Last week I looked at the new version
of Adobe's Photoshop, the industry-standard software for, as the name
suggests, editing digital photos and scans. Among its new features are
painting tools, beefed-up to make digital art look less like digital
art and more like paint or charcoal on paper or canvas.
When it comes to creating images onscreen that look like they were
done with real-world tools, though, Photoshop's new features don't come
close to matching those found in Painter 7 (about US$500, $200
upgrade), the latest version of a program that has passed through many
hands and is now released under Corel's new Procreate (get it?) brand
name.
From its beginnings, Painter has ignored Photoshop-like tools to
enhance photos in favour of "natural-media" tools, simulating the
actions of an ever-increasing range of brushes and other artists' tools
applied onto simulated textures of paper and canvas. The new version
offers newly realistic watercolour brushes and very nifty Liquid
Ink.
Also improved are the text tools and scripting functions, making it
possible to automate repeated strokes, simplifying, for example,
cross-hatching. The new version also offers increased support for
Photoshop-formatted files and previews JPEG files prior to saving,
making it easier to select an optimal amount of compression, balancing
file size against picture quality.
Painting realistically onscreen won't come easy, however. Painter
provides a dizzying array of palettes and brushes, each with a slew of
options. The previous version streamlined the user-interface, making
the wealth of choices look a little less overwhelming. The updated
watercolour brushes, for example, gives the user options to control how
digital "water" spreads, evaporates, and dries. Luckily, you can ignore
most of these options and just select a watercolour brush, choose a
colour, and start to paint.
Behind the scenes, the software is doing its best to simulate the
physics and chemistry that affect what happens when paint hits canvas.
The new version makes digital ink spread differently depending on the
direction of the grain of the digital paper, for example. As a result
of all this calculating, the software needs reasonably hefty hardware.
For reasonable performance, double the recommendations on the side of
the box (64 MB of memory and a 200 MHz processor).
Although you can paint with your mouse onscreen, Painter (and
Photoshop's painting features) really benefit from a graphics tablet
and pen. Most users find it more natural to draw with the tablets'
digital pens than with a mouse. As well, like using a paintbrush or
felt pen, Painter's brush strokes are pressure-sensitive: pressing down
harder with the digitizer's pen spreads more colour on screen. Wacom's
small but affordable (US$110) Graphire
2 graphics tablet or the company's bigger and better Intuos
2 (prices starting at $300) both include older versions of both
Photoshop and Painter to get users up and running.
Like the new Photoshop, the new version of Painter comes in Windows
and Mac versions, and like the new Photoshop, the Mac version offers
support for both the classic Mac OS and the new Mac OS X. But
unlike Photoshop, Painter's OS X version needs fine-tuning; it
runs noticeably slower than under OS 9. The OS X version is
stable, but it's just too slow for most users to find it
worthwhile.
Classic Mac OS artists and artist-wannabes will find the new
versions worthwhile, however. According to Procreate, artist Warren
Manser created designs for costumes for the recently released
Spider-Man film using Painter 7.
You'll still need talent to produce art, but Painter makes it easier
than ever for any of us to use a computer to produce digital images
that don't look like they were made on a computer.
You can order Painter 7.0
from
Amazon.com for US$395.
The
upgrade sells for US$195.
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