The Painter 5 CD includes both the Mac and Windows 95 and NT versions. 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. A typical install requires 56 megs of hard drive space on the main installation drive. This does not count any space under windows/systems, etc. A full custom install requires 80 megs.
Included with the CD-Rom for Painter 5 is a good sized Guide, a Quick Reference Card, and a Tutorial Manual. 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.
For those not familiar with Painter 5, Painter is a high powered painting/image editing program. Its emphasis is in the direction of painting. Some of version 5 tools have been constructed so as to conform to those found in Photoshop since these two programs work well together.
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, Maze, 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.
In addition, Fractal Design online can be accessed from within Painter 5 to download new materials and get program help.
Fractal Design can be contacted at: Phone: (408) 430-4200; fax: (408) 438-9672; http://www.fractal.com.
The upgrade costs $95.00. A first time version costs $280.00.
The Tutorial Guide works with the tutorial section of Painter. This is loaded with a typical install. I suggest this tutorial for both novices and more advanced users. It is well written, easy to follow, and introduces old as well as new features.
It is hard to describe the scope of Painter 5 except to say that it is mind boggling. The new brushes 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.
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. I am looking forward to doing this. Of the three Painter versions that I have reviewed, I find this one to be the most exciting and in many respects the easiest to learn and use.
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