Description:
There are certain tools that should be in the toolbox of any digital artist; Painter from MetaCreations is one of them. Painter is an extraordinary and beautiful application--no other graphics application comes close to Painter's ability to emulate natural media. Watercolors or oil, paper or canvas, chalk or charcoal--Painter is the digital tool for virtual media. For a traditionally trained artist or someone simply drawn to experimenting in different media such as charcoal, oil, or watercolor, Painter is the tool of choice when it comes to painting or drawing digitally. On a reasonably fast PC or Mac with a fair amount of RAM (i.e., a 200 MHz processor with at least 64 MB of RAM allocated to Painter), Painter is a joy to use. Painter is not just for painting still images, though. It also supports what MetaCreations calls "frame stacks" and onion skinning for animation. A frame stack is a single document with many frames (determined by you), where each frame can be treated with any or all of Painter's brushes, pencils, or crayons. Onion skinning is an animation term. In Painter's usage, it means you can see past and future frames in a "ghost" mode while working on a current frame. This allows the animator to see where lines should be placed when drawing movement or to see the direction of movement based on the frame history. The latest version, Painter 6, offers many new features and some substantial improvements. The most notable visible change is the inclusion of new expandable palettes. MetaCreations has done away with the plethora of palettes that littered the screen in earlier versions. All tools and options are now available from a small number of expandable palettes that look much less stylish than before, but also take up far less space. It is a simple interface change that makes the whole program feel more accessible. Painter now uses the term "layer" instead of "floater," making it easier for users with experience in the market-dominant Photoshop quickly relate to Painter. Layer behavior is now more intuitive, too, since painting on a layer is now the default behavior for any brush variant. Painter 6 features "computed brushes" for some of its tools. These are essentially vector-based brushes, which render to a bitmapped image almost instantly when the stroke is done. They feel much more responsive and have a very smooth look, yet still retain that natural quality. The most important new feature is "Impasto brushes." Impasto refers to the painting technique of applying thick paint to a canvas, using the height of the paint to create highlights and shadows. Painter's Impasto brushes look stunningly real and are a pleasure to work with. One important note: using Painter without a graphics tablet (like a Wacom Intuos or their newer Graphire tablet) should be against the law. A pressure-sensitive graphics tablet brings out the best in Painter's brushes, and it makes the whole program feel more natural. Using a mouse with Painter is like trying to draw with a pencil the size of a block of wood. It can be done, but it's a real handicap. Painter 6 is not without a few glitches. Some system freezes occurred while working with it, and after one crash, a file was corrupted and the application had to be reinstalled. At the time of this writing, MetaCreations has announced a corporate restructuring and refocusing. I can only hope that Painter doesn't get lost in the shuffle, and that tech support and patches will soon be available. Still, Painter 6 should hold a place on every artist's shelf. It's not as straightforward to use as Photoshop, but the joy and imagery brought forth by using Painter's brushes on a textured paper is worth the effort of scaling the learning curve. --Mike Caputo
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