you have the relevant maps available in the glove box for a quick consultation? The Quick Guide palette is the glove box of Corel Painter Essentials. Conveniently located above the Color palette, the Quick Guide palette provides a handy description of the workspace items as you select them. Links to more detailed help are also provided.

Corel Painter Essentials also features the new Photo Painting Palettes. These three palettes—Underpainting, Auto-Painting, and Restoration—are organized to provide a step-by-step cloning workflow. The Underpainting palette centralizes several tools for preparing an image for cloning. The Style pop-up menu allows quick tonal adjustments to an image through easy-to-understand effect options. The Edge Effect pop-up menu lets you add soft-edged borders to an image by using adjustable stylistic vignette options.

My favorite Underpainting feature is the new Smart Blur control. This slider-based adjustment reduces a photograph's complexity while maintaining its crisp edges. The application of Smart Blur alone can transform a photograph by adding a watercolor-like simplicity. A Quick Clone button is available to take completed underpaintings to the next logical step: Auto-Painting.

The Auto-Painting palette makes it extremely easy to create paintings from digital photos - even if you've never touched a paintbrush in your life. Many of the decisions made while creating artwork are what I refer to as “season-to-taste” decisions. Like a chef in the kitchen, the artist adds personalized variations to create a unique result. The choice of stroke and its corresponding attributes—randomness, pressure, length, rotation, and size—are all smartly grouped together here. As adjustments are made and then applied to an image, the effects are immediately observed. This visual feedback as well as the ability to undo brushwork provides an optimal season-to-taste environment in which you can experiment until you arrive at the perfect recipe for your image.

The Restoration palette allows the original photographic detail to be selectively reintroduced into a painted clone image. This technique is used by traditional portrait artists. The highest degree of detail is preserved in the facial area of a portrait, and the background is painted with broader strokes. The result is that the viewer's eye is led into the area of greatest interest: the subject's face. In Corel Painter Essentials, this same traditional technique can be applied retroactively to an auto-painted image with the adjustable brushes in the Restoration palette.

Finished images benefit from enhanced compatibility with popular software and hardware. For Windows® users, Corel® Paint Shop Pro® files (versions 9 and X) are readable by Corel Painter Essentials, and files can be sent to Corel® Photo Album™ 6. The Adobe® Photoshop® PSD file format is also supported. Layers and layer sets are maintained when users save and open files in both Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements.

Mac® users can set their Apple® iPhoto™ preferences to designate Corel Painter Essentials as their photo-editing software. This means that double-clicking an iPhoto image opens the image for editing in Corel Painter Essentials.

Corel Painter Essentials 3 fully supports the most recent advancements in pen tablet technology from Wacom, including the Wacom® Intuos® 3 pen tablet, the Cintiq 21UX interactive pen display, and the 6D Art Pen.

In addition, this is the fastest-performing version of Corel Painter Essentials yet. If you are the owner of a digital camera, a craftsperson with a digital yen, or just want to get your hands virtually dirty with digital art, then you owe it to yourself to take a serious look at Corel Painter Essentials 3.

John Derry
Somewhere in Kansas

John Derry is a pioneer of digital painting and one of the original authors of Corel® Painter™. Since 1985, he 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. He is currently serving as Corel's Painter Ambassador-at-large. John's Web site is at www.pixlart.com.