Painter Essentials 5 Review
I very recently learnt of the existence of Painter Essentials. The moment I did, I knew I wanted it, and now that I've had a chance to play with it for a few days, I'd like to share my thoughts about it.
Short version:
This is a fantastic additional tool for your toolbox if you are interested in digital art. I'm finding it much more useful as a filter replacement - it has auto painting features that beat the hell out of most filters - and while it is not the first or only such application I have, I am exceedingly glad that I have found it. (I got it for £5 off, which didn't hurt.)
However, I am exceedingly glad - very, very happy indeed - to have found Manga Studio and to be using that as my main app. Painter Essentials lets me do cool stuff. Manga Studio encourages me to make art.
Relationship to Painter
Of course I'd known about Painter. I've owned several lite/bundle versions of Painter in the past, and always found it awe-inspiring, far too complex, and buggy. The $400+ price tag does not help. Painter Essentials has a smaller number of in-built brushes; no ability to modify or import brushes, layers but no masks (which I assume Painter has - no idea), and is generally sold as a pared-down version. For a tenth of the price I can put up with the limitations. The bugginess is still there - nowhere near as annoying as previous incarnations, but odd little things not happening or having to tab in and out several times before a window reappears, options being greyed out without reasons, and stuff like that.
What it can do
1) Autopaint. Not all of the auto paint settings are equal - some are excellent, some are meh, the pencil setting created an unexpected result - but on the whole, I am deeply, deeply impressed. Painter Essentials has answered my question of 'how can you even paint this scene' that I had about a couple of places - I know it's only one way (the software lays down large brush strokes and then moves to more and more detailed ones) but this is definitely a technique I can try. (It also occurred to me that maybe what I need to do more of is varying the size of the brush I paint with.)
4 different autopaint settings: clockwise oil, pastel, impressionist, pencil.
Two watercolours: Painter Essentials Autopaint at the top, Sketcher (MacAppStore) at the bottom. I find Painter's palette not overly pleasant; I like Sketcher's result much more.
2) Use the reference image as paint colour. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it allows you to give photos a 'painterly' feel very quickly - you get the brush strokes and texture while the image is very clearly recognisable. There are variations of this. Some brushes pick up the reference image very clearly, some as a kind of smeary starting point. It took me several days before I realised that the effect of the first - the effortless laying down of brushstrokes that then become populated with the image; one of the things that makes this software so nice for quick sketches of things I can use in, e.g., my applications as reasonably good-looking placeholder art - are merely a shortcut to something I can do just as well, if not better, in MangaStudio. Only MangaStudio does not allow you to pick up an image with a brush, you need to mask the image off and then paint holes into the mask, but the same splatter effect etc is perfectly possible and does not even take much longer. If you want to blend several source images, it is, in fact, much easier in MangaStudio. It took me days to work this out; Painter makes it feel effortless.
The dark side of this is that your brush WILL pick up the image underneath. (Unless you turn it off). This makes it easy to paint with rough strokes and amend the result a little; but it discourages you from developing a feeling for brush strokes: 'this area should be blocked in with broad strokes, that one needs a finer (or even different) brush' does not work when your fine brush picks up lint from the background and renders it in equal detail. You *can* turn this feature off, but you have to bring a lot of discipline to painting with Painter Essentials.
I'm hoping to use this feature to block out backgrounds in the hope that it will help me see colours a bit better.
3) Particle brushes
Some of these are also available for Photoshop as a plug-in, but despite having a coupon for an interesting offer (PS plug-in plus Essentials for not much more than Essentials alone) I declined: I currently do not own Photoshop, and I would be oh-so-tempted to buy MORE of those effects. And at $30 per pack (there are what, ten? eleven?) that is too much temptation for me.
4) Directional Lighting
I'm tempted to say that the directional lighting filter is almost worth the price of the application on its own.
What I thought it would do
One feature that was mentioned in the promotional material was 'paint from sketch' so I expected a stunning edge-finding tool. Instead you get the interesting pencil-shading preset and a very half-arsed Sketch filter that does a bad job on any image I've tried it with. This would be a REAL boon, and is something I currently do by hand because I tend to forget that maybe I should run things through filters and get at least a little help with seeing where the lines are.
