What is Painter 1.x?

Painter is an artist's dream of a palming program that transcends the special effects; of Oasis and PixelPaint Professional. Unlike those programs, Painter is designed specifically for replicating natural drawing and painting media, a difficult task at which it excels. Its unique effects make it the ultimate companion product for such programs as Photoshop or ColorStudio.

Users with Wacom graphics tablets will find that among Mac graphics programs, Painter uses a pressure-sensitive stylus to the best advantage. But even a lowly mouse can be used to control most aspects of Painter's brush dynamics.

Simulating natural media is one of the hardest challenges for graphics software. Until Painter, no other Mac program has been able to accurately reproduce natural brush dynamics and expression.

Painter's revolutionary brush tools are divided into several categories. Airbrushes, crayons, felt pens, chalk, charcoal, and pencils are all on the scrolling Brush palette. You can also find special-effects brushes, which include a water-drop tool (for softening edges and smearing paint), cloning brushes, two standard painter effects (based on the styles of Seurat and Van Gogh), and an eraser.

The modular design of the Tool palette lends itself to the addition of more brush types and effects. Each tool category has several variations. For example, muhipje chalk settings include enlarged or sharpened tips as well as a softer pastel-like option. Custom brushes include an accurate calligraphy pen and a thick, roughedged Japanese brush.

Painter supports adjustable anti-aliasing of brush edges as well as variable brushtipdynamics. Its chalk tools are completely convincing, and we found the felt-pen tools simply uncanny. As you rub a felt-pen tool over the same area repeatedly, for example, it builds up density and saturation accurately. The program is so realistic that a yellow felt pen dragged over a dark paint stroke ends up with a tainted tip, which you can remedy by dabbing the pen on a clean white area of the canvas.

For many artists, Painter s built-in brush choices will probably offer everything they need for everyday work. Technically inclined users can dive in and experiment with the program's advanced brushbehavior controls. You can, for example, create chalk that smears underlying colors as a watercolor brush does.

Brushes can be manipulated to change their overall dynamics characteristics (opacity, color, size, or roughness), depending on stylus- or mouse-input variables that include speed, pressure, and direction. A unique feature for owners of a Wacom graphics tablet allows Painter to be fine-tuned to the velocity and pressure with which each user handles the stylus, a feature that's sorely lacking in other painting programs that otherwise support the Wacom hardware.

Painter offers several paper textures that work like PixelPaint Professional's Pixel Paper, The paper breaks up the brush stroke to simulate a textured surface. Paper textures can also be applied to existing images as filter effects. Paper libraries appear as swatches in a scrolling window. Two libraries come with the program, and we expect to see others appear on the market.

Painter is not only a tool for creating artwork from scratch; it can also use existing pictures (including scanned images) as a starting point. By cloning a document and using the program's clone brushes, you can manually convert a scanned image into a digital masterpiece. By applying short jabs of the Van Gogh cloner brush to a cloned image, for example, you can gradually approximate (and even mutate) the look of the master.

The driving-rain and felt-pen doners are great fun. and there are also oil-, pencil-, and chalk-cloning brushes. The Autoclone command lets you apply a brush style to an entire selection or a document as a filtered effect. You can use Painter's Tracing Paper option to view a background image as a template while you paint on a separate document in the foreground (this ability emulates Oasis' most distinctive feature, the Light Box), Painter can open and save files in TIFF. PICT, RIFF,or Photoshop format, in user-definable sizes and resolutions. Masks saved with ColorStudio documents are imported when you open a RIFF document.

Masks, or friskets, are used to selectively paint on isolated portions of an image. You create masks by using Painter's freehand drawing tool. You can relate masks and move them into position, modify how they're displayed, and specify whether tools paint inside or outside them. Painter comes with a library of predefined masks, and you can save custom ones.

The Bottom Line

For the absolute best in digital paintbrushes, crayons, charcoals, and markers, look no further than Painter. Shipped in a novel metal paint can, the program includes a clearly written manual with ample color samples and illustrations. Without question, at $299, Painter is a best buy in the crowded Mac graphics-software arena.

Biedny, David. (February 1992). Painter. MacUser. (pgs. 62, 72).

Download Painter 1.x for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II