Painter was originally designed for creating fine art on the computer with tools that replicate artists’ real-world tools. Although Painter 5 adds Adobe Photoshop-like tools for image manipulation, color correction, and special effects, it’s still more of an image-creation complement to Photoshop than an image-processing replacement (for instance, Painter lacks high-end prepress tools and does not output CMYK images). Painter works mainly with bitmap graphics, but Painter also includes many vector-based drawing tools.
Painter has always offered a fantastic variety of brushes that include “natural-media tools” such as oil paints, and watercolors, as well as far-out brushes such as the cloner brush, which paints in a variety of styles, including Van Gogh and Seurat. (There’s also a new plug-in standard for brush creation so third parties can develop brushes.) Painter 5 ships with more than 100 new brushes, including a fire brush, gooey brushes, a glow brush, and a super cloner brush. Brushes are stored in libraries; by keeping a single palette open on the desktop with aliases of multiple libraries, you can easily access thousands of brushes.
Painter also has scads of built-in special effects and supports the Adobe plug-in standard so that you can use both Photoshop filters and third-party plug-ins, such as MetaCreations Kai’s Power Tools, directly in Painter. Several effects, including pop art, maze, camera motion, motion blur, and custom the, are new in version 5.
Floaters in earlier versions of Painter had some annoying limitations — you had to cut up an image into different floaters, for example. Painter 5’s transparent floaters solve that problem. You can paint directly onto one now, and with plug-in floaters, you can make crazy transformations on individual layers by burning them, tearing them, wrinkling them, viewing them through lenses, pouring liquid metal into them, and lots of other fun things.
Web designers, take note. Floaters can be converted to click-able areas instantly for image maps. Painter (and the floaters) also support JPEGs and GIFs, including the ability to convert a video or animation to an animated GIF. Painter offers more creative options for bevels, buttons, and repeating background tiles than any other program I have seen.
The Net Painter feature is fantastic for collaboratively creating artwork over a local network or the Internet. I tried this with a friend, both of us using standard 28.8Kbps modems. It was thrilling to watch him paint on my screen, while we had a conversation in the Notes window.
With Painter 5, the developers not only added features but also made this complex program friendlier. Painter’s traditional weakness has been that the sheer number of features made the interface seem cluttered. In Painter 5, you can help manage the clutter by choosing frequently used tools and saving them on custom palettes. The same with Painter’s custom brush features: You can drag your favorite customizing sliders to a single control window instead of having to open and close the many customization palettes.
Longtime users of Painter will see lots of other improvements, too, including a better Magic Wand tool, more Photoshop-like masks and selections, and better printed output due to the addition of the Kodak Color Management System.
Painter 5.0’s manuals, tutorials, and online help are truly useful. This is fortunate because you really need to go through them to be aware of all the features tucked away in this program. Anyone creating visual material for multimedia, print, video, or the Web should think about putting Painter in their software toolbox.
Florio, Chris. (September 1997). Painter 5. MacAddict. (pg. 62).
Fractal Design Corporation
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2014-08-24 / 
53b6f08fc7168f3eebf09e174b41c2c9e40c2aaa / 
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Painter_5.0.3_Update.sit_.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
