procreate Painter 7

by procreate

Product Details

• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Shipping: This item is also available for shipping to select countries outside the U.S.
• ASIN: B00005NHD7
• Date first available at Amazon.com: July 23, 2001
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #16,921 in Software (See Top 100 in Software)
• Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

Product Description

Amazon.com Review

Painter, the natural-media emulation tool for digital artists, has survived yet another ownership transition and is now up to version 7. The new owner, procreate, seems committed to the software: version 7 includes some important new features, as well as numerous bug fixes.

Any digital artist worth their salt is at least familiar with Painter. Painter has tools like no other image editing application, and it is capable of imitating watercolor, oil, crayons, markers, and pencil to a remarkable degree. Combined with a graphics tablet, a talented artist might never pick up a physical paintbrush again.

Painter 7 raises the stakes in natural-media emulation. The new Liquid Ink technology emulates thick paint on a surface, and the new watercolor layers are so realistic you'll worry that they'll drip down into your monitor.

Other enhancements include a continuous, variable zoom tool, total compatibility with Photoshop (including the ability to open and save layered PSD files), and perspective grids to act as an aid when drawing freehand objects.

Overall, Painter 7 offers numerous new and improved features, making it more than just a worthwhile upgrade. --Mike Caputo

Amazon.com Product Description

Painter 7 captures the thickness of the paint, the angle of the brush, the texture of the surface, and all the other real-world experiences of painting. It has hundreds of brushes and thousands of effects. The new brush library architecture makes it easy to organize brushes, create custom libraries, and share brushes with other users. Painter 7's watercolors are so true-to-life that paints drip and blend together as you apply them. You control how the watercolor diffuses onto the canvas with wetness, dry rates, diffusion, and wind direction features. The realistic new Liquid Ink layer mimics the viscosity and surface tension of a thick, gluey medium like ink or paint. Enhanced Adobe Photoshop compatibility lets you open PSD files and save Painter 7 images as PSD files, which you can open in Photoshop with layers intact.

Painter 7 offers a new continuous and variable zoom that lets you view and work on an image at an arbitrary zoom factor. The shapes-based text tool and the dynamic text feature are now integrated into a single, easy-to-use tool. Access all text options, including font, alignment, point size, tracking, leading, opacity, and curve style from a single drop-down palette. Painter 7 also includes an enhanced interface for CMYK preview and profile selection, updated ICC profiles, and color-managed CMYK import and export. New perspective grids allow you to create 3-D scenes easily with a non-printing array of lines that converge at a single vanishing point. You can turn on vertical or horizontal lines (or both), and modify the location of the vanishing point, horizon line, and ground plane using the Perspective Adjustor tool.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant unique program, September 12, 2002

By 

Tim Skyrme (Adelaide, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: procreate Painter 7 (CD-ROM)

Overview.

This is a serious program and not for the faint hearted, but has great potential for anyone who needs or wants a program that seems to offer things that are not available in any other program.

Mac and Windows platforms are supported.

Features.

Contains elements of other graphics programs such as Corel Graphics Suite 11, or Adobe's graphics programs, but adds much more.

The learning curve is steep, but if you started using an industry standard program of any sort, you would expect that.

The choices you are offered in the way of colours, brushes, textures, papers, etc is quite staggering.

Layers are supported and importing images and masks from other programs such as Photoshop, saves any alpha channels in the layers. You can then export the masks and selections back to those programs.

The best manual that I have seen come packaged with a program consists of 430 pages of full colour images and detailed descriptions. You may not even need a second manual as you do with most programs of this calibre.

The book consists of 20 sections, and these are very detailed. Also included is a list of keyboard shortcuts on a separate sheet which is very handy. Corel seem to supply these with all their programs and I consider them a great, but simple enhancement to any program.

Some good lessons are included in the two Cd ROMS that come with the package, and there are more lessons online.

Painter 7 is not just for painting as it contains Web features such as slicing images, and creating rollovers, and saving for the Web.

Animation and video are also covered, and with scripting, an effect that you create for one frame of your movie, can be applied to the entire movie. Avi, QuickTime, and animated gif files are all supported. Masking can be applied to entire videos.

Vector drawing tools are supplied and Bezier curves utilised before stroking paths in a variety of ways, not just a straight colour.

All brushes are customizable, and if you own an airbrush stylus for a drawing tablet, then the angle of the airbrush can be replicated on screen. You can still set angles for this manually if using a mouse though.

Not only the brushes, but just about everything you use in this program allows customising, so you don't have to use any of the presets if you don't want.

Creating your own brushes and dabs and colour profiles are just part of the enhancements.

This version also introduces new Water Colour Technology, Enhanced Colour Management allows changing from CMYK to RGB and back again without too much change in colour.

Text is easy to use and manipulate and alter, and curved text, blends and surface textures are all supported and can be altered individually on their separate layers.

Description.

Painter 7 is a painting program, not a paint program like Photoshop and Corel PHOTO PAINT, which are bitmap image manipulation programs, and is not just a vector based drawing program like Corel DRAW! or Illustrator either. It combines elements of these, then goes in a different direction, thus creating it's own niche.

Water colours are incredibly realistic, as are oils and inks, and brush strokes which can be altered as you use them give a virtual artist's studio on your computer.

Bottom Line.

For an artist, this program offers the ability to paint or draw in any medium, on any common surface texture, using either a mouse or graphics tablet. It gives real-time effects such as moisture penetration that you would get if using standard paints, brushes, pastels etc.

For an artist, I would definitely recommend looking at this as a means of mixing skills that have been picked up and adapted from other graphics programs, even if this is not quite like any other high end computer program.

There doesn't seem much that you can't do with this program in a two dimensional sense, apart from creating .swf files. What it does do is really great though. Added to other top end commercial graphics programs you can do wonderful things.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The best software for 2d digital art, June 14, 2002

By 

L. W. Perkins (New Jersey, USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: procreate Painter 7 (CD-ROM)

I have Painter 5 and 7, and I love them both. Combined with a tablet (a must-have for digital drawing)this comes as close as you can get to real natural media--a couple of times I have wiped my stylus on my jeans, forgetting I wasn't using real paint. It also works fantastically well with Photoshop, trading files easily back and forth.
What are it's flaws? It's a memory hog,and can slow down following your brushstrokes if you haven't alloted it enough memory--your PC needs at least 128RAM.(I have 256 and it's happy--I haven't tried it on the Mac.) You really need a tablet with it. You also need The Painter7 Wow! book since the manual is competent but not as useful as the book. It has so much functionality and brushes it's sometimes hard to remember where you left a particular brush, or where a particular effect is. But with 7 you may never need any other 2d program,and it even does a lot of the Photoshop digital-to-print functions, and has some of the vector features that Illustrator has.
Oh, and the Amazon price is a lot cheaper than what's over on the Corel site;-)

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Painter 7 & Photoshop, September 11, 2001

By 

Alvin L Stroyny (NY) - See all my reviews

This review is from: procreate Painter 7 (CD-ROM)

An absolute must for the digital photographer wanting to add an artistic touch to their work. Worth the cost just for the bility to create digital "backgrounds". A pressure sensitive tablet such as WACOM helps a lot but is not essential to start. Create a digital "grafitti" wall with all the effects, especially acid etch. Save as a .bmp file (slight problem with maintining acid etch in other formats when transferred to Photoshop). Use PS to image-adjust-colorize to a gold-bronze hue (full-color is too distracting). Feather select a portrait area with the lasso tool, colorize, paste on background. Creates absolutely knock-out portrait "frames".