Painter 5.5 Web Edition MAC CD natural paint drawing brush editing drawing tool Type: Application Platform: Mac Publisher: Meta Creations Released: 1998 Media: CD MetaCreations Painter 5.5 Web EditionWhat is "natural painting?"It is what Painter 5 is all about. At least that is the core concept behind this outstanding program from Metacreations – now, with the new version, there is a lot more. But the major thing which makes Painter 5 stand out is natural painting. What is natural painting? Look to the left. This graphic started out its life as a clipart drawing of a mortar and pestle from CorelDraw! Let me say that CorelDraw's clipart has saved my life a million times, but this time, we wanted something a little different, a little more artsy.How did we do it? With Painter 5's brushes. Painter has a unique tool called tracing paper. You use it to trace an image with a different type of brush, then save the tracing and, behold, an entirely new image. And, thanks to an autoclone feature, you don't have to even do the actual tracing, the program does it for you. The person who wanted this mortar and pestle was just delighted. It gave his whole project a lot of spark. We were happy, too. Because it made him happy.It Slices! It Dices! It Juliennes!Painter 5.5 sports the same interface as version 5, a somewhat palette-heavy, complicated affair that more or less succeeds in organizing the program's many tools and variants. Painter also makes extensive use of floaters, similar to layers in Photoshop. However, unlike Photoshop layers, floaters can be different sizes and can function as plug-in utilities as well as image repositories.Painter's tool set is both a strength and a weakness. No other product comes close to offering the sophistication and power of Painter's brushes and tools, but the sheer number of options makes this a program that can take a while to learn. Still, the results are worth the effort. Painter 5.5 adds a new Image Slicer plug-in floater that performs automatic slicing on any document. Web slicing chops a graphic into segments you can reassemble in an HTML table. Slicing typically makes images download faster, particularly if only one slice is changing from page to page.You define slices in the Image Slicer floater by placing and dragging horizontal and vertical rules over your image. In addition to specifying file names and URLs for each slice, you can also define separate compression settings, allowing you to choose the best compression options for individual segments. When you export a sliced image, Painter automatically creates a separate document for each slice, as well as an HTML file that reassembles the images into a table. Because slicing is implemented as a plug-in floater, you don't have to flatten your image, so you can slice while preserving all of your separate layers.For Mac (Power Macintosh: OS 9 or Below) [*Please review compatibility/platform sections in 'What You Get']
