Virtual Painter

Editors' ReviewDownload.com staffNovember 7, 2008OK, so you can't really paint dramatic landscapes like the Renaissance greats, but Virtual Painter 5 can. The interface may lean toward the simplistic side, but the transformation of photo files into Van Goughesque oils, colorful pencil art, and sweeping water colors is impressive. Virtual Painter 5 gives you 16 artistic styles and 20 canvases to achieve your look, and lets you make further adjustments to focus, scale, and rendering, among other parameter. We prefer the sliding scale and numeric inputs of Expert mode to the vague descriptors of "subtle," "normal," "intense" in the standard adjustment pane. Tweaks to contrast, brush angle and brush size, and color spectrum are sorely missed, but despite that, playing around with the painterly modes is addictive. The trial's allotted 32-uses disappeared all too quickly.