Review by David Stapleton

Ever since Corel bought Paintshop Pro, I have been looking for an acceptable alternative without success (this product included, since it is far too expensive). Painter is a fairly powerful art program targeted at those that are involved in serious computer generated art, not the casual artist of picture tweaker.

The selection of media, from brushes to palettes, including charcoal, pencil, marker and paper, weaves provide the user with many options.

Technically, the installation was smooth and the control set is fairly common (Painshop, Photoshop and Painter share many of the same controls so the learning curve on the interface itself is pretty easy to deal with). Speaking of interfaces, a mouse is not the preferred user interface to take full advantage of this program; I would opt for a tablet to get the most out of Painter. After several month of using the program I am still learning the subtleties of various drawing techniques (in this respect the learning curve is much more steep).

Overall, this is much more power than I, a casual artist, need for what I want to do (fiddle some photos and author or tweak some website art) and much too pricey as well, but for the true artists out there this is a jewel of a tool.