If you know Painter, the first thing you’ll notice about version 7 is that it no longer comes in a paint can. Don’t worry, that’s the only thing you’ll miss. This is the first full release since Painter found a new home at Procreate (a subsidiary of Corel), and — based on Painter 7’s evolved feature set, its deft handling of Layers, and its nearly seamless migration to OS X — Procreate provides a happy home indeed.
For those new to the world of digital art. Painter is a graphics application that brings organic tools (such as paper, inks, and paints) to digital artists. Painter emulates natural media (oil and watercolor paints, pastels, pencils, and markers) as well as the different types, weights, and thicknesses of paper used by traditional artists. When you get down to painting, your chosen media interact as they would in the real world. Newbies often compare Painter and Adobe Photoshop, as in “Which one should I buy?” But these two applications complement each other wonderfully for mixing photography with more freeform, painterly art — and yes. Painter fully supports opening and saving layered Photoshop files.
Perhaps one of the most important new features is Painter’s ability to run natively in Mac OS X — no Classic mode required. Now you can reap all the benefits of Apple’s state-of-the-art operating system while honing your fine-art skills. There’s just one drawback: Mac OS X currently lacks Wacom tablet support. Anyone who has used Painter will agree that drawing in the program without a tablet is like sketching with a brick. By the time you read this, we hope that Wacom tablets and Mac OS X will be running happily together under Mac OS 10.1.
Painter installed smoothly in both Mac OS 9.1 and Mac OS 10.0.4, but it felt a little slower in the Mac OS X partition. Again, we hope that Mac OS 10.1 makes everything zippier and fixes a couple Mac OS X-specific Painter quirks, such as the random screenredraw lag and application freezes (not fullsystem freezes) we experienced when we used Dynamic Plugins.
Painter has always been the tool of choice for creating digital art with the look of watercolor, oil, and other traditional media, and version 7 takes the quality of emulation to new heights. Procreate’s two new wet-media technologies. Liquid Ink and Water Color, improve the look and feel of wet media in the digital realm; both require Painter’s new wet-media layers, but you can convert this type of layer to a standard one if you need to apply other effects (say, one of the included KPT5 filters). Once you convert a Liquid Ink or Water Color layer, though, you can’t add more wet media to that layer.
Liquid Ink brings the feel of thick, wet paint — where adjacent colors bleed and run together — to computer-based painting. Painter offers over 40 Liquid Ink brushes— and in addition to having the usual control over size, pressure, opacity, and so on, you can use positive or negative (resistive) variations. The latter are useful for carving away or removing swaths of Liquid Ink rather than simply erasing them, so that what remains still looks painted, instead of looking, well, erased — try doing that with real oil paint.
The new Water Color technology... is even more exciting and fun to watch. Watercolor brush strokes run and merge, altering color as they bleed into each other. In our testing, these brushes worked well for the most part, but noticeably lagged when we used larger brushes. Although this could become a drag when filling in an entire background, there are easier ways of applying color to large areas.
Painter also offers improved text handling in this version — text remains vector based for editing until you convert the text layer to a standard layer. The Text tool’s controls and dynamic text features are now located in a single (Text) pane inside the Objects palette; similarly. Painter’s Brush Controls and Art Materials palettes are now modular, and you can hide and select palette sections and shuffle them up and down. Another handy addition to the interface is a real-time zoom tool, in the form of a variable slider at the bottom-left corner of document windows.
Those who sketch freehand will find the new Perspective Grids a welcome addition. After you switch on grid view (choose Show Grid under Perspective Grids in the Canvas pull-down menu), the Tools palette’s grabber hand is replaced by the Perspective Grid Adjuster, which you can use to adjust the grid’s horizontal and vertical vanishing points to reflect your desired perspective. Besides looking cool. Perspective Grids are an enormous aid to accurate 3D drawing.
When MetaCreations announced its restructuring and Painter's fate was unknown, more than a few digital artists held their breath. Thanks to Procreate (and Corel), Painter’s migration to OS X, and the application’s slick new features, digital painters can relax and get back to being creative with an exciting new version of a favorite tool.
Caputo, Mike. (November 2001). Painter 7. MacAddict. (pgs. 50-51).
Painter 7 "Procreate"
Procreate
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2015-09-23 / 
2023-06-14 / 
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Painter_7_CD2.sit_.hqx
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
SheepShaver
