As you may have read elsewhere, I've taken the plunge and acquired Corel Painter 8. I'm in the process of working my way through a "Painter Basics" tutorial. I got bored and distracted and yielded to temptation to play instead of sticking to the tutorial.

Knowing what I can (and can't) do in Photoshop and now that I'm scratching the surface on Painter capabilities and how to use them, I think Painter is going to be a terrific addition to the photo-art toolbox.

Attached is the original, which I believe is among those distributed with Photoshop or Photo-paint or Paint Shop Pro. It was not taken by me.

Next post is the Painter-Phothshop rendition.

~Danny~

What makes Painter unique is (what appears to me) considerable more control over brush characteristics than one has in Photoshop. There's also a "Cloner brushes" featue which operates in concept like Photoshop's Art History Brush, but with a high degree of control over brush characterics, e.g., Colored Pencil, Watercolor and Oils vs. Photoshop's lame "Tight Long" and "Loose Medium"-type options.

Don't misconstrue the attached image as world class quality or necessarily a reason to plunk down $135 for a Painter 8 upgrade. It's just a "while I'm learning" example of various Painter brush effects integrated with a Photoshop 7 Smart Blur/Edge Only + Diffuse > Anisotropic layer.

= = = = = =

If you have some images you've "photo-painted" using Painter, by all means post the "before" (if you have it) and thee after to illustrate the possibilities.

The more I mess with Painter 8, the more I understand it and appreciate it's unique abilities.

Original: http://www.pbase.com/image/20711999

Interpretation attached.

This started out in Photoshop as a standard convert to grayscale, duplicate layer, blend=color dodge, invert, apply Gaussian Blur. Merged visible and applied colored pencil filter.

Saved and opened in Painter where I applied various brush variants, then back to Photoshop for additonal strokes to mask some of the colored pencil strokes.