Corel Painter 8 Windows/Mac

by Corel

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00008NR3S
• Item model number: PTR80PCMENG0
• Date first available at Amazon.com: February 22, 2003
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #14,749 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

From the Manufacturer

With 30 mediums and over 400 new brushes, no other software replicates the traditional painting experience like Corel Painter 8. It unleashes your creative power, increases your productivity and enhances your compatibility with Adobe Photoshop, giving you digital tools that capture the subtleties of your artistic style.

Interactively blend paint colors using the new Mixer and design custom brushes with the Brush Creator. Experiment with true-to-life media such as Digital Watercolor, and create original sketches from photographs. With a redesigned interface, customizable palettes, and industry-standard layer masks and channels, you'll work more efficiently, leaving more time to be creative.

Corel Painter 8 is the ultimate digital sketching and painting application. It's designed for digital artists, illustrators, pre-visualization artists and photographers who crave creative freedom, and need the tools to mimic the output and experience of traditional drawing and painting media.

Unleash your creative power

• Mix your own colors--blend colors interactively as you would using paint and a palette with the new Mixer palette
• Design your own brushes interactively--the new Brush Creator was developed specifically to let you design your own custom brushes in a visual, interactive environment. Use the Randomizer to randomly modify the characteristics of an existing brush; combine the characteristics of two brushes together using the Transposer; or fine-tune brushes with the advanced controls of the Stroke Designer. The Brush Stroke preview lets you interactively view the changes you make to each brush before you apply them
• Create sketches from photographs--use the new Sketch Effect to easily convert photographs to simple pencil drawings while controlling the amount of paper grain, the heaviness of the pencil line and the desired level of detail
• Paint with Digital Watercolor--hand-paint line drawings, touch up photographs and create simple watercolor washes with the new Digital Watercolor simplified, transparent watercolor medium
• Experiment with over 400 new brushes--take advantage of more than 400 new brushes in over 30 mediums, including acrylics, airbrushes, blenders, calligraphy pens, chalks, charcoal, cloners, colored pencils, cont?, crayons, distortion, erasers, felt pens, gouache, impasto, oils, palette knives, pastels, pencils, pens, photos, sponges, sumi-e, tinting and watercolor

Increase your productivity

• A redesigned interface for better, faster access--the redesigned toolbox provides easier access to tools, papers, patterns, gradients, nozzles, looks and weaves. A context-sensitive Property Bar puts commonly used controls at your fingertips, and the new Brush Selector simplifies your brush selection
• Group palettes to customize your workflow--group and ungroup palettes in any configuration to match your workflow and reduce the number of palettes on screen
• Keep track of your brushes--the new Tracker palette keeps track of your most recently used brushes so you can navigate between brushes quickly
• Preview brushes--preview brushes before you paint with a live brush preview
• View brush size as you paint--use the new Brush Preview Cursor to see the dab size and shape of the brush you've chosen
• See image information at a glance--enjoy easy access to important image information, such as cursor position, color info and unit details, with the new Info palette

Stay compatible

• Hide and reveal areas of a layer--use the redesigned Layer Masks to hide and reveal areas of a layer without making permanent changes
• Create and store masks--use alpha channels to create and store masks to modify, separate and preserve specific areas of an image
• Open and save Adobe Photoshop files--enjoy enhanced support for opening and saving Adobe Photoshop files, including layer sets, layer masks and channels
• Use the latest operating systems--take advantage of full compatibility with Mac OS X and Windows XP

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Leave well enough alone! The bad first, then the good..., June 4, 2003

By 

Simon (Ocala- Fla) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Corel Painter 8 Windows/Mac (CD-ROM)

As the other reviewer noted, Photoshop users will be on home ground here, but some basic Painter functionality seems to be lost. The "new" brushes are not really worth spending money for a new version, if you don't have any version of Painter already. Painter 7 is a fine program, with a vast functionality, though its learning curve is steep. Along with my compatriot, I mourn the loss of the capable and extremely useful expressions palette. The mixing window is fun, and I would suppose it to be useful to those who cannot mix colors easily. Once again, mixing, then eyedropper choosing was very easy before.

The new brushes palette is not that hard to use, but what really new brushes are there? None that I can see. The Photoshop-like layout is not bad, but why change the interface so much, and not include some of Photoshop's best features? How about some really new filters that no version of Painter ever had? How about allowing difference, color, multiply, lighten, and so forth brush functions on the canvas, like Photoshop does? (If Painter 8 does this, I've missed it!)

Now for the good... if a new user wants to get a Photoshop interface, then this is the program to get, considering it's half the price of Photoshop. For those who want Painter's wonderful brush engine, this version supplies a great deal of it at a great lowering in price from the earlier releases. This really is a fine program, capable of incredible raster graphics. The brushes are great, and the capabilities it presents for designing one's own brushes is a great plus. I like Adobe's interface, but I also liked Painter's interface. Six of one, half a dozen of these over here for me. By the way, the color choosing palettes are still the same as any of Painter's earlier releases, which is vastly superior to Adobe's anemic, hard to use color palette.

