VERDICT A rethought interface, new auto painting capabilities and excellent price make Painter Essentials a real creative star.
Corel’s flagship Painter application is unmatched for its ability to mimic traditional artistic media such as watercolours and oil paints – but no-one could claim that it makes the process simple. This is where the cut-down Painter Essentials comes in, promising to make the core of this creative power accessible to everyone.

As such, the focus of this latest release is again on ease of use and the entire interface has again been entirely reworked to make it more visually appealing and user friendly starting with more and larger icon commands – a particular boon in you’re using a Tablet PC. There are also now two dedicated workspaces with palettes and tools changing depending on whether you want to create your artwork from scratch or base it on an existing image.
Select the Drawing & Painting workspace and the right hand sidebar is dedicated to helping you select the colour to apply to your canvas. Previously users were presented with a typical computer Colour Wheel in which they could select any colour based on its hue, saturation and brightness values. That option is still available but Painter Essentials 4 instead foregrounds a reworked version of its Colours palette which shows a limited range of swatches and a new Mixer palette on which you interactively mix and select colours much as you would on an artist’s palette. It might seem a step backwards restricting your colour range like this, but it’s closer to the way that traditional artists work and the process and end results quickly prove more rewarding.
Once you’ve selected your paint, you need to select your brush. Click on the main Brush tool on the lefthand toolbar and a new Brush Drawer slides open to let you choose brushes via their name and a sample stroke. To help you find the exact effect you are after, the drawer is divided into tabs – thick paint, thin paint, dry media and so on – and all brushes that you’ve used recently can also now be quickly selected from a column of icons beside the drawer. In the full Painter application you can then dig down to fine-tune a bewildering array of parameters to control every aspect of your brush but in Essentials you’re limited to changing size, opacity and, where relevant, grain.
This certainly makes life far simpler but means that the selection of brushes provided is all-important. Painter Essentials doesn’t disappoint with grainy chalks, thick impasto oils and realistic watercolours that spread and diffuse. This new release also sees major additions in the form of new charcoal, calligraphy and sumi-e options and a particularly striking artistic brush based on the style of John Singer Sargent. Also impressive are the new brushes based on Corel’s RealBristle technology which attempts to reproduce the interaction between paint, canvas and brush even more faithfully.
Building up new images from a blank canvas is all very well but non-professional artists need additional help and this is found in abundance if you switch to the Photo Painting workspace. This replaces the palettes for choosing colours with three palettes designed to help you base your artwork on an existing image. The first is the new Source Image palette where you can choose to base your artwork on the current open image or open a file from disk. The source image is then shown in the palette and you can also choose to display it as tracing paper on your canvas. Painter Essentials 4 also now stores this original image as a hidden layer when you save your file which means that you can always carry on working from where you left off or start over again from scratch – very simple but another major practical advance.
Below the Source Image palette is the Auto-Painting palette which again simplifies life by incorporating the functionality of the previously separate Under-Painting palette. Here you can quickly choose from the dropdown selection of 18 effects – oil painting, impressionist, and so on – and then hit the Play button. You can then sit back and watch as Painter Essentials 4 recreates your photo as a hand-drawn work of art. The end results are more artistic and impressive than ever thanks to Corel’s extraordinary new Smart Stroke technology which dynamically changes brush size, stroke length, and pressure based on the detail and focal areas of the original photo.
It might sound from this that you are virtually cut out of the creative process and that you’d be as well off with filter effects, but that’s not the case. To begin with, you aren’t limited to the presets but can set up your own custom effect by pre-applying edge and colour corrections and then choosing your own paper and brush. You can also apply multiple different brushes to build up effects and call up the Random Stroke dialog to vary parameters such as pressure and size. Most importantly, the auto painting results aren’t the end of the matter as you can use the tools in the third Restore Detail palette to subtly blend back detail from the original. Best of all, you can simply switch back to the Drawing & Painting workspace to paint directly with the currently selected brush.
Professional illustrators will want the greater control over brushes, layers and effects offered by the full Painter application, but Painter Essentials 4 proves that for many users a cut-down application can actually deliver more – and at a fantastic price.

EASE OF USE 5/6
FEATURES 3/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 6/6
OVERALL 5/6