Painter Essentials 8

Interested in digital art? Spark your creativity with Painter® Essentials™ 8. Enjoy fun and uncomplicated painting software for beginners that will inspire you to experiment and fall in love with digital painting. Sketch, draw and paint away on a blank canvas using realistic Natural-Media brushes and unique art tools created by artists. Go beyond the blank canvas and dabble in exclusive image-based AI and cloning to transform images into impressive works of art. Try it today and enjoy powerful performance and seamless creation, on the platform of your choice. You’ll quickly build the painting skills and confidence you need to paint something great.

What's New

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.

Apple support

Improve your overall Mac workflow in big ways!

• 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 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.