Top: the best I could get from Painter Essentials. Bottom: Sketcher.
I've always thought with much envy of people who could use Painter. With Painter Essentials, you can paint freehand and get a reasonable set of brushes for this, but compared to the MangaStudio ones that I am now used to (and the additional MangaStudio ones I own, some of which are absolutely utterly fantastic and very responsive to tablet pressure), I did not find Painter Essentials inspiring. This, obviously, is a Mileage May Vary thing.
What it doesn't do
From sample videos I thought Painter allowed you to change brush sizes while you were painting; this is not the case in Essentials and makes me wonder whether the narrators of videos were a little sloppy in relating what they do. This was a Painter feature I was vastly envious of; it appears without reason.
Painter Essentials doesn't allow you to modify your brushes, (fair enough, see '10x price tag); it also has a lousy interface for choosing brushes. In MangaStudio, I'm used to being able to tap my pen or finger once in the appropriate palette; two to three clicks at most; here you have the same number of actions, but you need to hit a very small active area, select the tool type in the popup menu, and then run your mouse over the list to see the individual strokes before clicking to select one. This makes painting unintuitive and clunky. Add to that bad interface choices in almost every aspect of the application and it very much feels like something you have to learn rather than something that wants to inspire you to make art.
But it's masks that I would miss the most. Masks are wonderful for working with photos, and while Painter has more blending modes than MangaStudio, without the ability to mask them off selectively, I dare predict most of them are pretty useless.
In conclusion, this is a neat app. It's a great edition to my toolbox, I am glad I have it, and I will be using it; I've had my money's worth. But if anything, it has put me off buying Painter (not that this was a serious consideration, more a perfect world one): now I feel content to not own Painter whereas before I was a little bit 'ooh, shiny'. If you want to make art, however, I think its value is limited. Much to my surprise I found myself less grateful that the software would do things for me than resentful that it put stumbling stones in my way: I want to learn to paint, not learn how to best manipulate this software into producing something that looks like a painting. I don't really care that, right now, the software is in many ways 'better than me': I want to learn this skill.
Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1063415.html where it has gathered
comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.
Short version:
This is a fantastic additional tool for your toolbox if you are interested in digital art. I'm finding it much more useful as a filter replacement - it has auto painting features that beat the hell out of most filters - and while it is not the first or only such application I have, I am exceedingly glad that I have found it. (I got it for £5 off, which didn't hurt.)
However, I am exceedingly glad - very, very happy indeed - to have found Manga Studio and to be using that as my main app. Painter Essentials lets me do cool stuff. Manga Studio encourages me to make art.
Relationship to Painter
Of course I'd known about Painter. I've owned several lite/bundle versions of Painter in the past, and always found it awe-inspiring, far too complex, and buggy. The $400+ price tag does not help. Painter Essentials has a smaller number of in-built brushes; no ability to modify or import brushes, layers but no masks (which I assume Painter has - no idea), and is generally sold as a pared-down version. For a tenth of the price I can put up with the limitations. The bugginess is still there - nowhere near as annoying as previous incarnations, but odd little things not happening or having to tab in and out several times before a window reappears, options being greyed out without reasons, and stuff like that.
What it can do
1) Autopaint. Not all of the auto paint settings are equal - some are excellent, some are meh, the pencil setting created an unexpected result - but on the whole, I am deeply, deeply impressed. Painter Essentials has answered my question of 'how can you even paint this scene' that I had about a couple of places - I know it's only one way (the software lays down large brush strokes and then moves to more and more detailed ones) but this is definitely a technique I can try. (It also occurred to me that maybe what I need to do more of is varying the size of the brush I paint with.)
4 different autopaint settings: clockwise oil, pastel, impressionist, pencil.
Two watercolours: Painter Essentials Autopaint at the top, Sketcher (MacAppStore) at the bottom. I find Painter's palette not overly pleasant; I like Sketcher's result much more.
