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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #5291 in Software
• Brand: Corel
• Model: PTR80PCMUGENG0
• Released on: 2003-05-07
• Platforms: Windows XP, Windows 2000, Mac
• Format: CD-ROM
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: 1.00 pounds

From the Manufacturer
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

Increase your productivity

• 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

Stay compatible

• 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

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Customer Reviews

Mea Culpa!
I wrote a hasty review of Painter 8 after only one day of haphazard dabbling with the program, and I have to now eat my words. I've spent a few more days working with the program, and it's a much better upgrade than my initial impressions (and review)indicated.

What I didn't remember is that this is not merely an upgrade but a REVISION of the program. One must come to this without the preconceptions learned from using previous iterations of this fine product. The lack of responsiveness in the brush or pen line thickness variations was due to my not having recorded a stroke in the stroke pressure setup panel...something I had not had to do before, as I did this in the Wacom Tablet stroke pressure setup panel (under Preferences) and that had sufficed to generate satisfying results in Painter 6 and 7. (I haven't found whether the Painter 8 documentation mentions the necessity of setting up one's stroke pressure preferences anew in the program, but it is necessary to achieve satisfactory mark-making sensitivity.)

As I get more acclimated to the new interface I have to admit that Painter 8 is pretty darn nifty. I don't know if this is such a dramatic upgrade from Painter 7--aside from the drastically improved interface--but it is worthy enough for me to withdraw my earlier cavils and give this program 5 Stars.

Depending on your computer's processing power, some stroke rendering can be slow, but this was true of earlier versions of Painter, as well. This is an attribute of the complex computations required to render the particular effect, and not a unique defect with this version of the program.

Anyone who already uses Painter will love the streamlined interface. Whether the new features are sufficient to warrant an upgrade--the new interface aside--must lie within the judgement of each Painter user. For those new to the program...go, buy, use, ENJOY.

why you have to upgrade..
Today, a creative professional can only notice how mature the graphics software industry has become, new software are offering more and more features that are using more and more computer resources, without being adding real marginal benefits. New upgrades are only to keep the products alive, on the expense of making them more cumbresome.

Painter 8 is a different story altogether!
Corel® has made a great effort to make this upgrade of a previously clunky yet powerful product, a much more versatile, standardised and user-friendly juggernault. Gone are the days where you have to hopelessly search among dozens of panels for a particular brush, style or method. A slick bar at the top dynamically changes according to the tool you're using, where you set the size, opacity, curviness..etc.
Another thing that was greatly improved is the process of choosing the brush (that used to be very annoying with the old selective dimming). The brush selector is tucked at the upper right part of the screen (also in that slick bar,) in a much more logical and standardised way.
One also has the feeling that painter 8 was given something similar to the Macormedia® MX treatment, where the palettes can be customised into different panels and the layout saved according to the project.
The mixer panel IS useful, and is very consistant with the philosophy of this new painter release: the small things that make your work faster and stress-free. The os X over all performance is much snappier, not to mention the beefed-up photoshop compatibility, and o! have i mentioned that you get both a windows and a mac version with the license price ?

In short, If you thought painter was too eccentric and boggy for you, this is the upgrade you've been waiting for. Its new slick interface made me thank God that Corel® had taken the torch from Metacreation.

Great paint program
Painter is an amazing program I have been using it since version 4. It is the best thing out there for realistic painterly effects on a computer. The new interface in Painter 8 is a great new feature. Much better than the old way. The toolbar and menus take up much less screen space than the old pallettes.