For 13 years, Painter has ploughed its own furrow in the world of creative digital software, providing tools that closely mimic their real-world counterparts. These days every image editor from Photoshop to Paint Shop Pro has its share of natural media effects, but with Painter natural media is the basis of everything it does, not just a fancy add-on.

Although highly praised for its innovative and incredibly lifelike brushes and effects, which were the first to behave in a messy fashion, Painter was widely criticised for being unresponsive and for its complicated interface. These two shortcomings have been all but eliminated in the new release.

Although its results were realistic, the gap between applying paint and it appearing on the canvas bore no resemblance to reality. With Painter IX running on a fast machine with plenty of Ram this doesn't happen, the paint goes on the canvas as quickly as you can apply it.

Brush selection has been simplified with the introduction of two pull-down menus, one for selecting the brush type and another for choosing the variant. One of Painter's strengths is the degree of control it gives over brush parameters and the Brush Control palettes provide access to these settings in an organised and logical manner.

Each brush type has a control palette, which is rolled up when not in use. To change the settings you click the triangle to expand the palette from the list. Although better, this is not as good as it could be. Controls for non-selected brushes are greyed out, so why not one context-sensitive palette to display the controls for the currently selected brush?

Another criticism of the Painter interface was that it was so radically different from Photoshop that it was impractical to work with the two together. Corel has addressed this problem in two ways. Layers now behave much more like Photoshop. Creating and editing layer masks and alpha channels is simpler, and you can collapse layers with different merge modes and toggle visibility for a group of layers by click-dragging.

Perhaps more importantly, you can interchange files between Photoshop and Painter IX with layers, alpha channels and layer masks intact, although you can't transfer Painter's wet paint watercolour layers to Photoshop or import Photoshop type layers into painter.

It's not all productivity and interface enhancements. Painter has new Artists' oil brushes. Corel has attempted to push the real-world metaphor further with these brushes, which run dry as you apply paint to the canvas.

It's also not just a case of real by nature, as the colours adopt the same naming convention as artists' paints, so you'll find Cadmium Yellow, Naples Yellow, Indian Yellow and so on, rather than the proprietary colour libraries usually found in image-editing applications.

In default mode they're a little crude; rather than tapering out, the paint dries up across the width of the brush, so you need to be prepared to experiment with the brush controls.

The new Snap to path painting feature will be a boon to commercial artists who need to produce crisp artwork with clean lines but a natural media look. Snap to path works by confining brush strokes to the contours of a vector path created with the pen tool.

As far as it goes it works pretty well. The path simply acts as a guide, so you can, for example, stipple along it using dabs or change brush type, variant, width, colour or other parameters part way along. But there's no ongoing relationship between path and paint and therefore no scope for subsequent editing. You can move the path, but the paint stays where it is.

Quick clone makes short work of tracing photos, automatically taking colour information from the traced layer and applying it to an overlay to provide a five-minute study in oils, watercolour or whatever your choice of media.

A revamped tracker palette remembers all your brush settings, but undo is still limited to 32. Enhanced digital watercolour brushes stay wet between sessions so you can open up a previously worked image and change the wet edges.

There's also support for Wacom's new Intuos 3 pressure and tilt-sensitive tablet, frames-per-second playback control for animators, improved layer mask selections, version control and keyboard shortcuts. Finally, Corel has included seven KPT effects filters.

While these new tools are welcome, they don't add significantly to Painter's existing palette. However, it's the performance boost, interface reworking and productivity enhancements that will convince existing users to upgrade and those yet to embrace a digital paintbrush to dabble.

Contact: Corel
www.corel.com

System requirements:

• Windows 2000 or XP
• Pentium II 500MHz
• 128MB of Ram
• Mouse or tablet
• 24bit colour display
• 1,024 x 768 monitor resolution
• CD-Rom drive
• 380MB available hard disk space