Fractal Design Painter broke new ground in 1991 by offering computer artists naturalistic media. Instead of the precise shapes and colors of digital painting, it gave you materials that behaved like the real thing soft and hard charcoals that picked up the grain of the paper, and voluptuous oil paints that oozed and mixed on screen.
Painter's ever expanding palette of features and awesome effects still runs circles around its competitors. The latest version, Fractal Design Painter 4, boasts new image-processing functions, better masking and support for floating objects, frame-by-frame animation, and vector drawing a technique used in Adobe Illustrator and Corel Draw. All paint programs let you layer images. But Painter's Image Hose goes three steps further: select Nozzle a file containing a series of discrete images to create, say, a forest, by spraying a variety of trees. As you move the cursor around, individual larches, firs, oaks, and chestnuts emerge from the nozzle in a subtly configurable degree of randomness.
The new mosaic effect is even more spectacular. Here, you paint with rows of tiny tiles, and, in keeping with painterly tradition, you can configure everything from the width and color of the grout to the size and shape of the tiles. The program now offers support for creating Web pages and features the Net Painter, which lets a group of artists collaborate on a picture over the Internet.
It's great fun just to dive in and start splashing paint about, but getting the most out of Painter requires skill, practice, and the willingness to learn a complex interface. And since drawing with a mouse is rather like painting with a brick, you'll want to invest in a pressure-sensitive stylus and tablet.
Fractal Design Painter 4 for Mac or Windows: US$549. Fractal Design Corp.: (800) 297 2665, on the Web at www.fractal.com.
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