Painter Essentials
Convert photos into convincing works of art using brush-based techniques
Painter Essential’s wide range of brush tips let you reveal a photo’s original colours and details
Although Painter Essentials 7 is a cut-down version of Painter 2020, it packs more than enough tools to enable you to mimic a range of natural media such as oil paintings or watercolours. The Essentials software is considerably cheaper than the full version’s £251.99 price tag, but it can still produce convincing results.
A bonus of using Painter Essentials 7 is that it’s faster to master than the more complex full version, and you can convert a picture’s pixels into paint-like strokes within minutes. If you’ve used older versions of Painter Essentials then you’ll notice that tool icons have been revamped to make them easier to identify. For example, a purple highlight helps you clearly see which tool is active. The revamped Magnifier tool lets you scrub to zoom in and out of your image, enabling you to fine-tune delicate detail or work on the big picture.
You may have used Photoshop Element’s filters to turn photos into ‘painted’ art. The problem with Photoshop Element’s filtered art is that it has a uniform look (compared to the visual variety produced by hand-painted brush strokes). You can also often tell which Photoshop filter has been slapped onto the shot. Painter Essentials 7 has its own versions of filters but they produce more convincing results. Painter Essentials also supplies a wide range of brush tips to let you manually reveal the original colours and details of a source photo. This is a satisfying experience as you can see your strokes smearing the photo’s pixels in an organic and natural way, as if working with real paint. Details such as a swan’s beak reveal in the direction that you paint in and they mix with earlier strokes. If you add a stylus to your toolset it feels similar to applying a real paintbrush to canvas, giving your digital paintings the human touch that is missing if you simply apply a filter.
Brilliant brushes
Brushes are the key to Painter’s art-producing powers. There are four new categories in the Brush Selector. Dab Stencils offers new Flow Map brush textures that are full of variety and detail. Dynamic Speckles adds extra techniques to your artistic arsenal such as spray paint (from the Flow Jet tip). The new Glazing tip lets you vary opacity as you spray. Image Hose lets you spray an image (such as leaves, wheels, and so on). You can buy more Image Hose nozzles (such as Pets) from
within Painter Essentials to expand its abilities, though conservative artists may consider Image Hose a bit of a gimmick rather than a serious art tool. Existing brush tips such as Digital Watercolour have new properties such as Set Diffusion and Adjust Wet Fringe to helps your washes of watercolour behave more like natural paint media.
Artificial Intelligence
You don’t need to be a brush (or stylus) wielding artist to produce art in Painter Essentials. In the Photo Painting panel there are eight new AI painting styles. AI painting works like Photoshop’s filters but produces much more natural-looking painted results. After choosing an AI style (such as AI Van Gogh), you click the Play button and then sit back and watch as brush strokes in the chosen style begin to sketch in a painting based on a photo’s original colours and details. This takes time and is fascinating to watch. Once you’re happy with the look that’s developing you can stop the auto painting at any time. You can even combine multiple AI styles to create distinctive looks and then apply additional strokes by hand. This combination of artificial intelligence and hand-placed strokes helps build up a convincing natural media paint effect.
It can take quite a long time to watch Painter Essential’s AI tools reveal a photo’s detail by applying hundreds of strokes. This might be seen as some as a negative, but good art shouldn’t be too easy to produce. By watching the painted image unfold you can decide when to stop the AI painting and take over manually using a brush. This involves you in the creation of the piece (rather than simply slapping on a filter as you’d do in Photoshop Elements).