Corel's Painter is a professional program that lets designers reproduce the effects of natural art media, such as oil paints and watercolours.

Painter Essentials is a less expensive version of the same thing for home users.

Much of the program’s emphasis is on transforming digital photos to make them look like old-fashioned paintings and drawings.

Unfortunately, previous versions of Painter Essentials were rather difficult to use, and it wasn’t easy for non-professionals to produce good results. However, we were pleased to see that this version has been completely overhauled.

The interface has been redesigned, and now works in one of two modes (switched by clicking on a button at the top of the screen). The Drawing and Painting mode creates a blank canvas where it's possible to create an original artwork from scratch. There are some simple colour palettes to select and mix colours, and several new brush styles, such as Japanese sumi brushes and the Sargent Brush that mimics the style of the artist John Singer Sargent.

Switch into Photo Painting mode and the program displays a different set of tools to help trace over a photo and make it look like painted artwork. A copy of the original photo is displayed at the side of the screen to give a reference from which to work. You can then either paint over the photo by hand or use the auto-painting option that tells Painter Essentials to try and automatically recreate the painting itself.

The redesigned interface makes it much easier for amateur artists to get good results. Corel has also improved auto-painting with a new technique called Smartstrokes, which allow brushstrokes to follow the outlines of objects more closely.

We’ve been critical of previous versions of Painter Essentials because of its difficulty, but the redesigned interface and improved painting tools in this version make it a great tool for anyone that wants to experiment with digital artwork on their PC or Mac. The price cut to £39 makes it good value too.

Vista compatible: Yes