Corel Painter Essentials 4 (Win/Mac)

I really loved this product. I'm an Adobe Photoshop man myself but found Corel's Painter Essentials to be excellent when doing a few simple things to pictures. It's very easy to use. Highly recommended!

I was hoping for more scrapbooking options, so this wasn't what I needed. It's a good product, and it was my bad not to look at it closer before I ordered it, but I should have stuck with a Photoshop-type product instead.

Corel Painter Essentials 4 is a software package that runs on either Windows or Mac systems designed to enable you to draw or paint using a computer or to edit digital photographs to make them look like drawings, paintings, or to do touch up. The application would be most applicable to artists and designers looking for a tool with which to create new images, or to regular non-professionals looking for a nice way to edit photographs to make them look more interesting for family and friends.

The software comes with a tutorial that explains the process and makes the program easy to use. If the uses of this application are something that you would like to do, then this seems to be a very good software package. Take a look at the reviews here for yourself, and you'll notice that the only 1 and 2 star reviews are from people who could not figure out how to install the software or didn't take the time to watch the tutorial to learn how to use it. In other words -- no negative reviews of the actual product itself! That's pretty good design for software.

However, if you are not interested in drawing from scratch or creating painting/drawing-like pictures, this may not be necessary for you. I use Photoshop to edit my photographs, and as I am not a designer, that has been enough so far for me. But I could see uses for this and may use it more in the future should the need arise.

This looks like a fine software program if you're into creating images. I'm really not that tech savvy and have not used the program only for that reason. The product does not come with the markers, etc. that are pictured - that is for illustration purposes only.

Corel makes great products and this one should be no different.

Whether you're using a Wacom tablet or just a mouse, you can quickly achieve painterly styles either free hand or with existing art and photographs with a few clicks and create unique pieces of art with minimal effort.

Being a user of Photoshop for about 14 years, I can tell you, this is not a competing product - it is a complementary product. The two do very different things in very different ways. Great for amateur artists or professionals, Painter 4 Essentials has great video tutorials to get you started.

I installed this on two different machines to test it out - once on a one-year-old MacBook that has the older video card w/ 64MB of shared graphics memory and on a new (early 2008) iMac with a 512MB graphics card. The difference is striking on performance. While this product would probably be great on one of the newer MacBooks with 144MB of shared memory, it stuttered and was slow on my older MacBook. It flies on my iMac... and this is clearly due to the graphics memory differences and not because of a moderate processor jump.

I'd recommend anyone trying this new out of the box to sit through the tutorials at least once to familiarize themselves with the interface - to me, it was not initially intuitive.

Fun, affordable, powerful product.