Painter 7 -

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DesignerToday 2001 Product Reviews

Painter 7

Jacquelin Vanderwood

November 1, 2001

There are a number of new features present in Procreate's Painter 7. What are they? One of the first two new features that are immediately obvious is Liquid Ink and Watercolor. The first two graphics you see below are samples of these new brushes. I found Liquid Ink easier to handle initially than Watercolor although I can do watercolor fairly well in the real world. It takes some time to master the Painter version. Liquid Ink was fun to discover because you weren't really sure where it would take you as far as effects are concerned. It appears to have it's own mind at times. With each new brush you'll find a plethora of new options that accompany them. (You can see the two screenshots of the dropdown menus below of Liquid Ink and Watercolor.) In addition to these two new brush features you'll find additional option buttons at the bottom of the layers palette for choosing Layer Commands, Dynamic Plugins, Create New Layers, and the infamous Trashcan. No longer do you have to press the little arrow up in the corner to access some of these options. You'll also find new external buttons for the Mask layers palette as well such as Load Selection, Save Selection, Invert Selection, Create New Mask, and the Trashcan. There are new images in the Image Portfolio to use too.

A very necessary new addition that has long been overlooked in Painter is the easy-to-use Text palette which is resident on the desktop any time you need it. It allows you to edit your text immediately and easily. All the text settings are right there at your disposal. If you choose to do so, you can specify curved text, shadowed text, internal shadows, point size, leading and tracking, opacity, blur, direction, centering, composite method, directional blur, and alignment.

Some of the new Surface Control Effects that you can apply to your artwork are Woodcuts, Distressed, and Serigraphy. It takes a little experimenting to make them do what you want but you can have some fun with them.

Ever feel like you need some perspective on the situation? Well Painter now contains that illusive Perspective Grid that is so ever present in other applications. It's easy to use and manipulate and won't take a college degree to learn it.

One of the biggest gripes I've had with a lot of programs is the Zoom tool. Since we artists are constantly using it, it should be there at our fingertips. Now Painter contains continuous and variable zoom with a scale slider. It is editable allowing you to specify the amount of zoom tailored to your needs.

Included with all of the new enhancements above are color set opportunities which allow you to create color sets from an image, an active layer, and an active selection; contextual menu support, keyboard shortcut enhancements, and JPEG and GIF preview enhancements.

All-in-all it appears to be a much improved product. I did find some bugs in it which will have to be rectified and hopefully available for download as a patch but I am happy with the enhancements. I give it a thumbs up. Here's a hint: when you find a bug in Painter 7.0, email Procreate and let them know about it so they can fix it.

(I do have one beef with Procreate, that is their web site for Painter. I found it difficult to use. I would rather have a site that I can access with ease and go directly to the subject matter.)