Painter 8 Upgrade

• Platform:    Windows XP / 2000, Macintosh
• Media: CD-ROM
• Item Quantity: 1

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
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

• 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

• 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

  *Registered users of Adobe Photoshop 5.5 and higher, Fractal Design Painter 4 and 5, MetaCreations Painter 5 - 6, procreate Painter 7 and all versions of Corel Painter and Painter Classic are eligible to upgrade to Corel Painter 8.

• Software > Business & Office
• Software > Digital Imaging > Art & Illustration