Is Corel afraid Painter will supercede their raster graphics programs? (Corel Draw is a vector map graphics interface, hard to use, since it's a memory hog of colossal proportions.) I do not have the answer to that question. For my uses, I find Painter's earlier releases from 5 on up to and including 7 to be superior to ALL the other graphics programs I've ever used put together. That includes Adobe Photoshop, up to and inclusive of 6, Fauve Matisse, TV Paint, Ulead Photoimpact, XRes, Corel Photopaint, Pixia, Paint Shop Pro, and several others scarcely worth bothering to remember. All the named programs are fine, but only Ulead's program comes within sighting range of Painter for creating raster graphics. Adobe's fine program boasts excellent printing capabilities, and a suite of fine filters, but, even for editing photographs, I find Painter better, even this latest version.

My opinion? Painter 8 is a fine program at a reasonable price compared to Adobe Photoshop and Painter 7. For those interested in serious computer graphics and creating art, I will highly recommend it.

18 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars 5 stars historically, 3 stars for execution., May 2, 2003

By 

Eugene Arenhaus (Haifa, Israel) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Corel Painter 8 Windows/Mac (CD-ROM)

I am reluctant to give this program a low rating, being a long-time user and having a true dedication to Painter. It deserves a high rating for its functionality overall, by all means; but the changes made in this new version do not deserve even three stars. They hardly justify the version number change, in fact, just as it was the case with Painter 7. The changes between 6 and 7 at least were in function (insignificant as they were, like the new watercolor engine that still didn't look quite like watercolor, or perspective grids which support only 1-point perspective). The changes between 7 and 8 are cosmetic at best: the interface had been made closer to Photoshop (which led to oddities like two separate current color displays), and that is about all. Oh, sorry; one new filter effect was added. The almost doubled number of brushes seems to have doubled because most of them are now available in three sizes (in case you didn't notice the size control, I suppose). The advertised Mixer palette does not provide anything that keeping a small test canvas for mixing colors didn't do before. The brushes can now be designed without having to stroke in the canvas for testing, but at cost of not being able to stroke in the canvas for testing: all the settings besides the few basic ones are hidden deep inside Brush Designer dialog, and in general being less accessible: for instance, the Expression palette is gone, now you have to go through all the panels to change the brush's response to stylus using scattered controls. The only (arguably) good thing is that the interface might look more familiar to Photoshop users, but it seems to be rather poorly thought-out for all that.

Corel's attitude towards the once innovative and unique product is disappointing; and their online support and promotion for Painter line is so vestigial that it begs a question whether they are not feeling that it's a danger to their own product line.

In short, the two releases of Painter after it left the Metacreations ownership did not add much to the program. Painter 6 still remains the best version, despite its awkward handling of masks.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Slimmed down, slicked up--big improvement, December 19, 2003

By 

Joanna Daneman (Middletown, DE USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Corel Painter 8 Windows/Mac (CD-ROM)

I've been using Painter since it's very inception as "Sketcher"--a b&w version that was sold in a cigar box to imitate a sketcher's kit of charcoal and pencils. The ensuing versions added virtual artists' media like oils, chalks, pencils and pens and textured papers to allow digital artists to create some astounding work.

Painter 8.0 is now marketed by Corel, and it's definitely been slimmed down; the loading time for installation was very fast, indicating that the program overhead had been lightened considerably. Some improved features:

1. Mixer Palette allows mixing of colors interactively--a big plus. Before, you only had the option to mix colors with a kind of blending algorithm and no control at all.
2. Brush controls now are on a slider panel; you pull down the brush after loading the type of brush (oil, water, chalk, for example) and then can change the size with the slider. No need to pull down a menu to do this.
3. The watercolor brush has been improved tremendously; the effect is like watercolor and wash, not just a smeary or blurred effect. It looks wet.
4. The Image Hose (a brush that sprays or paints images rather than a stroke of paint) now has a fun cousin; a brush that lays down a flat stroke of patterns in a similar way. You can paint with feathers, stucco pattern and this is a very good enhancement to the idea of a digital image brush. For the image hose, you load pre-created images as the nozzle or make a custom nozzle from your own images. The pattern brush uses pre-loaded patterns (like the stucco) or you can create a pattern, capturing it from a graphic, and load it instead. This pattern brush is a wonderful addition.

This program got an award from MacWorld (it comes in Win or Mac versions) and I think it deserves the award. While I use Photoshop Elements for photo manipulation, I still prefer Painter for digital art creation. This new version really impressed me.