The website for Painter 7 is to be found at www.procreate.com which is the banner under which Corel now promotes its new and upgraded line of graphic applications for the 'creative professional' (see inset) It must be said that Corel do promote their wares well. To review Painter 7 they sent me the software CD itself, a 30 page (a4) reviewers guide and a glossy flyer detailing all the main upgrade features. To check out the cool new stuff I simply worked my way through the reviewers guide page by page. Developers take note, this is how to get your software reviewed in a favorable light! Make the reviewers life easy.

The interface and layout in Painter 7 seems much the same as version 6 at first glance. I can only believe that artists must have given good feedback on the V6 design and Corel decided to focus on adding features and let a well liked front-end remain intact. The tools are at your finger tips, the drop down palettes give you instant access to the hidden treasures etc.

One of my first complaints when I fired up P7 was that the screen still seemed a little clogged as in earlier versions. Corel have tried to help by giving us the option to set which palettes appear at start up. This is pretty much how I work in Photoshop, having only the most used palettes available so I found it a big help. Usually the way isn't it? a small enhancement but it makes the software that little bit better to use.

Another natural media tool addition is the new Liquid Ink technology and I think I will let Corel describe it:
Liquid Ink mimics the viscosity and surface tension of a thick, gluey medium like ink.
Bascially it's like painting with glop! Real, old fashioned sticky glop.

Much the same as the new water colour technology in terms of having loads of new slider options, Liquid Ink leaves you wondering what part to tweak first. There are so many variations that it can be difficult to keep focussed on what it is you are trying to achieve. The effects vary wildly depending on you and your preferences. You can use Liquid ink to create a splattered ink page or make it simulate a page full of gluey gunge.

I found the Liquid Ink feature hard to grasp when I first used it. I couldn't really see where I would use it and what I could achieve with it. As I messed with the settings I found that it was getting easier to create nice effects with different brushes and by varying the settings.

One very well received feature is the ability to save and load PSD's (Photoshop native file format). Corels aim seems to have been to make Painter 7 a better partner for Photoshop users by giving them the ability to share files with their layers intact.

Again, this isn't a giant leap in technology but for me it means that the company is really listening to what its user base is saying. I suppose one worry would be if Adobe ever want to steal some market share and go all out to produce natural media tools then there could be a bit of a fall out but for my money, keep your enemies closer as they say.

I use Photoshop everyday and the fact that Painter now gives me a familiar layered-format means I am more likely to use it.

Corel have also added the ability to convert your files to CMYK from RGB, another little upgrade that would have been done in Photoshop previously.