Corel Painter 2015 review: Digital art studio betters its best features

Corel Painter 2015 $429.00 It's not a revolutionary update for the world's leading natural-media painting application, but key improvements keep Painter 2015 at the top of its class.

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Corel Painter faces an interesting problem: When you're the best natural-media painting program out there, how do you innovate? What more could you possibly add to get people to buy the new version, Painter 2015?

Painter 2015 improves on a proven formula.

Fortunately, rather than trying to fix something that isn't broken or add a "groundbreaking" new interface (Ribbon, anyone?), Corel went with incremental improvements. They don't make for a riveting feature list, but they keep what's good about Painter and actually do make it better.

Painter is like an unlimited artist's toolbox—at the heart of the app are its numerous and sophisticated brushes, which convincingly emulate natural media. Previous versions saw the introduction of Real Watercolor and Real Oil brushes, which actually let you watch paint dry (more exciting than most will have you believe). Painter 2015 introduces Particle Brushes.

You'll find the new particle brushes in a number of categories.

Unlike Painter's usual fare, Particle Brushes do not emulate analog tools. Instead, they give you quick ways to draw wisps of smoke or realistic fur and hair and add swirls of color to your creations. In other words, if you're a purist and you love your paintings to look as if they were drawn by hand, you may struggle to find uses for some of the new Particle Brushes. But for artists who enjoy melding old with new, they open up new possibilities. If you want a hyper-realistic beard for your fantasy dwarf, these are the brushes to use.

Another area that's been improved is speed: Corel says Painter 2015 is about 40 percent faster than its predecessor, Painter X3. Even so, some of the brushes are processor-hungry—especially the aforementioned Real Watercolor. I was still able to slow Painter 2015 to a crawl on a powerful computer by quickly drawing many strokes with a Real Watercolor brush. Once the paint finished drying, Painter was back to its usual zippy self.

Next up in the improved features department, jitter smoothing. This technical-sounding name hides a simple reality: When we draw by hand, no two strokes are exactly the same. A computer's digital uniformity is a dead giveaway when you're trying to emulate natural media. While jitter, or introducing some randomness into the strokes, isn't new to Painter 2015, it has been improved. Newly-introduced jitter smoothing allows finer control over jitter, so you can tune your brush strokes to look just like you want them to.

Jitter smoothing (right) vs. jitter without smoothing (left).

Painter 2015 ships with five layouts, but you can also make your own.

If Painter is like an unlimited artist's toolbox, that can be both a blessing and a curse. You can use any tool your heart desires... if you can just find it. With dozens of tool panes filled to the brim with sliders, checkboxes, and tabs, finding what you need can be confusing. Painter 2015 helps by introducing new palette arrangements.

An illustrator doesn't use the same tools as a photo artist, and a novice user would find either one of these layouts intimidating. So when you start up Painter, you can now opt for a Simple interface with just a handful of large buttons or for the Illustrator or Photo Artist one. Another included layout highlights just the brushes new to Painter 2015 for when you want to try out just the latest and the greatest.

While brushes are at the heart of Painter, sometimes you may want to tweak (or radically change) the look of your entire image. This is where effects come in, and Painter 2015 makes those easier to use, too. While previous versions included image-wide effects, they limited preview to a small thumbnail in the effect dialog. Painter 2015 applies the effect to the full image, letting you see exactly what you're going to get and modify effect settings as needed.

Full-canvas preview makes it easier to tweak effects.

If you're a happy user of Corel Painter X3, I'm not sure any of the new features or improvements should compel you to upgrade. On the other hand, if you've never used Painter, this latest version is better than what came before—not a given when it comes to a mature product like this. Painter was, and remains, a solid and versatile tool for creating digital art.

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Review: Corel Painter X3 makes natural media more accessible

Corel Painter X3 $429.00 Corel Painter X3 remains a compelling tool for creating traditional-looking artwork with a computer, especially now that it's easier to navigate.

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Corel Painter faces a problem similar to that of Microsoft Office: When you're already at the top of your field, it's hard to see the path to improvement. Just like Office is the go-to suite for everyday productivity tasks, Corel Painter is the go-to application for serious artists looking to create natural-looking paintings and concept sketches using a computer. That gives Corel the enviable problem of trying to get artists to upgrade from a program that's already more than good enough...a problem the company tackles ably in Painter X3.

Painter's Start screen tries to be both inviting and inspiring.

Corel's solution: Keep the powerful tools, but make everything more accessible. Almost every change and addition in the new Corel X3 is meant to lower the learning curve, make features easier to discover, or make common drawing tasks simpler than they used to be.

Take, for example, the all-new brush search engine: Previous versions of Corel came packed to the gills with impressive brushes, including my personal favorites, Real Watercolor and Real Wet Oil. While established users could appreciate having dozens and dozens of brushes to choose from, novice users could find the sprawling brush selection menu daunting. The new search engine tackles this by avoiding the menu altogether: Simply type "pencil," and get a list of all of the pencil brushes Corel Painter offers, no matter where they are located in the brush menu.

