Painter Essentials 8

Painter Essentials 8 What's New

Apple support

Improve your overall Mac workflow in big ways!

Painting tools

Launch the new Drawing and Painting Layout from the Welcome Screen to set up the UI with optimal tools for creating from scratch. Begin your painting by experimenting with 23 new brushes and many with enhanced smoothing for buttery strokes that react to stylus tilt and bearing.

Color options

Easily narrow down the perfect painting colors by using the new harmonies and color sets. The harmonies include complementary, light monochromatic and dark monochromatic color options that dynamically create balanced color swatches from your chosen color.

Artificial Intelligence

AI Auto-painting presets have added powerful new algorithms to provide richer, more natural looking results for portraits, still life and landscape type paintings from imagery. Choose from 10 new AI Styles to experience auto-painting with stunning artistic results.

Document and layer control

Choose to create a landscape or portrait-oriented document right from the New Image dialog. While working with layers, the improved contextual menus, information dialogs, layer adjuster options and easy access to commands will greatly improve ease of use.

Digital art made simple

Interested in digital art? Enjoy all the versatility of Painter Essentials 8, the fun and uncomplicated painting software for beginners that will inspire you to experiment and fall in love with digital painting.

Blank Canvas

Paint from a blank canvas using a curated collection of artist-created brushes.

Photo Art

Create amazing photo art using AI, Auto-Painting or Paint by hand.

Brushes

Enhance your paintings with outrageously creative brush packs.

Painter Essentials 8 Key Features

• Easy to use interface
• AI-based photo painting
• Incredible painting speed
• Industry-acclaimed brushes
• Apple-powered AI capabilities
• Extensive built-in learning resources

Everything you need to get started with digital art

Intuitive user interface

Brushes, adjustment tools and built-in learning are easily accessible through the UI so you can focus on your art.

Amazing brushes

Craft your masterpiece with stunning reality using renowned dry, wet, and blending media.

Simple photo art and tracing

Transform any image using powerful AI, Auto-Painting, Cloning and Tracing Paper.

Convenient color selection

Select color your way. Use the Color Wheel, Mixer, Color Sets and Harmonies.

Valuable symmetry tools

Paint in perfect symmetry with Mirror Painting and create beautiful Mandalas using the Kaleidoscope tool.

Incredible speed

Essentials can easily manage large canvases, scrubby zooming, rotating, large brushes and up to 4x’s faster Sargent brushes.

Artist-trusted brushes!

From traditional to uniquely Painter, every brush in Essentials was custom selected for new digital artists from our professional Painter art studio.

Acrylics & Oils

Mix and spread media on the canvas as though you were working with traditional paints.

Chalk, Pastel & Crayons

Choose from hard variants that reveal texture to soft media that glides on to cover just when you need it.

Digital Watercolor

Experiment with paint that will flow, mix and absorb just like the real thing.

Dynamic Speckles

Paint with brushes that produce continuous brushstrokes from discrete spots of color.

Particles

Physics-inspired brushes spring, flow and glow as they dynamically embellish your canvas.

Markers & Inking tools

From fine point to blunt, these brushes allow for natural color buildup and pooling.

Pencils

Pencil brushes build to black and interact with canvas texture based on stylus pressure.

Painter Essentials 8 Apple support

Touch Bar Support

On MacBook Pro and iPad, increase efficiency with new support for the Touch Bar that offers context-sensitive controls that change depending on the selected tool.

Multi-touch Trackpad support

Responsive multi-touch Trackpad support allows you to perform useful actions by swiping and pinching, or spreading your thumb and forefinger on your trackpad.

Sidecar Support

Use Sidecar on macOS Catalina to use your iPad as a secondary display that mirrors your Mac desktop. The Painter Essentials UI will auto-adjust based on the resolution of your iPad.

Apple Pencil Tilt

With new tilt support for Apple Pencil, you can now tilt the selected brush while you paint to precisely control the shape of the brushstroke while using Sidecar.

Apple Artificial Intelligence

Enjoy AI Auto-Painting presets that leverage Core ML and the powerful new Apple Vision Framework technology to determine areas of focus in a photo and intelligently paint details generating natural-looking paintings with a greater sense of depth and focus. By painting with more detail in the areas of interest, and using larger more gestural strokes in the background, the results more closely resemble what a trained artist can achieve. Choose from 10 new AI Styles to experience auto-painting with stunning artistic results on the Mac.

Painter Essentials 8 Compatibility

Photoshop

Preserve colors and layers with ease when transferring files between Photoshop and Painter Essentials

Drawing tablet

Support for stylus tilt, rotation, bearing and pressure control creates the most natural painting experience

Mac/PC

Whether you’re a Mac or PC person we support both platforms with perpetual licensing

Essentials was created to provide the ideal paint software for beginners to ease into digital art

Blank canvas

Sketch, draw, render and paint whatever you dream up or are inspired by.

Photo art

Produce incredible photo art with ease using AI, Auto-Painting and cloning tools.