CREATIVE STUDIO As a traditional artist, pencil, paper, brush and paint is all you need to paint. But if you want to try your hand at digital art, Painter Essentials is a simple-to-use home art studio which can transform photos into paintings.

Features
New features include the Photo Painting system that's been enhanced to reduce the complexity of turning photos into paintings. Smart Stroke is yet another new feature that offers intelligent brush stroke processing. With this, it is now easier than ever to achieve hand-painted works of art. Also, there are two new workspaces-'Drawing & Painting' and 'Photo-painting' are tailored environments that contain tools for those specific tasks. Workspaces are how you navigate around Essentials-start from scratch or from a photograph. The Drawing & Painting tab is where you work with brushes and color palettes. When you switch to the photo painting tab, the brushes work with the selected source image Switching between the two modes allows you to combine color and photo at will.

The toolbox to the left side contains tools that allow you to paint, fill areas with color, view, navigate and make selections. The 'Brush Drawer' is a new feature.
It is located to the left of the screen, right next to the tool palette; this makes it easy to locate new brush selections. For instance, under the 'Dry Media' category, there are many styles including charcoal and pencil. Each style is indicated by a name as well as a stroke 'preview' so it's easy to find a preferred style. As you work with various brushes, it simultaneously develops a favorites list and tracks frequently used brushes for future use. The palettes are on the right side of the screen; they change depending on the mode used a traditional artist's color set and the photo-painting palette.

The mixing area allows you to blend the colors available on the palette to produce new shades. Alternatively, for those who find it easier to produce colors visually, there is the color wheel that has a control for altering hue and tension shades. Auto-painting allows you to apply painting styles to the photograph in the source image,
for instance, classical oil, impressionist, Seurat, watercolor and more.

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Performance
This program is so intuitive to use that even an artistically challenged user can create masterpieces fairly easily. To test this statement, we picked a digital photo as a source image and tried to convert it into a watercolor, a chalk drawing
and a woodcut piece. Compared to the previous version, this release has reduced the rendering time and cleaned up the interface so that the process is faster.
With the new Intelligent Strokes feature, when a brush stroke is applied on a canvas with a source image, the painting forms instantly The color mixer area is very useful for users who have some painting experience .

VERDICT: If you are a novice looking at getting into the world of digital art, this is the program for you. However, if all you want to do is play around a little, then try out Pixarra's TwistedBrush which is free. FOR: Intuitive and simplified procedures. AGAINST: None.