Corel Painter Essentials 4

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!
Rating: 5 / 5

Whether you’re using a Wacom tablet or just a mouse, you can quickly achieve painterly styles either free hand or with existing art and photographs with a few clicks and create unique pieces of art with minimal effort.

Being a user of Photoshop for about 14 years, I can tell you, this is not a competing product – it is a complementary product. The two do very different things in very different ways. Great for amateur artists or professionals, Painter 4 Essentials has great video tutorials to get you started.

I installed this on two different machines to test it out – once on a one-year-old MacBook that has the older video card w/ 64MB of shared graphics memory and on a new (early 2008) iMac with a 512MB graphics card. The difference is striking on performance. While this product would probably be great on one of the newer MacBooks with 144MB of shared memory, it stuttered and was slow on my older MacBook. It flies on my iMac… and this is clearly due to the graphics memory differences and not because of a moderate processor jump.

I’d recommend anyone trying this new out of the box to sit through the tutorials at least once to familiarize themselves with the interface – to me, it was not initially intuitive.

Fun, affordable, powerful product.
Rating: 5 / 5

Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R3RMO0PHTKL5Y I am not an artist, not computer savvy and used this product with a mouse. And even with all those disclaimers I can tell you it was not easy to use until I read the booklet and watched the tutorial. So I suggest you watch the tutorial videos that come with it first. After a little practice I was able to produce “paintings” from photos as it promised. This lets you upload a photo and basically paint over it. And expect to be able to improve as I learn more about all that the software has to offer and of course ‘Practice’. I cannot imagine how easy and useful this product would be with a tablet.

As you may be able to tell from this review, I mainly wanted this so that I could enhance my photographs. The Photo Painting was quite nice. When you upload an image all you do is select which parts of it you want shown by using the same variety of paint tools available in the Drawing & Painting workspace. And there are a lot of choices; many that I am not using at the moment, but will with time. You are even able to change the texture of the image by changing the paper; you can change the brush type and width, and even use different kinds of paints. It will take more time to learn all that this software is capable of. The Amazon description shows the wealth of options available within this product.

For me this is a big upgrade. I have only used PC Paint before and always found myself frustrated by not having a brush size I wanted to use. Painter Essentials 4 gives you many more options and has greatly reduced this level of frustration I use to feel. Another big plus in my opinion is the undo or unedited, whichever term you are use too, works for many levels. I had gone forward and noticed something I did not like. I was able to remove the last 18 modifications I had made to the painting and it looked as if I could have kept removing them.

My sister visited me and is great a sketching. She loved the charcoal brushes range from pencils to hard or soft charcoal sticks. She mentioned that it was not as easy as drawing with the actual stick, but the sketch looked great. And I am sure with a pen attached and practice it would be just as easy.

I remember when a friend bought the first Corel product and was happy with it. I could never figure out how to use it and it was over three times the cost of this. This is worth the price, has many features and gives you an intro to the basics with its tutorial material that is included.

So considering I could use it for my photos and my sister thought it was a wonderful tool for creating art (in her case sketches), I have to give this two thumbs up as a product for the home.
Rating: 5 / 5

I’ve used previous versions of Painter, long ago. When my kiddo became interested in doing more complex drawings than KidPix would support I immediately thought of Painter Essentials.

Amazon delivered the package quickly, and I’ve spent the past two mornings working with Corel support trying to get the program to run. I’ve also spent the past two mornings, while on hold, reading many comments online (the painter factory, etc ) about people recently having troubles with Painter 11 and Painter Essentials 4 running – and stopping running if it had been previously running.

The program displays a its splash screen and then disappears.

From comparing the un-installation instructions, which I’ve done 10 times or more, to the files installed on the computers hard disk I can see that some of the files which are supposed to be there are not. Support has no explanation for this discrepancy, but has said ‘it shouldn’t matter.’

as a software developer I find this a curious state of affairs.

I’ll be contacting Amazon for a refund.
Rating: 1 / 5

Back in the mid 90′s I went to school to become a graphic designer, and while my career ended up going in a totally different direction, I still find the idea of using a computer to create or enhance artwork and photography quite appealing. I decided to take a chance on Corel’s new Painter Essentials 4. I liked the idea of “one stop shopping” for both illustration and photo manipulation software, and my experience with Corel in the past was positive.

I’ve found Painter Essentials 4 particularly useful in creating freehand illustrations (I’m using the mouse only – no special hardware), coloring scanned line artwork, and editing and enhancing photographs. I love to sketch in pencil and then ink, but am an indifferent colorist at best, so Painter Essentials 4 is a nice tool for adding color to my drawings. The photo enhancing features are great for adding fun special effects to photos, and can be used to restore damaged photographs as well. The software features a wide array of available colors and effects, so the sky is really the limit when it comes to what you want to do with this software.

My only complaint is that the operation of this software is not as intuitive as it could be. I was familiar with the various tools and functions (like riding a bike, it all came back pretty quickly), but someone brand new to this kind of software will need to spend some serious time with the users guide before they can take advantage of this program’s various bells and whistles.

Other than that, I’m quite happy with Corel Painter Essentials 4. It’s not at the same professional level as Adobe’s one-two punch of Illustrator and Photoshop, but for everyday users it’s an outstanding graphics product.

Rating: 4 / 5