Corel Painter is the leading 'natural media' painting program, which means that it attempts to simulate the use of physical watercolour and oil paints, ink, pencil, charcoal and pastel in an electronic form. It can be used with a mouse, but is better with a graphics pad and probably best with one of the LCD graphics pads, like Wacom's Cintiq.

The big advance claimed by Corel for version X (version 10, really, but all Corel's new products now have hybrid version numbers), is RealBristle, which simulates the types of bristles used in different brushes. This means that a blender brush gives a different effect from a fan or a round, though of course the biggest difference from real painting is still in the tactile experience of using a stylus on a pad.

Applying paint and building up a picture layer by layer does approximate to the way most artists work, and the wide range of brush sizes, along with being able to load the brush with more or less paint, gives a lot of scope.

What's even more intriguing is that imported photographs also act like paintings, with the paint still wet. You can touch photos up with Painter's brushes or use them as a basis for an artistic impression of the photographic subject.

There are other new features in the program, like the Divine Proportion grid, which superimposes Golden Rectangles and a proportion spiral over an image, so you can make use of it in producing a more eye-catching work. Other, simpler grid overlays are also available and can be customised so you can choose proportions to fit individual projects.

As well as the artistic brushes, Painter X has a good range of photo-editing tools and filters and can be used for retouching photos as well as adding artistic effects, such as canvas textures and random brushstrokes. Colour palettes can be extracted directly from a photo, too.

Painter X's interface is conventional, with a menu across the top, toolbox down the left-hand side and palettes down the right. In this program's case, palette is a very suitable word, as one of the panels is for 'mixing' colours. By dipping into standard pots and putting spots of colour onto the palette, you can then mix just the hue you want. And once the colour's just right, you can use as much of it as you like; the palette will never run dry.

Verdict
Painter is by far the most widely sold artistic painting program on the PC. Painter X shows that Corel isn't sitting on its laurels because of this, and is continuing to develop new and useful features to make it an even more suitable vehicle for realistic electronic artwork.

Company: Corel

Contact: 0800 376 9271

Tags: paint corel painter wacom brush graphics corel image editing painter