Review by Harold McFarland

The installation of this program went smooth with no problems whatsoever (Windows XP with Service Pack 2).

While this is basically a scaled down version of Corel’s professional product, ParitnerX, it still has a tremendous number of options and abilities that are more than enough to meet the needs of the home or hobby user. With two workspaces You can choose to create a picture or illustration from scratch or apply various effects to your photographs to give it an artistic effect.

I did find that the interface was confusing until I actually bothered to read the manual. Afterward it was very easy to use and in fact seemed intuitive, guess I just needed a jump start to understand what it was supposed to be doing. With options for detail level adjustments, brush types, brush sizes, opacity, paper type and many, many other choices you can pretty much create any effect you want.

The Drawing & Painting workspace is fairly easy to use but seems to be yet another drawing and painting program with nothing in particular to recommend or detract from other products. Much more than Paint, much less than Illustrator it strikes a good solid middle ground. However, when it comes to the Photo Painting area this is an amazing product. Want to take a picture and make it look like an oil painting? No problem. What about a watercolor? No problem. Charcoal, chalk, sketch…. no problem. It did an amazing job and I was really pleased with the results after working with it a while and getting to understand the program. I did notice that photos with a lot of color and contrast variation turn out much nicer than those that are predominantly dark or composed of a predominantly small range of color.

The program is well worth the price for the photo painter ability by itself. The results are really amazing and I was very please with the results.