Review by Patrick O

If you know Painter, there’s not much I can add about the program in general. There’s nothing else like it. It’s an art studio in a box, on your computer. Allowing an almost infinite creativity to take shape. It’s the sort of program where the key learning task isn’t the software itself, it’s learning how to draw, or paint, or design. Useful for sketching, for composing, for testing out ideas, for putting together test pieces. Allows you to discover new processes and try new mediums. No, of course it’s not an exact replica of real painting or drawing. But it is as close as a computer can get, mimicking the textures and attributes of a very wide array of mediums.

If you don’t know Painter, get to know it if you are a serious artist who wants to expand to computer based approaches. Or if you’re a budding artist. It definitely helps to have an Intuous pad of one kind or another, but this isn’t absolutely essential (well, maybe it is in a way…)nnI’ve owned previous versions. If you own the most recent version, there’s not really a big reason to upgrade. The perspective lines are quite helpful and there are improvements across the board, but nothing so substantial to justifying paying a lot of money. Of course, if you’re a teacher or student you can get this for a big discount, just look up the academic version.

I loaded this on my Dell 15R touchscreen laptop and am happy to say it works great with the touchscreen. Very responsive. The screen itself is not anything near as sensitive an Intuos, but it definitely works quite well.

No downsides or glitches or negatives that I’ve seen here. Runs smoothly, runs great even on a far from top of the line computer. Corel makes great software that works and works without the constant nagging that Adobe insists on.