Corel Painter Essentials 5 Digital Art Suite for PC and Mac (Old Version)

I have used Corel Painter and Painter Essentials since 2008. My first experience was Painter Essentials 3 or 4 (bundled with my Wacom Intuos 3 graphics tablet). I used Painter X up until OSX Snow Leopard (10.6) ceased to run it (thank you for nothing Apple) and I upgraded my PC beyond 8GB of RAM. Since then, Ive been Painter-less and itching to get back into using it again. While other programs come close, Painter has the best simulation of oil and other natural media.

So far so good.

Corel Painter Essentials 5 has raised the bar on making art using mind boggling algorithms that mimic real watercolor, oils, pencil, and a million other ways of expressing. Attached to this review is a video of creating a watercolor impression of my cat. You will notice that I created a layer over the background and turned on tracing paper. Then I create rough trace of where I would like to paint. After the trace if completed, I created another layer where the actual watercolor painting is done. The rough trace really makes a big difference how the watercoloring is applied. Theres an auto watercolor feature, but I think without a human applied trace the final result may not look so good. At the end I can turn off the tracing layer to see the final result. It does take a bit of work to get the result to where you want it to be--changing brush sizes, amount of brushing applied, etc. all contribute to how you want the final result to look like.

I rather like Painter 5 I have been able to do many things on the mac with the program. I was rather surprised it worked so well. I will be using this more and more.

Its Corel.

I bought, installed and tried to use this, but THEN I got a trial up notice asking me to register & purchase this. It named the wrong title, calling the disc I got Painter 6 when it is 5. Then I input the serial number and clicked to contact Corel, only to get a window saying that my serial number was invalid. Now What???

Daughter loves this program

I loved using it. However, after a computer problem I was unable to reinstall Painter Essentials 5. Tried a million different things including

very cool

Love it!!!! Corel you are the best with your phenomenal product and at very wonderful price for ones the cant afford the cutting edge software. Love you software!