Operating system: MacOS 8 and earlier, Windows 95/NT/98
Developer: MetaCreations, Inc.
Website URL: http://www.metacreations.com/
 
Much as I love Photoshop, quite often I have yearned for software that would give me virtual equivalents of the art materials I had grown up with as a wanna be painter and photographer, all those years ago.
NATURAL MEDIA IN AN UNNATURAL SETTING
Something that would give me the kind of natural painting tools I knew and loved as a kid, combined with all the precision and duplication ability of a computer. And, without the stinky mess and space demands of real paint, solvents and canvas.
Then I came across Painter in version 4, as a demo on a computer magazine cover CD-ROM. Painter 5 came out not long after that and received mixed reviews - maybe from version 4 users who perhaps were expecting something radically new, and enthusiastic yes's from newbies like me, albeit with one reservation. I had hoped that with the merger of Painter developer Fractal Design into Kai Krause's MetaCreations the Painter interface would be improved.
PROS AND CONS
It was not, and remains an uneasy mix of slightly funky, less than obvious and sort of conventional. There is a lot of stuff in Painter, and much of it is buried under the surface. It is not a fast program to learn although you can leap in and use it quite effectively in a crude kind of way right from the gate. Choose some preset brushes, metaphorically dip them in colour and start slapping it on.
 
The subtleties are what really takes the time and they are rather sophisticated indeed, enough to more than justify your perseverance. There are elements in Painter that resemble those in Photoshop such as its photo lab metaphors, layers and actions, bits of vector graphics programs like Freehand or Illustrator in its handling of Postscript type and objects, similarities to some animation programs, and then of course the wild stuff that is Painter's alone.
I guarantee that I will not be able to cover all of Painter's capabilities in this review - the manual that ships with it is 400 pages long - but here is a run down of some of the most outstanding aspects of it.
CUSTOMISE IT
Above all, Painter's other essential components, its brushes, are eminently customisable in a metaphor to building your own set of painting tools from twigs dipped in ink through to beautifully handcrafted Kolinsky sables. There are literally hundreds of them that either come preconfigured or that you can create yourself.
Everything in a brush is variable, allowing you to simulate your favourite real life brush, or use something that could only exist in a computer, like the Image Hose.
TEXTURISE IT
The Art Materials palette is where you can select, store and add the media you apply to your working surface, the canvas in Painter parlance. Colour it, create weaves and patterns, apply paper and other textures, add graduations and set the colour of your brushes.
 
Later you can choose to apply lighting effects and further textures on top of your artwork so it looks for all the world as if it was made with real 3D paint on a real 3D canvas.
 
GO PHOTO
As famous digital photographer Pedro Meyer says in The Painter 4 Wow! Book, "Although the program is called Painter it's important not to exclude photography from its repertoire, given that the program can also be used effectively in that medium."
Photographic manipulation comes under Effects menu and includes colour correction, retouching, softening and sharpening focus, dropping lighting on your image with full control over its colour, direction and intensity, and finally, image orientation, scaling and flipping.
LAYERS UPON LAYERS
Painter calls them floaters. They are more or less the same kind of thing as Photoshop's layers. Build up a multilayered image so you can add and subtract as you go along.
 
Painter's native RIFF file format is particularly good at storing multilayered image files in a very small space. Shame other graphics products do not make use of it, but you can import and export all the other standard file formats anyway.
MAD EXTENSIBILITIES
Painter 5's plug-in floaters are the result of a new architecture for floating objects, and they behave in one of three new ways - creating a new floater, altering an existing floater or adjusting the underlying image.
 
The first plug-in floater is fairly mundane - Brightness/Contrast. Now it gets wilder. Burn gives your objects the effect of having burnt edges. Bevel World applies 3D bevels effects, Equalize adjusts the black and white points beneath the floater. Glass Distortion applies, well, glass distortion.
Kaleidoscope creates kaleidoscopic effects, and Liquid Lens allows you to smear and distort the underlying imagery not unlike MetaCreations' Goo program. Liquid Metal lets you paint with liquids and metals, raining molten steel down onto your pictures if you wish. Posterize does just that and finally, Impasto lets you paint with textured brush strokes.
MADE FOR THE WEB
If 3D effect buttons and edges are your thing then spend a few hours in the aforementioned Bevel World, which works as well if not better than similar Photoshop plug-ins. If animations for the web or other purposes are for you, then Painter offers features like rotoscoping, onion-skinning, cloning, tracing, editing and compositing.
 
Net Painter is an intriguing feature that permits you to collaboratively make paintings across a network or the World Wide Web. I am not sure why you would want to, but no doubt someone will find it essential for something, perhaps Painter tutorials?
SCRIPT IT
Painter's Scripting is something unique in graphics applications. You can create a picture and all the while you are recording all of your actions, brushes and art materials.
This has interesting implications for illustrators using Painter 5. Do an illustration in your studio while recording it as a script, email your script to your client, and then if they also have Painter 5 they can replay it at the same resolution and canvas size or a different one.
IN SUMMARY, A SUGGESTION
There are a couple of very promising books on Painter 5 due to appear any time now - The Painter 5 Wow! Book and Painter 5 Studio Secrets. I suggest you check them out for a sampling of some of the things you can do with Painter, but keep in mind that the capabilities are so broad that such books cannot show you everything.
 
Last year at Apple Expo 97 I attended a presentation by Kai Krause and Painter developer Mark Zimmer. Their enthusiasm was infectious and the way they showed us how they play in a virtual sandbox on the very edges of fractal mathematics was inspiring. From the evidence, there are plenty of amazing new things that will find their way into Painter in the near future.
