Painter 8 Student Boxed Edition

There are business graphics programs, technical graphics programs, artistic graphics programs and Painter. Painter is a natural media painting program, designed to simulate the use of watercolour, oil, gouache and many other real-world painting media as closely as possible on a PC or Mac. Although you can use Painter 8 with a mouse, most of the professional and semi-professional users for which it's intended will be using a graphics tablet. The use of a tablet and stylus is a lot more natural for this kind of painting and drawing work.

Painter 8 has a revamped interface, pulling it much more into line with other Corel applications and the new combination of tools, menus and palettes is very intuitive to use. At the same time, it has increased compatibility with Adobe Photoshop, and understands Photoshop layers and channels. The program includes several useful extensions to what was available before. For a start, there's the new mixer palette. This enables you to mix colours interactively, using a stylus or mouse and then apply them from the palette to your painting. With over 400 new brushes in 30 categories as diverse as acrylics, conte, felt pens, sponges and Sumi-e, there are a lot of tools to pick from. If this still isn't enough, you can design your own brush by combining attributes of two or more others.

To give you a flying start with a new painting, you can use Painter 8's innovative quick sketch effect to turn a photograph into something approaching a pencil sketch. The digital watercolour effect, also new, can then be used as a transparent colouring medium to produce very realistic looking watercolours. Painter 8 is a consolidation of earlier versions of this natural painting program, but offers useful extensions and an even closer approximation to brush and paint. --Simon Williams

Manufacturer's Description
Painter 8 provides the highest degree of realism yet. Users will enjoy a new user interface which has been simplified with more space created, a wider variety of traditional art-making tools, including 400 new paint brushes, such as digital watercolor brushes, oil paint brushes, impasto brushes, airbrushes; dry media, such as artist chalk, oil pastel, and charcoal; pencils, such as 2B, colored pencil, and flattened pencil; and pens, such as calligraphy pens, fine-point pens, and scratchboard pens. Users can also choose from a greater assortment of patterns and textures to add depth, texture and an improved mixing palette. Painter 8 provides industry-Standard Selections, Layer Masks, and Channels, increased Performance and Stability and enhanced Adobe Photoshop Compatibility.