Featured Resource – Particle Shop

Bob Taylor is a PaintShop Professional who has been drawing for many years. He uses PaintShop Pro along with various other Corel products. He wrote this post about Particle Shop.

You might have seen this program offered by Corel, bundled with Paintshop Pro. You might have wondered what it is all about. Well, Corel’s new ParticleShop plugin for PaintShop Pro is one of the best tools they have come out within years. It has taken Corel’s Painter brush technology and tore it down to a simple easy to use program.

If I had to describe ParticleShop brush engine program in one word that would be awesome. It is so easy to use the brushes that come with it to enhance a photograph, a painting, fonts and so on. It has only a few settings to adjust the brush tool so the learning curve is easy and simple. You bring your image into PaintShop Pro and you duplicate the layer and then you go up to your effects on the toolbar and go down to painter and open ParticleShop. Once it opens, you will see your image in the viewer window and now you can start to create.

You have many choices on the brush packs that come with ParticleShop and you also have the option to buy some more. Once you select the brush you can start adding your effects and the colors you want to use. You have a color wheel with an eye dropper to help you select the colors. You also have an eraser tool and a smudge tool. All these tools have there own settings that you can play with to get the look you want. You also have pen pressure control if you're using a pad or tablet to help you draw. You have brush size, opacity, and count settings.

Once you are done using your Particle shop, you hit apply and this is the cool part, it will ask you if you want the layers merged or on a separate layer. I make it a habit of saving my work on a separate layer because it will open as a layer in PaintShop Pro layers palette as just the brush strokes. With this option, you now have the ability to erase, smudge your brush strokes to your image that you are working on.

With the way it works, you can copy the two layers together and merge them and again bring it into ParticleShop to add more effects. I did spend a few bucks on some brush packs, my favorite is the fur brush pack. With this set, you can add down to a baby bird, and fur to other animals.

But with the fur brush where it does come in handy is when you cut a person out of an image you always lose the ends of their hair. Now with the fur brush, you can add back the hair and no one will be the wiser. Little things like this can make or break a photo. Your cut outs will look so real after you tweaked them with ParticleSHop. So in closing, if you are serious about your photograph and artwork, ParticleShop is a must have.

If you want to purchase ParticleShop, you can check out here, but since it is often bundled with Paintshop Pro, you can also wait for a special and check back regularly if it is included in your purchase.

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