Fractal Design Painter has long been at the leading edge of graphics applications, offering a dynamic range of extraordinary natural-media painting options that no other Macintosh program has seriously attempted to reproduce. With version 3, the product has achieved a rare state of perfection, balancing enhanced conventional controls with spectacular effects packaged inside a tidy interface. The result is a piece of software that deserves a place on the hard drive of every professional artist and graphics enthusiast.
Painter Cleans Up Its Neighborhood
When it came to screen real estate, previous renditions of Painter amounted to unregulated urban sprawl. Every new feature seemed to bring with it a new palette chock-full of excessively large icons, encroaching on w'hat screen space remained available for painting. This problem has finally been remedied by way of a complete interface restructuring that leaves few screen controls unmodified. While the palettes remain vast and intricate, their number has been reduced to eight, the icon size has been halved to the 32-by-32-pixel standard, and each palette has been reorganized and compartmentalized
in digestible chunks. A single palette, for example, offers access to color selection, gradations, and paper textures, all structured inside logical panels. As in previous versions, you can tear off panels if you want to access, say, color and gradation options at the same time. The exception is the Brushes palette, which no longer allows you to tear off brushes. The idea is that the brushes are small enough that you don’t need to. Painter still offers more palette options than most folks will exploit in a lifetime, but now you can easily stow the ones you’re unlikely to use, leaving plenty of room for the essentials.
In addition to its collapsing and expanding palettes. Painter equips a few palettes with drawers, which allow you to access additional brushes, paper textures, and the like, making them available on a regular basis. For example, the Brushes palette gives you access to five commonly used brushes at all times. If you want
to access another brush, you just open the drawer and click on the brush you want to use. Painter deletes the least-used brush from the main five and puts the selected brush in its place. You can also make as many as four of the five main cools permanent; one must remain temporary so you can swap cools in and out of the drawer.
If you derive satisfaction out of personalizing your environment, you can customize the appearance of the interface by assigning different patterns to palettes, lining drawers with different colors, and even changing the position and softness of the drop shadows behind tool icons. You can choose from several predefined patterns on the Extras CD that ships with Painter or create your own pattern. Editing the interface may sound trivial, but it can actually help you to distinguish icons more clearly...
New Dimensions in Natural Media
When it comes to providing a real-world artist’s studio, Painter can’t be beat. Version 3.0 builds on the program’s natural-media capabilities in ways that both make sense and provide tangible benefits for its users. For starters, Painter 3.0 allows you to adjust the placement of the canvas on the screen. Just as you can rotate a real-life page to accommodate your personal style. Painter lets you rotate the screen canvas without affecting the orientation of the printed image. You can access the rotate-page cursor from the keyboard, making it easy to rotate between brushstrokes without missing a step. And you can make the page upright with a mouse-click. Naturally, you will not see every image pixel when the canvas is rotated — just as you can’t see every pixel when you view the image at a reduced zoom ratio — but it is a great sketching and planning tool. You can also resize the canvas, move it without constraints in the full-screen mode, and change the color of the empty no-man’s-land outside the canvas.
Painter’s new gradation palette is second only to Gradient Designer, which is included with Kai’s Power Tools from use Software, and much better than the gradation palettes included with other bitmap editors. In addition to accessing the standard linear and radial color ramps, you can access conical and spiral ramps, edit the angle of gradients, tighten or loosen spirals, and change the way colors blend. You can specify the First and last colors in a gradation using the expanded color wheel (borrowed from Fractal Design’s introductory paint program, Dabbler) or lift a custom color ramp directly from an image. And if that’s not enough, a frivolous but fun command lets you map a gradient onto a gray-scale image to create moderately diverting psychedelic effects.
Painter 3.0’s most delightful new feature is Image Hose, which sprays out a continuous stream of predefined images. Each image is an independent floater, exploiting Painter/X2’s ability to mix multiple floating selections in a single document. Portions of the floater can be translucent — as in the case of drop shadows — w'hile other portions are opaque. Floaters are stored in collections called nozzles. You can choose from more than 50 predefined nozzles included on the CD that ships with Painter, or you can create your own. You can even specify that floaters spray out in a specific order or in relation to the direction of your mouse-drag. All in all. Image Hose represents a new milestone for generating background patterns; using one of the predefined nozzles, for example, you can paint a field full of cloverleafs that repeat entirely randomly, without regard for a rectangular grid or any other geometrical structure.
Although this arguably exceeds the boundaries of the program’s naturalmedia territory. Painter 3.0 offers limited animation capabilities. It’s straight Disney-style cel animation; you draw each frame by hand, one on top of another. Painter’s Onion Skin feature lets you see up to five adjacent frames at a time (though you can work on only one of them at a time). You can also trace frames from recorded QuickTime movies, a technique known as rotoscoping. Painter isn’t likely to attract professional animators, but you do have full access to the program’s wealth of painting and masking tools, which is more than any animation application offers.
As If That Weren't Enough
Selecting and masking have received quite a bit of attention in Painter 3, above and beyond the options available in Painter/X2. Among the new-masking functions is a Bézier-curve tool that can draw free-form lines or precise point-by-point shapes. The wealth of live selection functions — though something of a chore to get used to — are uniquely flexible, enabling you to call up any selection outline and even adjust the softness of a floater without dropping it onto the canvas. Painter offers several new calculations for combining floaters. And to its considerable credit, in Painter a floater doesn’t invoke nearly, as much of a performance hit as does a layer in Photoshop.
I can’t begin to describe the rest of Painter’s new functions in detail. The Weaves palette allows you to create tartan-like patterns that Fractal Design claims you can duplicate thread-for-thread using a conventional eight-harness loom. The Image Warp command lets you distort an image by dragging over a thumbnail from inside a dialog box. New dodge and burn tools lighten and darken areas to create highlights and shadows. You can now' capture brush shapes to better emulate irregularly tipped tools like chalk and pastels, and you can imbue brushes with multiple colors, much as you might load a real paintbrush by rolling it on a palette.
No program is perfect, but my criticisms of Painter are minimal. A handful of commands — including Image Warp — require an FPU, preventing me from using those features on the road on my PowerBook 540c, for example. The Undo command is still not sufficiently sensitive, incapable of restoring a deleted floater or a moved selection outline. And Painter doesn’t support JPEG compression, except when opening PICT files. While occasionally irritating, none of these problems interferes with the program’s performance as a real-world painting environment.
The Last Word
Painter has never failed to amaze and amuse, but version 3.0 goes its predecessors one important step better by offering a new' level of usability and genuine practicality. Quite frankly, this is the first Painter to join the ranks of such essential electronic design staples as Adobe Photoshop, QuarkXPress, and Adobe Illustrator. To its considerable credit, version 3.0 takes all the power and magic that have attracted folks to Painter in the past and enhances these qualities, repackaging them in a thoughtfully designed and logical interface. I wish the price hadn’t increased — Painter 3.0 costs $100 more than version 2.0 and $200 more than version 1.0 — but since the newest version integrates Painter/X2, which used to sell separately for $149, I suppose I can cut it some slack. And when you consider that the product still requires a modest investment compared with most mainstream design programs, there’s no doubt that Painter justifies every penny. Quite simply, it’s the best image-creation program I’ve ever seen.
McClelland, Deke. (April 1995). Painter 3. Macworld. (pgs. 56-57).
Mark Zimmer
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Painter3.0.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