Thanks to the new brush search engine, you no longer have to dig through the menu to find the brush you want.

Even once you find a brush with a name that sounds like what you need ("Real 6B Soft Pencil"), you'd still want to see what it actually looks like on paper. This is where another new feature comes in handy: Stroke preview. Simply hover over the brush's name, and a small pop-up shows you what you can expect once you put the brush to your canvas. The preview shows just a single, isolated stroke, so you will still need to learn how to read it, but it can help.

Corel's cloning feature makes it easy to create paintings based on photos.

Many artists base their paintings on reference images, and Painter X3 makes it relatively easy to inject such images into your workspace. Reference images float in their own mini-windows which you can drag around and even take outside the main Corel Painter window. You can zoom and pan them, and it is easy to quickly sample colors from them.

For budding artists who need more of a helping hand, the newly enhanced cloning workflow can come in handy. You can now place a reference image next to your work, and see a cloning crosshairs moving around on the source image as you work on your painting, letting you easily see what exactly you're cloning. At its simplest, this lets you render a photo into a painting using just a handful of strokes.

The new perspective feature is handy mainly for artists who already know what they're doing.

Another new addition to X3 are perspective guides, which make it easier to draw street scenes, rooms, and other images with a sense of depth and perspective. This feature could be made more accessible in future versions: It currently ships with just four presets bearing names that assume you know what you're doing, such as "Point Standard Horizon" and "Point Worms-Eye View."

All in all, Painter X3 is an iterative release, with no major groundbreaking features...but really, Corel Painter doesn't need such features to retain its lead in the natural-media painting world. Making the application more accessible is a good move, and one that I hope to see continued in the next iteration of this venerable art application.

Note: The Download button takes you to the vendor's site, where you can download the latest version of the software.

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Turn Photos Into Fine Art With Dynamic Auto Painter

Dynamic Auto-Painter ($50, free demo with watermarks) lets you take any photograph and turn it into a high-resolution painting that looks like it was drawn by hand. It is not a simple pixel mask or overlay filter: Rather, it uses real brush strokes based on the works of great artists to recreate any photograph as a painting, stroke by stroke.

Dynamic Auto-Painter recreates a photograph as a drawing using real artist brush strokes, yielding astonishing results.I love products like Corel Painter and ArtRage Studio Pro that let you draw your own natural-looking images using nothing but a computer and a mouse or a pen tablet. But as much as I enjoy painting, I am a much better photographer than I am a painter. Dynamic Auto-Painter lets me bridge that gap and present my photographs in ways I never thought I could.

The application ships with over twenty different painting presets, ranging from Aquarel to Chalk to Monet to "Wet-on-wet" paintings with subtle color gradients. The workflow is simple: Drop a photo into the app, pick the preset you like, and dial in your settings: How expressive or realistic you want the output to be, how dry or wet, what should be the brush sizes used, how faithful or impressionistic the output should be, etc. Now hit Start and watch your photo transform into a painting.

The process itself is fascinating to watch. When I first tried the program, I figured my processor was going to crunch some numbers and come up with a somewhat-transformed version of my photo that is supposed to resemble a painting. In other words, I had fairly low expectations. Imagine my surprise when my photo was removed from the canvas, and individual brush strokes began to appear one by one, rapidly building up the image from scratch. It was an eerie experience, almost like watching an invisible artist painting my photo in fast-forward.

Producing an image can take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour. If you've ever used a 3D design program such as Carrara, you've probably had to wait for a render to finish. Using Dynamic Auto-Painter is a similar experience, only it "renders" a hand-drawn painting instead of a 3D-looking polished image. One big difference is the continuous mode, in which Dynamic Auto-Painter continues rendering endlessly. You decide when to stop once you get the look you were after (sometime fewer brush strokes make for a more expressive painting).

For my first test, I picked the Aquarel preset and changed almost none of the settings. The results were surprisingly good--it really looked like a painting, even when I zoomed in on the 6-megapixel output image (the default output setting--Dynamic Auto-Painter can output images as large as 16 megapixels). At full resolution, the brush strokes become clearly visible and show organic grain and texture.

Because the application redraws the image from scratch rather than overlay individual pixels, you can feed it with a low-resolution image and get high-resolution output. I tried this with a 250-pixel image; results weren't as nice as when I used high-resolution input images, but even this tiny image yielded a beautiful (and clear) 2400-pixel painting.

Having over twenty presets, each with configurable settings, means you can coax an endless variety of art styles from Dynamic Auto-Painter. You can even combine presets: I created a painting using the WoodEtch filter, then left it on the canvas and painted over it with the Aquarel filter, and then painted over the result using yet another filter.

Using Dynamic Auto-Painter is not like drawing artwork from scratch, but it offers amazing results and great customization for very little effort. If you've ever wanted to see your photos through the eyes of a painter, Dynamic Auto-Painter is well worth the download.

--Erez Zukerman

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