Corel Painter IX.5 review

Painter is a great piece of software, but this latest upgrade is a missed opportunity.

Launched with minimal publicity, Corel hasn't even bothered to update the printed manual and online Help files supplied with the program. The short list of new features is mentioned in passing on a flimsy addendum that has been slipped inside the box.

The new features put a lot of emphasis on automatically generating painted art works from your digital photos. The Auto-Painting palette lets you select the brush type and brush stroke, such as an oil paint brush and a medium dab stroke, and Painter automatically paints over the photo for you. However, allowing Painter to apply brush strokes automatically doesn't produce very good results. Often you'll end up with a mottled effect that looks more like a blurry photo than a real painting. If you've already got a copy of Painter IX then the free upgrade isn't really worth downloading for these new, but not very good, features.

If you're new to the world of computer-generated art, Painter IX.5 still has a lot to offer. Its strength lies in its ability to create paintings and sketches that mimic the appearance of traditional media, such as oil paints, charcoal or water colours. You can also manually edit your existing photos to make them look as though they were painted.

To make this easy, Painter IX.5 has a Quick Clone tool that automatically makes a copy of your photo and applies a layer of digital tracing paper to it. It opens up the Clone Brush toolbar, too, so all you have to do is decide which type of brush or paint you need and then start dabbling away. The results are often quite impressive.

Painter is also good if you want to generate your own art works, although we recommend investing in a graphics tablet. It has several features to make painting easier for amateurs. The best of the bunch is the Snap-to-Path, which helps if your brush strokes are a bit shaky. It lets you use the program's vector drawing tools to create nice smooth shapes and curves that act as the outline for your brush strokes.

The range of effects is impressive and mimics pretty much every paint and surface type. The Artist Oils system is particularly good, simulating the effect of a paint brush running out of paint, at which point you have to reload it.

The creative power available in the software makes it an attractive proposition, particularly for professional artists. As an upgrade, it's a dissapointment and doesn't offer enough new features. For new users, it remains the same excellent software that we reviewed back in What's New: Software, Shopper December 2004. It's tricky to learn, but you can't get the same results in any other application.