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A Few Minor Gripes

As so many programs have done previously, Painter 5 has given up on the 680x0 processor for the Mac platform and on Windows 3.1 for PC's. The minimum memory requirements are fairly low for both platforms, 12mb of application RAM for Mac, and 16mb of memory for Windows 95 (32mb for NT 4.0), but you should have at least 32mb to feed Painter to be comfortable. Giving it only 12mb will result in horribly slow performance and brush lag. In this sense, Painter is identical to Photoshop; buy more RAM, and lots of it.

Having recently gone through the tutorial from start to finish, I would recommend it to anyone, even those upgrading from Painter 4. This is still an unbelievably powerful program, and getting to all of its features through experimentation alone is highly unlikely. Unfortunately, Painter's tutorial seems to be predicated on the fact that you are a veteran of the program, and you might end up scratching your head trying to figure out some of the lessons. The manual offers little help, and sometimes adds to the confusion. In light of this fact, perhaps MetaCreations should consider following Adobe's lead with their Classroom-in-a-Book series. A tutorial is a great introduction, but falls very short of walking you completely through the program.

Among Painter's other shortcomings are the vector based tools (or
Shapes, as they are called in Painter), which are still very non-standard in their execution. For instance, to constrain a rectangle to a square (or an oval to a circle), you would in most programs, shift-drag. In Painter, however, you can't do this, nor can you create these shapes from their center points, which is standard in most drawing programs.

The Verdict: Buy It

Having said that, however, Painter is not (nor should it try to be) a drawing application. It is best at what it has always been best at; natural media simulation for the digital artist. There is currently no program which even comes close to rivaling Painter's control over brushes, and Fractal (now MetaCreations) has extended their lead with version 5. To sum it up, Painter is one of those apps that no pro should be without.