Painter 6 sells for $399 and the upgrade for $149. The system requirements for windows are: A Pentium using Windows 95, 98, or NT 4; a minimum of 32 MB with 64 recommended; color display of 24-bit recommended; and a CD-Rom Drive. Included with the program is a very thick manual and a quick reference guide.

For individuals not familiar with any version of Painter, the following is a quick summary of the basic program.

Painter is a painting program while Photoshop, for example, is an image editing program. While these two overlap considerably, their emphasis is different. Painter focuses on creating paintings by using natural media brushes. However many of the tools, such as the lasso, cloning stamp, etc. are also found in image editing software. Natural painting techniques such as the building of brushes and their use is emphasized more in Painter than in any image editing software. The majority of artist that I know use both Adobe Photoshop and MetaCreations' Painter. For that reason, Painter's tighter integration with Photoshop's basic structure is a big plus.

Some of the features new to Painter 6 are a more customizable and easier to use interface which allows for a larger work area. Painter 6 introduces layers and more tools such as a tool to create transparency layer masks. This new version has speeded up the painting process by eliminated the often experienced delay between creating a brush stroke and seeing it actually appear. In addition, the new brush technology allows for closer duplication of art materials.

This version of Painter also supports 3D painting with the use of the Impasto brush, allows for text to be written on a curve, has a responsive palette knife that can be governed by a pressure sensitive tablet, and has increased the capabilities of airbrushes and image hoses.

Painter 6 now also supports the CMYK tiff format.

This is just a brief summary of some of the new features. For more information go to http://www.metacreations.com/products/painter6/ .

Just as a note. It is possible that some users might be experiencing difficulties using Painter 6.0. Before I ever installed Painter, a friend of mine informed me of the patch "painter601update.zip" on the MetaCreations' website at http://www5.metacreations.com/downloads/painter_win_patches.html. Whether I would have had problems without this patch, I do not know.

When I first launched Painter 6, I was very anxious to see how two major areas functioned. The first involved arranging the palettes and the second involved using a Photoshop created image that contained layers and channels. All I can say is "Why were these changes not made in earlier editions?" Suddenly, I did not have to deal with the whole object/mask issue. Now I could go directly to Painter and utilize its main features without becoming frustrated. As I customized Painter through its preference menu found under the toolbar heading Edit, I discovered other new features that I really liked. For example, third party filters can be accessed from another program that contains compatible filters by creating a shortcut of that directory and dragging it into the Painter plugin folder.

Many brushes have circles that expand and shrink in accordance to the size of the brush. This is the same circle that one can see in Photoshop when certain preferences are chosen. This adds to more control over the painting because the size of the stroke can be visualized before it is actually "put on the paper."

If one has any criticism of Painter 6, it is that there are too many brushes and too many variables. Almost any configuration can be created and saved. Thus, one can narrow the field down and create ones own personalized selection of brushes.

This review has only touched on some of the features, both new and old, of Painter 6. For those people like myself who use Photoshop for most of their work, this new version is a must! I have even seen some advertising that includes MetaCreations KPT 6 along with the purchase of Painter 6.

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