Corel Essentials 3: A Taste of Painter

Geared toward hobbyists, Corel Painter Essentials 3 has a few things full Painter doesn’t, like Auto Painting, and cloning a painting has never been easier. But is that enough to justify the price tag?

Corel Painter Essentials 3 is the newest in Corel’s natural media painting line of software. Geared toward hobbyists, its auto-painting feature lets you make a few choices and finish a digital painting in minutes. It features natural media brushes that mimic oils, acrylics, watercolors and more. Easy to use filters create simulated woodcuts or sketches and let you add texture to a painting so it looks as if it had been painted on canvas. It has a few rudimentary photo editing tools, like Brightness/Contrast and a simple one-click sharpen and blur control, but not enough to use it for photo editing. This program is all about releasing the artist in you.

When you first open Corel Painter Essentials 3, you are greeted by a welcome screen that looks like a notebook. The artwork on ths screen was created by many talented artists, and each time you open the welcome screen you’ll see different examples. Access the welcome screen at any time while using Painter Essentials 3 from the Help menu, and click the Painter Gallery tab to see all of these images. There are several tabs with different information. From here, you can create a new file, open a saved file, or even start a new document from a template, which are simply blank documents of preset size and resolution. One comes with Painter and you can easily save your own. You can also access video tutorials designed to get you started working in Painter Essentials quickly. The Painter on the Net tab takes you online for more tutorials and information.

Art by Sumiko Onishi

Lucious Paints: Digital Watercolors, Oils, Acrylics and More!

Digital Watercolors remain “wet” even after an image has been saved, closed, and reopened. Oils go on thick and build up, just like real oil paints. The chalk brushes act like chalks. You can even paint sprayed images using Painter nozzles. Whatever your favorite painting style, you can mimc it using Corel Painter Essentials 3. Use the Brush Selector Bar to choose a brush category, like Digital Watercolor or Artist Oils, and the context sensitive Brush Variant menu will list several variants for the category. Choose a variant and begin to paint.

New Auto-Painting Feature

Three new Photo Painting palettes let you quickly create digital paintings in three steps from your photos. Start with any digital photo.

First, use the Underpainting palette to prepare the image for cloning. Add a style that will suit your kind of painting—for example, you may want to deepen colors if you are doing an oil painting since oils traditional have rich, deep colors, or lower the saturation if you are doing a watercolor because watercolors usually are more muted in tone. Use Smart Blur to remove some of the detail from the photo to make a more realistic painting, and pick an edge if you like: this is the ragged vignette edge. Click Apply.

After you apply the underpainting settings, click the Quick Clone button. A clone of the image will be created which will use the prepared image as the source. Move on to the Auto-Painting Palette. Choose the brush variant from different cloners in the Brush Selector bar: oils, watercolor, impressionist and more, and then choose the shape of brush and set any options you want in the Auto-Painting palette, then press play. You can press stop and change the brush settings, then press play to continue to give more detail and paint variations.

Finally use the Restoration palette to add back any detail like edges of flowers or veins in leaves, and you’re done.

Cloning by Hand

Just as you could in previous versions and in full Painter, for those who want total control over the cloning process, you can clone by painting each stroke in by hand. The new Quick Clone feature has turned getting a painting ready for cloning into a one-click process rather than 5! Just go to File > Quick Clone and the clone with tracing paper is instantly created for you. Use the clone brushes to paint by hand, so you control where the paint goes.

Brushes

While this software does have some great brushes, it doesn’t have very many, and what brushes there are have very little customization options. If you have never used full version Corel Painter, you may not feel you are missing anything, but if you have, you will feel restricted using the options here. The fact that you cannot save brush variations is limiting enough—because of the limited options there aren’t that many variations to save anyway—but the fact that you cannot load brushes you or other have saved in full version Painter really limits your options if you plan on using this program for painting your own pictures rather than editing photos. However, it is a good program to get a feel for painting with natural media brushes and if you are a traditional artist and used to painting and/or drawing with natural media, you will appreciate the realistic look and feel of these brushes.

Another drawback is that while you do get the usual cmd/ctrl + Z undo command, there are only 5 undos and nowhere to change this setting. In a program such as this, painting strokes, 5 strokes is not very much of a comfort zone, so save often so you can revert to the saved version (File > Revert) if necessary.

Compatibility

Corel Painter Essentials 3 works well with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Photoshop Elements, and on the Mac, with Apple iPhoto. If you are using Windows, it works together with Corel Paint Shop Pro, and Corel Photo Album 6. Use with a Wacom tablet for pressure sensitive control, giving you even more realistic paintings, and it is also compatible with Tablet PCs. All in all, this is a capable program and very easy to learn. I tested it here with people of various ages and skill levels, and even the 7 year old was happily painting away in a few minutes. This is a great way to get your feet wet and see what Painter is all about, and you may find this program is all you need.

Pricing

Now we come to price: with the current promotion of Painter IX selling for $299 bundled with a 4 X 5 Graphire 3 tablet, $99 for Corel Painter Essentials 3 seems a bit steep. While you may feel that $200 is a big difference in price—and it is—consider the fact that about $100 of that is tablet, and the brushes and options in full Painter are a huge upgrade from what you will find here. If you do not want or need a Wacom Graphire, Painter IX is on sale now without the tablet bundle, $100 off, with the upgrades priced at $169 for the download version and $179 for the boxed version, and full versions for $319 for the download and $329 for a boxed version. Even if you don’t need another tablet, having a spare around for $30 less than buying Painter alone is a great deal.

The best way to tell if Corel Painter Essentials 3 will do what you want and need is to download a trial version for Mac or Windows here, and Happy Painting!

System Requirements

Mac
Mac OS X version 10.2.8 or higher)
Power Macintosh G3, 500 MHz or greater
256 MB of RAM
150 MB disk space for full install
Mouse or Tablet
24-Bit Color Display
1024 X 768 or greater monitor resolution

Windows:
Windows 200 or Windows XP (with latest service packs)
Pentium II, 500 MHz or greater
256 MB of RAM
150 MB disk space for full install
Mouse or Tablet
24-Bit Color Display
1024 X 768 or greater monitor resolution