Corel Painter Essentials 4 (Win/Mac) (Old Version)

3.4 3.4 out of 5 stars | 96 ratings

Price:

Last update: 01-04-2025


About this item

The simple-to-use home art studio that makes it easy for you to draw, paint or turn your photos into paintings--
The ideal way to get started with digital art
Tutorial-based guidebook and accompanying video tutorials/sample files teach you the application while you complete fun, instructional projects

Top reviews from the United States

  • Gaget Girl
    5.0 out of 5 stars Corel Essentials Painter 4
    Reviewed in the United States on June 4, 2009
    What a great program! I am not an artist, but just a person who likes to doodle and have fun with artsy things. This program let's you look like an artist by allowing you to take a photo from your collection on your computer and bring it over to Painter to duplicate like a painting. You get tracing paper where you can trace over your photo and fill it in with color from all kinds of medium like paint, chalk, pencil etc, and it comes out looking like a painting. I use a Wacom Bamboo Fun tablet with this program that I purchased separately, but found out later that this program comes with the Bamboo Fun tablet as a package - which is a better bargain. I would highly recommend this program for anyone wanting to have fun drawing or learning how to draw. It comes with tutorials that are excellent to get you started.
  • Mikey
    4.0 out of 5 stars Easy to Use
    Reviewed in the United States on August 16, 2008
    This product is easy to use but it takes about a minute or so for it to do its thing in the auto painting. I recommend playing the video tutorials first as they were very helpful.
  • K. opitz
    3.0 out of 5 stars Memory Hog but good software
    Reviewed in the United States on January 1, 2011
    Purchased this for my 12 year old aspiring graphic designer. She received a brand new computer from her grandpa & I thought this would be great. Installation took forever, and then whenever we loaded this software, it made her brand new computer run very slow. I had to un-install this & will be contacting the customer service at Corel to find out what the problem is. If we can get this running, it seems to be amazing! The instruction book that comes with it is THICK and covers everything you could do in amazing descriptions
  • S. Tollefson
    1.0 out of 5 stars Doesn't work on a Mac. Corel support is the worst I've ever encountered.
    Reviewed in the United States on December 8, 2009
    The concept is intriguing (Photoshop filters on steroids) and "auto-paint" is a gas to watch. The results, however, are variable. The "transparent" brushes, which paint with pieces of the underlying image are (unless you yearn for the days of decoupage or "hand-tinted" portraits) definitely taste-challenged and seem like a waste of time. They take minutes to do what a filter overlay could do in seconds. The "opaque" brushes however, which apply dabs of colors taken from image, yield results that are sometimes quite attractive. As the auto-paint routine progresses, the "brushes" get progressively smaller and bring out more and more detail, yielding a product that actually does resemble a painting. It can be quite useful for getting a usable enlargement out of an original photo that has too little resolution or saturation to blow up.

    The problem is that, on a Mac anyway, there is a bug in the good "opaque" brushes' auto-paint routine. At a point near the end of the routine, when the picture is starting to look good, the brush switches from dabbing bits of color to drawing black squiggles that ruin the picture. It looks as if a 3-year-old with a Magic Marker vandalized it. The problem is built-in. It even happens with default settings with newly installed software on tutorial images they supply.

    I wasted many hours trying to get the program to work properly and even more trying to deal with Corel's support site and personnel. They're the worst I've ever encountered. Their support people are truly committed to blowing the customer off as quickly as possible and don't even bother to read what you send them. The support site is scanty, opaque, and non-intuitive. There are even simple things, like a "download now" button, that just don't work. I could go on for some time about the problems I encountered, but this one probably sums it up best. On their "Patches and Updates" page there is a listing for a "Corel Painter Essentials 4.3 Update for Macintosh OS X 10.6." You'd never suspect that what it sends you is v. 4.0.1.060--their latest version-- that has never been tested on Snow Leopard, would you?

    I couldn't recommend any Corel product, based in my experiences with this product.
  • ZENmom
    2.0 out of 5 stars Title is Misleading
    Reviewed in the United States on October 23, 2009
    I purchased the item based on the item description. It says, The simple-to-use home art studio that makes it easy for you to draw, paint or turn your photos into paintings-", which, to me, means you can draw or paint without using a photo. That is, just a nice, easy paint/draw program.

    When the box arrived, it says, "Painter Photo Essentials", and is clearly meant for use with photos. (On the Amazon pages, the title omits the word, "Photo".)

    I am disappointed and am returning the product.
  • janie
    5.0 out of 5 stars Great software for beginners!
    Reviewed in the United States on September 17, 2011
    This software does enough to explore digital painting but does not require you to "take a course" in it just to accomplish amazing results. The tutorials are easy to follow and do an excellent job of guiding you through all aspects of the program. Anyone who wants to explore digital painting for the first time should buy this software to provide a broad spectrum of the medium. I LOVE it!
  • Janine Boyer
    4.0 out of 5 stars Four Stars
    Reviewed in the United States on February 23, 2016
    Great program for digital artists!!!
  • Almita Ranstrom
    3.0 out of 5 stars Painter Essentials 4
    Reviewed in the United States on December 16, 2009
    The product had a glitch in loading; only by visiting the forum could I find the (simple) fix, since Corel Support had a completely unusable solution. Now that it is working, I find it simple and fun to use, with many interesting variations.

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