Having both packages working in fundamentally the same way is a huge boost to productivity. Rather more impressive are its special effect dynamic layers. The Bevel World option offers even greater customisable control over the production of Web buttons than Photoshop 5.5 s layer effects, while its existing Burn, Glass and Liquid Metal dynamic layers chart completely new creative territory. That s only the beginning. Draw on your image with any of Painter s rectangle, oval, pen, quick curve or text tools, and you ll see that each shape or letter is automatically added to its own layer.
Painter even supports cut and paste from Illustrator and enables shapes to be blended together.
This ability to interweave vector and bitmap components in a single image gives a huge boost to both flexibility and creativity and Painter 6 s advanced implementation leaves Photoshop looking seriously underpowered. One of the major uses of vector handling is for the handling of text, but Painter s default text handling of one letter per vector layer hardly makes for simple re-editing. The solution is to use Painter s dedicated text dynamic layer. The one major disappointment is that Painter 6 is not able to read Photoshop s text layers and keep them editable. This is more than made up for, however, by the formatting power that Painter s revamped dynamic text dialog offers through its three main tabs.