Product Description

Corel Painter Essentials 4 is the ideal way to get started with digital art. This
simple-to-use home art studio is based on the world's most powerful painting
and illustration software â€" Corel Painter X.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #202 in Software
• Brand: Corel
• Model: PE4ENPCM
• Released on: 2007-12-07
• Platforms: Macintosh, Windows
• Dimensions: 2.00" h x 7.75" w x 9.00" l, .86 pounds

Manufacturer's Description
Corel Painter Essentials 4 is the ideal way to get started with digital art. This simple-to-use home art studio is based on the world's most powerful painting and illustration software â€" Corel Painter X.

If you want to do more than just edit and print your photos, Corel Painter Essentials 4 extends your creativity by helping you transform photos into painted works of art.

Feeling more artistic? Try painting on a blank canvas. Working just like an artist, you can use one of the 90 brushes and mix paint to get the exact color you need. Plus, the brush strokes are just like the real thing.

Digital camera owners and anyone who enjoys taking photos can use Corel Painter Essentials 4 to find new ways to work with photographs and express their vision. Try the autopainting features to quickly and easily convert a photo into a painting. Then use the easy-to-access online services to have your masterpiece printed on a canvas, t-shirt, mug or other keepsake.

Creating scrapbooks is fun and rewarding with Corel Painter Essentials 4. Explore the many tools, brushes, paints and effects to add a whole other creative element to your scrapbooks.

Home users, on both the Mac OS and Windows platforms, now have everything they need for creating digital art and lasting family mementos. Easy to learn, Corel Painter Essentials 4 is complete with training videos and a helpful guidebook, making it simple to get started on a digital art project.

Discover an Expressive, Natural, and Inspiring Home Art Studio

Redesigned and simplified, Corel Painter Essentials 4 provides two new workspaces - Drawing & Painting and Photo Painting â€" which give users a tailored environment containing the tools needed for a specific task.

The new Brush Drawer makes brush identification and selection easier than ever before.

With the addition of the new Mixer palette, Corel Painter Essentials 4 users can easily get the precise colour they want.

In the toolbox, the addition of the new Magic Wand tool makes it easier for users to select specific portions of a photo or painting.

In the toolbox, the new Paper Selector provides quick access to paper textures and displays the current colour.

Try the Broader Selection of Natural-Media Materials

Several new RealBristle brushes authentically reproduce the natural movement of the artist's brush.

New pens in the Pencils & Pens category, such as the Scratchboard Tool and Smooth Edge Calligraphy, are perfect for inking comic books or doing calligraphy.

The new Charcoal brushes range from pencils to hard or soft charcoal sticks.

The two new Sumi-e brushes let users create flowing sumi-e-style brushstrokes.

The new Sargent brush lets users paint in the style of master artist John Singer Sargent.

The enhanced Brush Ghost gives users better control through unprecedented visual feedback of brushstroke behaviour.

Box Contents

Customer Reviews

A fun experience, excellent software
I am not an artist, not computer savvy and used this product with a mouse. And even with all those disclaimers I can tell you it was not easy to use until I read the booklet and watched the tutorial. So I suggest you watch the tutorial videos that come with it first. After a little practice I was able to produce "paintings" from photos as it promised. This lets you upload a photo and basically paint over it. And expect to be able to improve as I learn more about all that the software has to offer and of course 'Practice'. I cannot imagine how easy and useful this product would be with a tablet.

As you may be able to tell from this review, I mainly wanted this so that I could enhance my photographs. The Photo Painting was quite nice. When you upload an image all you do is select which parts of it you want shown by using the same variety of paint tools available in the Drawing & Painting workspace. And there are a lot of choices; many that I am not using at the moment, but will with time. You are even able to change the texture of the image by changing the paper; you can change the brush type and width, and even use different kinds of paints. It will take more time to learn all that this software is capable of.

For me this is a big upgrade. I have only used PC Paint before and always found myself frustrated by not having a brush size I wanted to use. Painter Essentials 4 gives you many more options and has greatly reduced this level of frustration I use to feel. Another big plus in my opinion is the undo or unedited, whichever term you are use too, works for many levels. I had gone forward and noticed something I did not like. I was able to remove the last 18 modifications I had made to the painting and it looked as if I could have kept removing them.

My sister visited me and is great a sketching. She loved the charcoal brushes range from pencils to hard or soft charcoal sticks. She mentioned that it was not as easy as drawing with the actual stick, but the sketch looked great. And I am sure with a pen attached and practice it would be just as easy.

I remember when a friend bought the first Corel product and was happy with it. I could never figure out how to use it and it was over three times the cost of this. This is worth the price, has many features and gives you an intro to the basics with its tutorial material that is included.

So considering I could use it for my photos and my sister thought it was a wonderful tool for creating art (in her case sketches), I have to give this two thumbs up as a product for the home.

Quality art package/Photo art converter!
If you would like to produce some exciting painted effects to your digital images, quickly and easily you will love the options from this software. Almost all traditional media types are available as a preset one click! They are also costomisable to extend the range plus all presets from PE 3 are included if you had any favourites there.
Once you click on a style, off it goes, mimicking real brushstrokes flowing with the subject matter to make a realistic look. It starts with big strokes getting smaller and more detailed. The good thing is you can stop the "painting" at any stage. This allows a loose abstract look all the way to fine details or anywhere inbetween. There is also a clone tool to bring back details selectively and boost details from the digital original.This side of the software requires only a mouse.

If you are artistic and would like to paint from scratch the natural media tools are wonderful, once you get a feel of there instinctive use.
The tutorials are vidio based and well made. You will soon be itching to get started and play with all the options. I do think a graphics tablet is required for working from scratch to give the "FEEL" and flow control of the paint especially using palette knives. It has so many of the tools from it's big brother Painter X, that unless you are a true pro, it is everything you could dream of in a package of this price.

Brilliant new program
This is a brilliant new program. I have been using Painter IX and the X for the past couple of years - Painter is a fantastic, powerful painting tool, but it has the complexities that go with that. I sometimes find the sequence of commands to get the result I want can be very hard to remember. I tried Essentials 3 that came free with my Wacom tablet to see if that would be easier, but in essence it was just Painter IX, cut down. I pondered long and hard whether an upgrade to Painter 11 would make my life easier or whether I should spend £28 to download the upgrade from Essentials 3 to 4.

Essentials 4 was the right decision! It is a complete revamp: very clean and open, very user friendly and after watching the tutorials and playing around a little, intuitive. It has a completely new welcome screen with immediate links to video tutorials and the guidebook. The new brush drawer is terrific, and displays the brushes you have used recently with a very simple way to save your favourites - and yes, it has all my favourites from Painter X, including the RealBristle and Felt Art Markers (and Sumi-e which I must try). You can toggle quickly between working from photos and freehand and use both on the same piece of work. The mixer and colours palettes are great, with a fresh look, larger and clearer, and when you hover, the traditional colour names appear, so I won't forget which colour I was using again! The colour wheel is still there as well.

There are tutorials and pictures to play with to build your confidence, and when you are an Essentials master and want to try your hand at the wider range of brushes and effects in the parent Painter program, the guidebook tells you clearly where to find what. But I wouldn't mind betting that if you do eventually upgrade, you'll still find yourself coming back to Essentials 4 for a lot of your work. It really is good.