Corel Painter Essentials 4 (Win/Mac) (Old Version)

Purchased this for my 12 year old aspiring graphic designer. She received a brand new computer from her grandpa & I thought this would be great. Installation took forever, and then whenever we loaded this software, it made her brand new computer run very slow. I had to un-install this & will be contacting the customer service at Corel to find out what the problem is. If we can get this running, it seems to be amazing! The instruction book that comes with it is THICK and covers everything you could do in amazing descriptions

The product had a glitch in loading; only by visiting the forum could I find the (simple) fix, since Corel Support had a completely unusable solution. Now that it is working, I find it simple and fun to use, with many interesting variations.

This product is easy to use but it takes about a minute or so for it to do its thing in the auto painting. I recommend playing the video tutorials first as they were very helpful.

The concept is intriguing (Photoshop filters on steroids) and "auto-paint" is a gas to watch. The results, however, are variable. The "transparent" brushes, which paint with pieces of the underlying image are (unless you yearn for the days of decoupage or "hand-tinted" portraits) definitely taste-challenged and seem like a waste of time. They take minutes to do what a filter overlay could do in seconds. The "opaque" brushes however, which apply dabs of colors taken from image, yield results that are sometimes quite attractive. As the auto-paint routine progresses, the "brushes" get progressively smaller and bring out more and more detail, yielding a product that actually does resemble a painting. It can be quite useful for getting a usable enlargement out of an original photo that has too little resolution or saturation to blow up.The problem is that, on a Mac anyway, there is a bug in the good "opaque" brushes' auto-paint routine. At a point near the end of the routine, when the picture is starting to look good, the brush switches from dabbing bits of color to drawing black squiggles that ruin the picture. It looks as if a 3-year-old with a Magic Marker vandalized it. The problem is built-in. It even happens with default settings with newly installed software on tutorial images they supply.I wasted many hours trying to get the program to work properly and even more trying to deal with Corel's support site and personnel. They're the worst I've ever encountered. Their support people are truly committed to blowing the customer off as quickly as possible and don't even bother to read what you send them. The support site is scanty, opaque, and non-intuitive. There are even simple things, like a "download now" button, that just don't work. I could go on for some time about the problems I encountered, but this one probably sums it up best. On their "Patches and Updates" page there is a listing for a "Corel Painter Essentials 4.3 Update for Macintosh OS X 10.6." You'd never suspect that what it sends you is v. 4.0.1.060--their latest version-- that has never been tested on Snow Leopard, would you?I couldn't recommend any Corel product, based in my experiences with this product.

What a great program! I am not an artist, but just a person who likes to doodle and have fun with artsy things. This program let's you look like an artist by allowing you to take a photo from your collection on your computer and bring it over to Painter to duplicate like a painting. You get tracing paper where you can trace over your photo and fill it in with color from all kinds of medium like paint, chalk, pencil etc, and it comes out looking like a painting. I use a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet with this program that I purchased separately, but found out later that this program comes with the Bamboo Fun tablet as a package - which is a better bargain. I would highly recommend this program for anyone wanting to have fun drawing or learning how to draw. It comes with tutorials that are excellent to get you started.

I haven't had much luck using this. Nothing comes out the way I want it to. I'm not crazy about it and you don't have a lot of personal control with it.

I purchased the item based on the item description. It says, The simple-to-use home art studio that makes it easy for you to draw, paint or turn your photos into paintings-", which, to me, means you can draw or paint without using a photo. That is, just a nice, easy paint/draw program.When the box arrived, it says, "Painter Photo Essentials", and is clearly meant for use with photos. (On the Amazon pages, the title omits the word, "Photo".)I am disappointed and am returning the product.

This software does enough to explore digital painting but does not require you to "take a course" in it just to accomplish amazing results. The tutorials are easy to follow and do an excellent job of guiding you through all aspects of the program. Anyone who wants to explore digital painting for the first time should buy this software to provide a broad spectrum of the medium. I LOVE it!

With persistence, by loading as a Windows XP SP3 compatible program on my Windows 8 HP laptop, I managed to get Painter Essentials 4 to work, albeit when booting up it is necessary to leave the PC waiting for ten minutes. Just when you think nothing will happen, it loads successfully. I now avoid the delayed boot up by minimising the program when not in use. In spite of multiple attempts I have been unable to load the program on my Mesh PC (Windows 7) and Acer laptop (Windows 7). I have yet to use all the paint options but the jpg to art conversions (watercolour, oil, etc) are superb and make excellent framed artworks when enlarged. The program will get 5.5 stars when Corel bring out a Windows 7 and 8 version.

This is a chopped down version of Coral PainterX,don't be put off,this is a lot of fun.I'm a retired designer/illustrator and I get an enormous amount of pleasure using this software...it has all the tools you'll need.I use an iMAC 27"and a Wacom tablet [ESSENTIAL...Can't draw with a mouse!]if you're running Windows 7 or Mac Snow Leopard you'll need to download a patch to get all the tools up and running,this is very easy to do.The only TOOL I miss,is the Tracing tool,which i had with CLASSIC PAINTER.I would recommend a big monitor...22'' plus.JUMP IN...ENJOY!

This is a good piece of software for the priceand the Tutorials were very comprehensive andeasy to follow, which is not always the case forthis type of programme.I have not had much time yet to try out the software, but with the variety of brushes on offer to represent naturalmedia tools I think most people will find this programme quite usefuland fun to use.

The product itself was as expected in it's functionality as I had seen a demonstration previously hence my desire to purchase. However, I was disappointed to find that when I downloaded it it would not operate on Windows 7 but, after consulting Google I downloaded a patch from Corel which fixed the problem. A reference to this should be made at point of purchase as others may not realise how easy it is to fix. At the price it is great value for a top product in its field.

If you would like to produce some exciting painted effects to your digital images, quickly and easily you will love the options from this software. Almost all traditional media types are available as a preset one click! They are also costomisable to extend the range plus all presets from PE 3 are included if you had any favourites there.Once you click on a style, off it goes, mimicking real brushstrokes flowing with the subject matter to make a realistic look. It starts with big strokes getting smaller and more detailed. The good thing is you can stop the "painting" at any stage. This allows a loose abstract look all the way to fine details or anywhere inbetween. There is also a clone tool to bring back details selectively and boost details from the digital original.This side of the software requires only a mouse.If you are artistic and would like to paint from scratch the natural media tools are wonderful, once you get a feel of there instinctive use.The tutorials are vidio based and well made. You will soon be itching to get started and play with all the options. I do think a graphics tablet is required for working from scratch to give the "FEEL" and flow control of the paint especially using palette knives. It has so many of the tools from it's big brother Painter X, that unless you are a true pro, it is everything you could dream of in a package of this price.