Corel Painter X review

We weren't entirely impressed by the previous update to Corel's painting program, Painter IX.5 (What's New, Shopper December 2006), but this full release builds more convincingly on the features it added.

Most notable are the enhancements to Auto-Painting, a feature from the consumer edition, Painter Essentials.

Quick Clone makes it easy to apply brushstrokes over a photo, picking up its colour to create a painted reproduction. Auto-Painting, introduced in IX.5, takes this a step further: you press Play and the strokes are applied automatically. Now in Painter X you can angle Smart Strokes to follow contours in the image. We were pleasantly surprised by the results, which could sometimes be mistaken for the work of a competent human being. If you need to tweak the results, Restoration brushes let you paint back the original detail.

Painter's main focus is still on doing it yourself, and the big news here is Real Bristle brushes, which are supposed to get even closer to the real thing, aided by the 6D Art Pen (also known as Art Marker), a £60 add-on for Wacom Intuos3 or Cintiq graphics tablets. An ordinary graphics tablet works fine too, though. Advanced users may find ways to get new and rewarding results with Real Bristle, but our impression is that it's just another set of controls to fiddle with. The new Enhanced Brush Ghost gives graphical feedback on tilt and other pen dynamics, but it should be the paint that responds meaningfully to input, not an abstract indicator.

Despite its power, the ability to evoke the real sensation of brush on canvas still eludes Painter. Nor has it quite licked the problem of producing complex brushstrokes as fast as your hand can move. Corel has achieved some good performance improvements, but unless your PC is incredibly powerful, you'll have to keep the brush size pretty small to make some brush types usable, including Real Bristle options. This isn't really a criticism, but it's something to be aware of if you dream of splashing brushfuls of colour across a large canvas.

There are few changes to the interface, which is organised neatly but with little attention to the practical needs of the user. As well as the usual palettes, there's an endless stream of Brush Options panels, each filled with settings and sliders, and no clue as to how it might fit together to produce a desired result.

To get you started, Painter X comes with a bigger printed manual and extra video tutorials, but these are no substitute for usability. Greater understanding of the creative process is shown in new guides to aid composition, including a Divine Proportion spiral based on the golden ratio (1:1.618, or Phi), and a customisable rule-of-thirds grid.

While IX.5 had the benefit of being a free upgrade, Painter X costs more than £100. For new users, however, this program looks more attractive than ever, offering unrivalled - if flawed - painting tools along with a fair range of photo-editing features at a sensible price.