The screenshot above is appropriate bcause Corel Painter Lite is ripped out of Corel Painter. Corel has stripped away Painter’s Clone, Trace, AutoPlay and most of the Effect commands but has left in 15 brushes including Acrylics, Airbrush, Digital Watercolor, Impasto, chalks, pastels among others. Their are 7-10 presets for each brush and you can define more. Basic brush properties like size, opacity, resaturation, bleed, and jitter are available on the property bar across the top of the screen. However, full Painter’s brush creation tool is not available.
However layers are implemented so one can do a poor man’s trace cloning. One creates a new empty layer on top of the original image and then paint over the top on that new layer. Users can see their progress by periodically hiding the underlying layer. This is what was done in the screenshot . Just as the brushes are abbreviated so too the material and color mixer. One has a an eye dropper to pick up colors on the canvas; but full Painter’s mixing tool is not available.
Painter Lite also has basic controls for photo-finishing including hue/saturation/lightness, brightness/contrast, color inversion, basic masic operations, cropping, selection and masking tools. So one can do basic photo editing as well as painting. But the bottom line is this is indeed a capable starter digital painting tool. Like ArtWeaver and Photoshop Elements provide great basic training for full Photoshop, Painter Lite does the same for Corel Painter. This is the perfect present for a budding artist or someone new to digital painting. One can always download the trial edition of full Painter for a 30 day trial – having used Painter lite users will be better prepared for the master program.