Corel Photo-Paint 8

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What is Corel Photo-Paint 8?

Photo-Paint 8, also part of the CorelDraw 8 suite, is now available separately. Although we touched on Photo-Paint 8 in our review of CorelDraw 8 (Nov/98, p54), the stand-alone package deserves its own in-depth review because it does so much.

Photo-Paint 8 became a real contender in the competitive world of imaging-editing apps by using Adobe Photoshop’s very own strengths to its advantage and trumping them with added versatihty. For example, Photo-Paint 8 lets you save your work (layers and all) in Photoshop-native format, and it can use all Photoshop plug-ins. It also includes most of the functions of ImageReady and even Painter. Thus, Photo-Paint 8 enables those who are new to it to work in a familiar mode, making it a better value than buying and maintaining several separate applications.

Once you’ve loaded the program onto your hard drive, along with its full set of support, tutorial, and sample files (a hefty 80MB total), you’re set not only to effectuate elegant bitmap editing, but also to explore fiilly the realms of digital illustration, unconstrained by anything but your Mac’s physical RAM and hard drive capacity.

Photo-Paint 8 looks a httle unfamiliar at first, but its helpful pop-up identifiers, thorough explanations of each feature in the manual, and included how-to book make it easy for novices and Photoshop users alike to get going very quickly. The program offers every feature available in Photoshop 4.x, then extends its feature set with customizable workspaces, operations undo, and the Painter-like concepts of nibs and hoses, as well as Internet features and sofid but basic animation and movie-editing abilities. In sum, Photo-Paint 8 contains everything a bitmap artist might want in one tidy package. The only area that Photoshop 5.x users might find lacking is Photo-Paint 8’s type-handling controls; they fall short of Photoshop’s, which Adobe recently enhanced. The existing controls, however, are more than adequate for almost every kind of work, and few users will notice serious limitations.

For Web artists, Photo-Paint 8 is a godsend. Not only does it import and export every conceivable kind of Mac and PC graphics format (say bye-bye to separate conversion applications), but its transparency options, browser-specific optimization palettes, and animation capabilities make it superior to Photoshop or ImageReady for JPEG and GIF file creation. Photo-Paint 8 also brings in vec- tor illustrations like those created in Illustrator and FreeHand (and CorelDraw, of course) with equal ease and preserves color tables perfectly, unlike some programs. Corel has added extensive print and Web color support, and for the first time we can unequivocally say that the company has incorporated true world-class print and Web color man- agement into its product.

One of Photo-Paint 8’s best features is its ability to create customizable workspaces, which enable you not only to set up frequently used commands where you would find them most useful, but also to rearrange menus and palettes to boost productivity. The Corel property bar (think of it as an expanded onscreen contextual menu) is the only addition you’ll have to get used to, but you can add, remove, or reorganize all the commands on it as well.

The Painter-like functions of Photo-Paint 8 include the familiar Image Sprayer, full support for drawing tablets, and nib changing. It also offers Brush Symmetry, which allows both Radial and Mirror symmetrical painting, and Orbits, a feature that enables you to set a hub point or series of points to paint around.

Photo-Paint 8 takes advantage of native Mac technologies, offering features that even Corel’s longtime PC user base never enjoyed. For instance, the program has drag-and-drop support, ColorSync compliance (including the underused but emerging Hexachrome color model support), QuickTime 3 features (including QTVR stitching), AppleGuide Help, and — most important for Mac OS 8.5 users — full AppleScript support. By using AppleScript to record and play back a series of actions (as with Photoshop’s Actions palette), you can undo a fall or partial series.

You might think that offering a program that can handle even the most demanding Web, print, and video files with the same finesse as the competition would be enough for Corel. Not so. The company has sweetened the honey to attract Photoshop devotees, offering them a considerable add-on package of carefully chosen goodies that function togetlier hannoniously. As it did with the fiill CorelDraw suite, Corel has included the Font Reserve font management software, the Cumulus Desktop portfolio manager, the Digimarc watermarking tool, and the Photo/Graphic Edges and Paint Alchemy plug- ins. In addition, Corel chose 1,200 of its best EPS clip art images (as opposed to the larger but poorer selection that PC users receive); 100 high-quality stock photos; a selection of animated GIFs, Web backgrounds, floating objects, and textures; and 1,600 TrueType and Type 1 fonts. The stand-alone Photo-Paint 8 also comes with the hefty manual, a commercial printing guide, and even a bonus book, Corel Photo-Paint 8: The Official Guide.

Given all that material, Photo-Paint 8 requires a large RAM allotment. Specifically, it needs a minimum of 32MB of RAM with virtual memory enabled before it will install — and any Power Mac with less than 40MB of physical RAM will feel the pain of churning operations. Also, Photo-Paint 8 can run only on a Power Mac; however, in our tests with the program on a 601, we found ourselves waiting quite a bit longer than with a 603e or 604. Of course, Photo-Paint 8 performs spectacularly on a G3.

With its fall support for every type of professional output, including even the relatively new PostScript level 3 and Web and graphics formats, Photo-Paint 8 is an ideal choice for artists who want maximum versatility in one package. It has enough extra features and goodies to persuade even those who already own Photoshop to take advantage of the $129 upgrade price. Corel has worked hard to bring only the best product over to the Mac, realizing that if it wanted to make any sort of dent in Photoshop’s fortress, it would have to present superior value and quality. Apart from a few Windows-like icons and first-run hiccups, Photo-Paint 8 sports a Mac interface on top of a powerful application that, for now at least, has one up on most aspects of Photoshop. It will be interesting to see if this development inspires Adobe to do something it hasn’t done in a while: Compete.

Martin, Charles. (March 1999). Corel Photo-Paint 8. MacAddict. (pgs. 50-51).


Download Corel Photo-Paint 8 for Mac

(205.15 MiB / 215.11 MB)
Mac OS 9 / Toast image, zipped
87 / 2015-09-12 / 69816e19e19b51b67f5255ee198f661efdb3b45b / /


Architecture


IBM PowerPC



System Requirements

From Mac OS 7.6





Compatibility notes


Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver





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