Corel Painter Essentials

As its name would imply, Corel Painter Essentials is a heavily stripped down version of Painter.  Though it can be purchased separately at a fairly modest price, I acquired my own copies at no cost when they came bundled in successive Ultimate versions of Paintshop Pro.  Since I already have the full 2022 version of Painter, the Essentials apps are for the most part redundant.  The only reason I keep them on my hard drive is for their auto-paint feature,  As I've mentioned in previous posts, Corel now includes an auto-paint feature in several of its offerings, not only in Painter Essentials but also in Paintshop Pro as well as in the full version of Painter.  In an interesting move, Corel - in order to increase sales, I assume - has opted to include different AI styles not only from one app to the next but even in different versions of the same app.  For example, the styles offered in Essentials 8 are fewer and different from those that had been included with last year's Essentials 7.  The downside to this for the user, of course, is that once a given version has been superseded by the following year's version it's no longer possible to acquire those AI styles that had been previously available.  If one had not purchased Essentials 7, for instance, when it was offered for sale one cannot now have access to the excellent Pencil Drawing style, examples of which I've shown in an earlier post.

Because Painter Essentials 7 was designed for amateur rather than professional use, all the AI styles come with the same hokey fade-out border around the edges.  While this might be fine for a student looking to post a stylized portrait of his girlfriend on social media, it isn't acceptable for more serious uses.  To work around this problem, one should shoot with sufficient space around the photograph edges and then crop the image on all four sides once the AI style has been applied.  Thankfully, Corel did away with these borders in the current version.

For completeness sake, here are the styles available in both versions.

Version 7:

• Bold Watercolor
• Charcoal Drawing
• Colored Pencil
• Colorful Dabs
• Impressionist
• Smooth Acrylic
• Van Gogh
• Watercolor Portrait
• Colored Pencil
• Detailed Painting
• Detailed Watercolor
• Illustration
• Impressionist Painting
• Modern Painting
• Oil Painting
• Pastel Drawing
• Pen and Ink Drawing
• Pencil Drawing
• Watercolor Sketch

Version 8:

• Bold Impressionist Landscape
• Captured Bristle
• Charcoal
• Colored Pencil
• Opaque Acrylic
• Palette Knife Landscape
• Pastel Portrait
• Pencil Sketch
• Spongefetti Landscape
• Watercolor Portrait

Note that some styles that share the same or similar names from one version to the next, e.g., Colored Pencil, nevertheless produce different effects.