Corel Painter Essentials – A Give Away!

**Edit: this give away is now closed. The winner is Sarah@Blue Castle. Congrats, Sarah!**

At the beginning of the year, I blogged about taking care of your photos. Many of you are getting awfully good at those digital cameras. I’ve seen your beautiful blog images! You invest in expensive machines and take beautiful photos…

…and then what? What are you doing with all those photos? I’m worried about all those memories. Are you taking care of them?

Have you found either Photobucket, Flickr or an online uploader that works for you? What about an external hard drive, or even burning them to DVDs?

If you’re not sure what to do with all those photos, or if you’re sure you’re not saving them the way you should, I urge you to block off 1 hour of time this weekend to devote to saving them all. Spend a half hour uploading them to Flickr. Spend another half hour copying them to a drive or DVD.

You can read these three articles to help you decide a good fit for your photos.
Taking care of your photos 1
Taking care of your photos 2
Taking care of your photos 3

And now… I have a fun addendum to the products I recommended. Afterall, what fun is taking all those photos, if you can’t do something creative and interesting with them once in awhile?

Have you all ever heard of Corel? Corel has several products but the ones I know best in my line of work are Corel Paint Shop Pro, Corel Draw and Corel Painter.

• Corel Draw is a vector-based graphics program; illustrators and blog/web designers use it to make graphics. Retail price $430.
• Paint Shop Pro is very popular in the digital scrapbook circle; it is a photo editor comparable to Photoshop Elements. Retail price $80-$100.
• Painter and Painter Essentials are two programs that allow you to create a digital art studio at home. Thought the day would come when you could paint with a computer and skip the mess? That day is here. Painter II retails for $400, Painter Essentials 4 retails for $100.

The folks at Corel sent me a copy of Painter Essentials (MSRP $100) for me to try and review. My first plug is that this program is both Mac and PC friendly. When I was investing in graphics programs, Corel hadn’t offered a powerful graphics program that would work on my Mac – so I was thrilled that this would work for fans of Macs and die hard PC users.

Here’s a screen cap of the program:

So, to be true to you all, I used my mouse instead of my tablet, because I know most of you would. I also wanted to give you a first-time attempt at the program. What you see on the videos and tutorials are awesome, and I am very much looking forward to getting to that skill level. But I wanted to share what a new Painter Essentials user could do a few minutes out of the box.

Not bad for my first time, right?

Here are some screen caps for the painting from blank canvas part (as opposed to painting on an image):

So some things that I really like:

• The screen puts gray behind it. It offers a neutral close to the image which gives a truer look.
• It has a way to paint back in detail on things like eyes.
• I love the tracing paper feature on photo painting. You can sketch on the tracing paper but it still allows you to see the photo below it, but the final product doesn’t have the photo, only what you’ve traced or painted on the paper. That’s how I achieved the look I made with Picasso above. I drew with pencil on the eyes, tracing the photo below it.
• The website has lots of links to videos, help and tutorials.
• You can save your work in “layers”, and come back and edit parts but not others = non-destructive editing.
• You can paint over a photo (like I did) or you can start from scratch if you’re artistic and creative, and just paint!
• Painting on a blank canvas is fun. This is NOT your 1996 paint program! You can dodge, burn, charcoal, watercolor, oil. You can pick paper colors, textures, orientation and size.

There were some features that I would have liked, that I bet are in the big, bad boy version of Painter:

• I can’t figure out why saving it as a jpg won’t allow me to upload it to Photobucket or Wordpress. I had to rename the file and save it as a png for it to show up as an option in my commonly-used image hosts. The files save as layered RIFs, which I wouldn’t expect Photobucket to handle… but it couldn’t find the jpg.
• The move tool did not want to move single layers. It wanted to move the whole canvas. Once I painted on my name, I couldn’t figure out how to move it other than delete that layer and make a new one. That’s why the name is, um… wrong. Tee hee.

All in all this is a fun program. I was pleasantly surprised with what all it can do. While it can’t replace photo editing programs meant to sharpen and color correct (nor is it meant to!), it can make realistic-looking charcoals and watercolors with the ease of throwing away whole layers if you don’t like them. I’m looking forward to see what else I can learn as my skill level increases.

Corel has generously offered a licensed copy of Painter Essentials 4 to one Life With My 3 Boybarians reader in the US! You may enter 5 times, and you may nominate up to 5 friends. Here’s how to enter or nominate a friend:

• Leave a comment for each nomination. You can nominate yourself. (You are welcome to link to your friends’ blogs here to nominate them, but please don’t reveal their last names or email addresses without permission!)
• Tell your friends you nominated them, they can come enter again and nominate winners, too.
• Tweet and RT this message: @my3boybarians and Corel have a give away! $100 Painter Essentials 4. http://su.pr/2UgWDA
• Stumble, Digg, Delicious, Kirsty, or post on FB about this post linking to the give away.
• Download the free trial of PE4 and let me know you did!

Give away ends on July 16th at 11:59 pm CST. Winner will be drawn and announced shortly after.