2) Use the reference image as paint colour. This is a mixed blessing. On the one hand, it allows you to give photos a 'painterly' feel very quickly - you get the brush strokes and texture while the image is very clearly recognisable. There are variations of this. Some brushes pick up the reference image very clearly, some as a kind of smeary starting point. It took me several days before I realised that the effect of the first - the effortless laying down of brushstrokes that then become populated with the image; one of the things that makes this software so nice for quick sketches of things I can use in, e.g., my applications as reasonably good-looking placeholder art - are merely a shortcut to something I can do just as well, if not better, in MangaStudio. Only MangaStudio does not allow you to pick up an image with a brush, you need to mask the image off and then paint holes into the mask, but the same splatter effect etc is perfectly possible and does not even take much longer. If you want to blend several source images, it is, in fact, much easier in MangaStudio. It took me days to work this out; Painter makes it feel effortless.
The dark side of this is that your brush WILL pick up the image underneath. (Unless you turn it off). This makes it easy to paint with rough strokes and amend the result a little; but it discourages you from developing a feeling for brush strokes: 'this area should be blocked in with broad strokes, that one needs a finer (or even different) brush' does not work when your fine brush picks up lint from the background and renders it in equal detail. You *can* turn this feature off, but you have to bring a lot of discipline to painting with Painter Essentials.
I'm hoping to use this feature to block out backgrounds in the hope that it will help me see colours a bit better.
3) Particle brushes
Some of these are also available for Photoshop as a plug-in, but despite having a coupon for an interesting offer (PS plug-in plus Essentials for not much more than Essentials alone) I declined: I currently do not own Photoshop, and I would be oh-so-tempted to buy MORE of those effects. And at $30 per pack (there are what, ten? eleven?) that is too much temptation for me.
4) Directional Lighting
I'm tempted to say that the directional lighting filter is almost worth the price of the application on its own.
What I thought it would do
One feature that was mentioned in the promotional material was 'paint from sketch' so I expected a stunning edge-finding tool. Instead you get the interesting pencil-shading preset and a very half-arsed Sketch filter that does a bad job on any image I've tried it with. This would be a REAL boon, and is something I currently do by hand because I tend to forget that maybe I should run things through filters and get at least a little help with seeing where the lines are.
Top: the best I could get from Painter Essentials. Bottom: Sketcher.
I've always thought with much envy of people who could use Painter. With Painter Essentials, you can paint freehand and get a reasonable set of brushes for this, but compared to the MangaStudio ones that I am now used to (and the additional MangaStudio ones I own, some of which are absolutely utterly fantastic and very responsive to tablet pressure), I did not find Painter Essentials inspiring. This, obviously, is a Mileage May Vary thing.
What it doesn't do
From sample videos I thought Painter allowed you to change brush sizes while you were painting; this is not the case in Essentials and makes me wonder whether the narrators of videos were a little sloppy in relating what they do. This was a Painter feature I was vastly envious of; it appears without reason.
Painter Essentials doesn't allow you to modify your brushes, (fair enough, see '10x price tag); it also has a lousy interface for choosing brushes. In MangaStudio, I'm used to being able to tap my pen or finger once in the appropriate palette; two to three clicks at most; here you have the same number of actions, but you need to hit a very small active area, select the tool type in the popup menu, and then run your mouse over the list to see the individual strokes before clicking to select one. This makes painting unintuitive and clunky. Add to that bad interface choices in almost every aspect of the application and it very much feels like something you have to learn rather than something that wants to inspire you to make art.
But it's masks that I would miss the most. Masks are wonderful for working with photos, and while Painter has more blending modes than MangaStudio, without the ability to mask them off selectively, I dare predict most of them are pretty useless.
In conclusion, this is a neat app. It's a great edition to my toolbox, I am glad I have it, and I will be using it; I've had my money's worth. But if anything, it has put me off buying Painter (not that this was a serious consideration, more a perfect world one): now I feel content to not own Painter whereas before I was a little bit 'ooh, shiny'. If you want to make art, however, I think its value is limited. Much to my surprise I found myself less grateful that the software would do things for me than resentful that it put stumbling stones in my way: I want to learn to paint, not learn how to best manipulate this software into producing something that looks like a painting. I don't really care that, right now, the software is in many ways 'better than me': I want to learn this skill.
Also posted at http://green-knight.dreamwidth.org/1063415.html where it has gathered
comments. If you're reading at both sites, I'd prefer comments at DW.