MetaCreations has also added some fixes to Painter 5.5. One can now open Photoshop 5 PSD documents without their breaking apart.

The Painter 5.5 CD includes both the Mac and Windows 95 and NT versions. It is stated that it performs under windows 98. Minimum requirements for the windows platforms are: 486DX, Pentium, or faster processor; 16 megs of ram for win 95 and 32 for NT 4.0; SVGA video, and a CD-Rom drive.

Included with the CD-Rom for Painter 5.5 is a good sized Guide, a Quick Reference Card, and a Tutorial Manual as well as a supplement manual for Painter 5.5. Also, there are many additional items on the CD such as technical sheets and documents, additional ICC profiles so one does not have to load ones that will not be used (this reduces the amount of hard drive space),demos, more image hose nozzles, brushes, seamless patterns, etc. Once one registers online, one can download about 400 additional web related buttons, background, etc. However, once registered, these files must be downloaded in a specified amount of time.

Of the graphic programs that are bitmap or raster based, Painter is a high powered painting/image editing program with emphasis in the direction of painting. While previous version gave the user the ability to create work for the web, Painter 5.5 has expanded on that part of its content. The following is a list of some of the elements new to Painter 5.5: New calligraphic and specialty brushes such as the spatter airbrush, and web friendly brushes such as natural-media and low bandwidth; Image Slicing; JavaScript Rollovers; Image Maps, both client-side and server- side; Dynamic Text which allows the user to manipulate text as well as apply surface textures, etc.; custom button creation using Painter's Bevel World; and basic web-authoring support.

Also included are tools to help the user create buttons, tiled backgrounds including fractals, gain better color control of backgrounds. One can also control the size of a GIF file, and thus the download times by using the Preview Button when a file is saved as a GIF. See GIF Options and the 4 GIF Files of the Desert Scene. The "Desert" scenes can only be seen on the current I/O Port version on the TCS web site at www.tcs.org.

Click on thumbnail to see larger image
Original	Click Here to see GIF Option Screen

For those people who never upgraded to Painter 5 from previous versions, I am including part of my review that I wrote about Painter 5. Some of version 5 tools have been constructed so as to conform to those found in Photoshop. As stated earlier in the review, while Painter 5 would open Photoshop 4 PSD files, Painter 5 would not open Photoshop 5 PSD files. Painter 5.5 will open both.

Painter 5 offers many new features. Brush strokes such as fire, twirl, hue, and layer can be created with the Expandable Plug-in brushes. A new stroke called layer allows the user to paint on transparent floaters.

Dynamic plug-in Floaters are used to create dynamic image effects in a floating object such as dynamic burn, tear, and bevel, kaleidoscope, glass distortion, and impasto which allows painting with textured brush strokes.

Painter 5 includes New methods for masking more similar to Photoshop's and a new Magic Wand tool.

Some of the new Focus Effects found in Painter 5 are: Camera Motion Blur, Depth of Field, and Zoom Blur. Other new effects include: Custom Tile, M aze, Place Elements, and Pop Art Fill.

A new brush called a super cloner extends cloning ability to include many transforming functions.

Painter 5 also includes an output preview function so as to see how the image will look when printed. There are many more customizing features for palettes, brushes, etc., as well as new animation tools.

It is hard to describe the scope of Painter 5 or 5.5 except to say that it is mind boggling. The brushes new to Painter 5 reflect the desire of the creators to integrate the program with Photoshop as well as to reflect the new merger between MetaTools and Fractal Design. The "gooey" brush allows the user to twirl, bulge, etc. parts of an image. The brushes new to Painter 5.5 show the added web design element.

After playing with Painter 5 for a few weeks, one can only say how overpowering and exciting the program is. There is so much material in it, that in order to use it fully, one needs to spend a lot of time with it.

For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here