articles/Software/painterxendervours-page3
by Mike McNamee Published
Mike McNamee made a number of false starts, trying to gather review information and screen grabs. In the DVD, which accompanies the software, Jeremy Sutton proposes using Auto-Painting to create a muck-up as a starting point. This is accomplished in around 12 seconds, which is certainly a time saver. His advice is to then move on with refined brushes, to add your own interpretation and brush strokes. Using the Impressionist Cloner did a half-decent job but one is always left with a feeling that you are cheating, a bit like using the off-the-shelf Photoshop filters. In the end Mike elected to use the Sargent brush to make a hand muck-up on a large scale followed by soft cloning back the inner detail and then an additional muck-up using finer brushes followed by further cloning and hand working. Including writing the review notes and making screen grabs it took 90 minutes to create eight versions. Just Add Water was also a successful version but we show the Sargent brush attempt. It represents about 15 minutes of work.
In addition to these tests, we had Marilyn Sholin prepare a double-page spread for the feature on Jon Brooks' camper van - how different her style to what our quartet created, but that is the delight of Painter, you can do almost anything and go almost any direction!
Overall
This is not a massive upgrade but the refinements and particularly the increased speed within the coding make it worthwhile. If you are a beginner you will welcome the tutorial DVD and the expanded manual. Painter remains, however, a slightly tricky program to get to grips with. We should start to see the benefits of the new bristle engine as our contributors to Artistic Endeavours start to understand and exploit it.
There are 21 days to get ready for The Society of Photographers Convention and Trade Show at The Novotel London West, Hammersmith ...
which starts on Wednesday 15th January 2025