Corel Painter 11

Corel’s Painter has for some years been the best-known computer painting program, which means that it’s designed for creating original artwork rather than touching up digital photographs.

The so-called natural media software enables digital artists to use simulated brushes, pens, pencils and other devices to approximate real-world artistic techniques.

Painter is best used with a good quality graphics tablet that has pressure sensitivity so that it can tell how hard the user is pressing. By using a tipped stylus to represent the different tools, Painter enables the user to wash watercolours, smudge pencil and charcoal or smear oil paints across the screen, as well as using the usual software tricks found in photo-editing programs such as layers, undo and symbol brushes to create natural stylised artworks.

Version 11, which follows version X due to a quirk in Corel’s numbering system, has a few new twists, but nothing so important as the last version’s introduction of ‘real bristle’ brushes for painting, which as the name suggests, simulate the movement of the bristles of a real brush. Using such brushes, the user can simulate heavily loaded or near-dry brushstrokes for different effects. The biggest things Painter 11 adds to the mix are Hard Media and Dry Media controls, a resizable colour palette and a new colour management interface.

Hard Media includes such things as pencils, charcoal and chalk and these can now be given different tip-widths, so it’s possible to produce thin lines for drawing and thicker ones for shading, by using the tip or side of the stylus. Some of the Dry Media tools, like felt-tip markers, now include a build-up effect, so overlaid strokes give darker and darker shades of colour.

The colour palette, which shows a tint triangle inside a colour ring, can now be resized. No big deal, you might think, but having a larger palette means the user can see a wider range of colour and tints, so they can pick a particular shade more accurately. The mixer palette, on which colours can be mixed as on a real palette, can also be enlarged to get just the shade you’re after.

Efforts have been made to make Painter 11 easier to use with the common Adobe products, particularly Photoshop, and colour matching between the two is now closer. The look of the colour management interface is now more like Adobe’s, so there’s less to learn if you’re already used to that one.

All in all, these extras are good to have, but there’s not enough here to justify the £137 upgrade price. If you’re buying version 11 as your first Painter, there’s a lot here, but the up-front price is very high if you’re not looking at this as a professional investment.