Corel Painter’s time has finally come. That sounds like an odd thing to say about a program that has been around for ten full releases, but after all these years of being on the fringe, a newly awakened interest in changing photos into paintings has placed Painter on center stage. One of my most frequent requests from students in the past year has been to teach about photo painting. Corel Painter X is perfectly situated to take advantage of this trend.

Corel Painter X adds an array of new features that will delight both the painters and the photographers who use it. Many of the new features are directly designed to either appeal to photographers or to make it easier for them the use the program.

Version 9.5 saw the creation of a palette that unified all of the Underpainting, Auto-Painting, and Restoration controls. In version 10, Corel Painter adds the Color Schemes selector, which allows you to choose from a variety of possible color looks (Impressionist, Modern, Classical, Sketchbook, Watercolor, and Chalk Drawing). You can also use the Match Color controls to choose a palette from any open image.

In the Auto-Painting section of the palette is a new brushing engine for the Auto-Painting command. In addition to the ability to paint with a recorded brushstroke (which has been there for a while), you can now choose Smart Stroke painting. Smart Stroke painting using the Smart Settings places strokes on the canvas following the lines in the image. The brush gets smaller as the Auto-Painting cycle progresses and more detail is brought out. You can then use the Restoration brushes to bring back selected features.

The new Smart Stroke painting uses a new category of brushes as well—the Smart Stroke brushes. My only complaint is the results of most of the brushes look the same. You can stop the Auto-Painting at any time if you prefer that the rendition of the image not be complete. I found that the most distinctive look from this feature came from using the Watercolor Runny Smart Stroke brush. However, brushes from other categories will work in Smart Stroke painting mode if you choose Clone color, though the speed of the paint build-up is slower.

By far my favorite new feature is the RealBristle Painting System. This brings Painter to a new level of emulating traditional media. In conjunction with the Wacom 6D Art Pen, you have incredible control over your strokes, and they look amazingly real. The new Mixer palette lets you mix colors and then choose multiple colors to be used in a single brushstroke. These brushes are awesome! The Art Pens category is also sensational when used with the 6D Art Pen.

According to the manual, “The Divine Proportion composition tool helps you visually arrange your canvas before drawing or painting.” The tool is interesting and Painter’s instructions for manipulating it are excellent; however, the manual fails to mention exactly how to take advantage of this to create strong designs. The other new layout tool is the Layout Grid, which gives you a 5×5, 3×5, or Rule of Thirds grid.

Overall, this Painter is fast. On my AMD 64X2 3800 Windows machine with 2 GB of RAM, the brushes—even the new RealBristle brushes—keep up with my painting as fast as I can stroke. However, it has been reported to run slowly on older systems.

If you’re looking to add photo painting to your repertoire of skills, look at Painter. It leverages the Photoshop skills you already have and works seamlessly with it. The combination of Painter with Photoshop is unbeatable.— Sherry London

PRICE: $429 ($419 for download)
FROM: Corel Corporation
PHONE: 800-772-6735
WEB: www.corel.com
FOR: Mac and Windows
RATING: 4.5

LAYERS VERDICT
HOT RealBristle Painting System
NOT Unresponsive, hard-to-control sliders

AKVIS Enhancer 3 is the latest upgrade of this software, with the main enhancements being a new interface and 16-bit image support. You can independently control the Shadows, Highlights, Level of Detail, and Lightness of an image.

The program, in general, performs nicely. At the default settings, I typically preferred the results to those of the Adobe Photoshop Shadow/Highlight adjustment, although in many cases neither correction was really satisfactory. If you want an alternative to Shadow/Highlights that gives you some different controls, this filter could be one to add to your arsenal. At $69, it won’t break the bank.

I also found some disturbing issues with it. On the Mac (a new G5 Quad with 1.5 MB of RAM using a 1500×1000 image), the filter was distressingly slow to preview changes in the sliders.

One neat new feature is the Level of Detail slider. It does add detail to the image but it may also produce excessive noise. I was able to get a similar correction in Shadow/Highlight with much less noise in the image.

On the Mac, the preview is not color-accurate. One corrected image looked fine in the preview but produced a distressing red skin tone when actually applied. This problem is either not present or less apparent in Windows. Neither platform contains a way to view the image at 100%; however, on Windows you can’t enlarge the dialog either, which makes it extremely difficult to select optimal settings.

If you work on a duplicate layer and mask out the less-successful areas of the filtered image, you can get good results with Enhancer that aren’t possible using Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight.—Sherry London

PRICE $69
FROM AVKIS LLC
PHONE 206-309-0821
WEB www.akvis.com
FOR Mac and Windows

LAYERS VERDICT
HOT Easy-to-use interface
NOT Lack of Zoom feature; noise
RATING 2.5 stars

Image enhancement software brings out the juicy details

AKVIS Enhancer is a filter designed to replace Photoshop’s Shadow/Highlight adjustment. It plugs into any program that accepts Adobe standard plug-ins. You can adjust to favor the highlights, the shadows, or an equal distribution of values. You can also alter the intensity of the effect and the level of detail.

While Shadow/Highlight was one of my favorite new features in the Photoshop CS release, it didn’t work as well as AKVIS Enhancer on many of the images I tried. When used on ocean tones, Shadow/Highlight at default settings tended to flatten the values and gray them out; Enhancer didn’t.

If anything, Enhancer has to be watched very carefully so that it doesn’t oversaturate images. However, the detail that it finds can be astounding. In the Tall Ships image that I tested it on, Enhancer found cloud texture in the sky. Shadow/Highlight produced a totally flat, even-colored sky. Enhancer, at certain settings, also tried to let you see through the sails to the dark details of the expressway across the river.

When you lighten any underexposed image, regardless of method, the image tends to get very noisy. The only problem I had with Enhancer was the noise created on saturated areas that were dark to begin with. Reds in an image also were oversaturated; however, the settings enable you to compensate most of the time. The histograms of any image that I viewed stayed healthy and didn’t posterize. The best results occurred when I filtered in a new layer and then masked out the less successful parts of the results.

PRICE: $69 (home) $78 (business)
FOR: Mac and Windows
FROM: AKVIS, LLC
PHONE: 206-309-0821
WEB: www.akvis.com
RATING: 4.0