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Nearly every graphics or visual effects artist has a mastery of Adobe Photoshop. Most video editors, even if they're not quite masters, have learned to rely on it as the Swiss Army Knife of graphics tools in the edit suite. I'm sure few are as familiar with Corel Painter, but if you skim a Photoshop user or photography magazine, you'll find that Painter is often the application these photographers turn to when their image needs an artistic touch.
Rather than a competitor, Painter is an ideal complement to Photoshop. Painter has been around since 1991 and has lived under various corporate roofs. Painter was originally developed for the Macintosh platform by Fractal Design Corp. Fractal Design later merged with RayDream, then with MetaTools to become MetaCreations. After a brief existence at ViewPoint, Painter was acquired by Corel in 2000.
In addition to Painter, the Corel portfolio includes CorelDRAW Graphics Suite-a powerful competitor to Photoshop in its own right-and Paint Shop Pro (formerly from JASC), which many PC owners have used for years as an economical, bread-and-butter graphics conversion utility and design application. Whereas Adobe Photoshop is recognized as a powerful graphic design and compositing tool, Corel Painter (now in version IX.5) is the de facto standard for the reproduction of natural painting media in a software application. By "natural media," I mean that, in the right hands, the result of Painter processing can actually look like the artist used real watercolors, chalks, oils, textured paper and other tactile media.
Natural Media
To the experienced Photoshop user, Painter can be a little confusing at first due to the similarity of its user interface. Painter also has docking palettes, tools, layers and a composition window, though its tools are different enough from Photoshop to cause uncertainty at first. For many of the tools and menus, Painter uses slightly different terminology than one would expect from Photoshop, so it takes a bit of playing around in the interface before you can get comfortable.
Both Painter and Photoshop let you paint on surfaces and apply surface textures and colors. The key difference is that your paint selection in Painter works like a material (like watercolor or ink) and not simply a color choice, so it will interact with the...