Corel Painter Essentials 4 (Win/Mac)
by Corel
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List Price: Our Price: $35.00 You Save: $64.00 (65%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Category: Software See more product details and other editions |
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Software Reviews of Corel Painter Essentials 4 (Win/Mac)
Customer Review: Amazing Power for the Price!
Summary: 5 Stars
I have children 14, 11, and 9, and I was looking for software that would appeal to their creative side. I am a fairly sophisticated software user, and used to do some programming myself, but had never really ventured into these type of painting/art programs.
Bottom Line: I was blown away by this program, totally impressed!!
Why?
#1 It's easy to use out of the box--- many of the controls are easy enough to figure out just by using them, it installs easy on both Mac and PC systems (I installed the program on both an old eMac and a low end Vista laptop successfully).
#2 It's really powerful--- once you really get into the software, it's amazing all the different brushes and textures and effects that you can do to make really impressive art.
#3 The tutorials are first rate--- A thick instruction manual that actually is well written, and actually teaches you about basic principles of art and painting. There are also a whole series of video tutorials included free. You can tell that a lot of hard work and frankly a lot of love went into this, which is a rarity for computer software these days.
#4 It's a great value--- For all you get, the price is very reasonable. And check the company's website, if you're still not sold they were at the time of this writing offering a 60 day free downloadable trial.
One more tip: Get even a low-price graphics tablet to go along with the software--- you'll be glad you did!
Customer Review: Who says you can't be creative?
Summary: 5 Stars
Who says you can't be creative with a click of a button? Create your own masterpieces with a few simple clicks! It's definitly EASY! That sold me for sure! Customer Review: Instant fun!
Summary: 4 Stars
Although a bit of a resource hog, the assortment of brush options and the presets make this more than appropriate for someone who wants to do editing or add special effects to their own photos. It's pretty easy to learn and provides instant fun. That's coming from the viewpoint of a graphic designer who has a great deal of experience with Photoshop and similar programs. The program may require more effort to learn from someone without that experience.Customer Review: Amazing product in many respects
Summary: 5 Stars
The installation of this program went smooth with no problems whatsoever (Windows XP with Service Pack 2).
While this is basically a scaled down version of Corel's professional product, ParitnerX, it still has a tremendous number of options and abilities that are more than enough to meet the needs of the home or hobby user. With two workspaces You can choose to create a picture or illustration from scratch or apply various effects to your photographs to give it an artistic effect.
I did find that the interface was confusing until I actually bothered to read the manual. Afterward it was very easy to use and in fact seemed intuitive, guess I just needed a jump start to understand what it was supposed to be doing. With options for detail level adjustments, brush types, brush sizes, opacity, paper type and many, many other choices you can pretty much create any effect you want.
The Drawing & Painting workspace is fairly easy to use but seems to be yet another drawing and painting program with nothing in particular to recommend or detract from other products. Much more than Paint, much less than Illustrator it strikes a good solid middle ground. However, when it comes to the Photo Painting area this is an amazing product. Want to take a picture and make it look like an oil painting? No problem. What about a watercolor? No problem. Charcoal, chalk, sketch.... no problem. It did an amazing job and I was really pleased with the results after working with it a while and getting to understand the program. I did notice that photos with a lot of color and contrast variation turn out much nicer than those that are predominantly dark or composed of a predominantly small range of color.
The program is well worth the price for the photo painter ability by itself. The results are really amazing and I was very please with the results.
Customer Review: Fantastic Amateur Painting Program
Summary: 5 Stars
I have found this to be a wonderful and fun program. There are a wide variety of paint brushes, pastels, and pencil effects to choose from in the painting area. The results are largely accurate with rich brush stroke textures and even bleeding on brushes that would do the same in real life. There are also a number of erasing effects available. You can free paint, draw straight lines, and resize your brush. There is a mixing pallet for mixing just the right color to suit your tastes.
The photo painting area is fantastic with incredibly simple auto painting features and a wide array of custom settings to choose from to get just the look you are interested in. You can doge details back in wherever you like for exactly the look you want without losing important details.
Another fantastic thing about this program is the ability to work in layers. It is also compatible with tablets. The software comes with very helpful tutorials to help you get rich, lovely results.