Corel sent us their new “Painter” program for review. This is used by professional artists and photographers to create some nice works of digital art. Honda Motors, for example, uses Painter to make digital paintings of their concept cars. It’s for either Windows or Mac and we couldn’t tear Joy away from it for hours.

The downside is Painter is expensive: $429 for the latest version 12. But the “academic” price is only $99. That’s the price for anyone who can show that they’re a student or teacher or otherwise associated with an institution of learning. Or anyone who can fake it, meaning anyone who knows someone who meets the qualifications and you can use their name. It also works if you’re taking a night class somewhere.

There’s a steep learning curve to a big program like Painter but the results are worth the effort. Some new features are fun and easy to use, however. Chief among these is “kaleidoscope.” Here, you can start to doodle and instead of ordinary lines, a kaleidoscopic image forms. Anything you do looks so nice that Joy is thinking of uploading her creations to Spoonflower.net, where you can have fabric printed with your own designs.

Joy liked the “mirror” tool. Ever draw a face with one eye higher than the other? With the mirror tool, as you start to draw an eye on one side, the program puts a mirror image of the eye on the other. Bob didn’t think it was good where eyes were concerned, since a mirror image makes the face look cross-eyed. But Joy was wowed.

A big advance in Painter 12 is “real watercolor” and “wet oil.” These respond to the kind of digital surface you choose; wet paint will pool, spread and flow.

The first thing Joy’s sister asked when told about all this was what good is it if you only see your paintings on the computer screen? Well, there are other ways. Walgreens.com has a canvas option under photo gifts; just send them the digital file and get back a picture on canvas. There’s also Zazzle.com, which is useful if you want to sell your art. Other sites for transferring digital images to paper or canvas are CanvasPop.com and CanvasOnDemand.com.

You can download a free trial of Painter and check out some tutorials at Corel.com. We got great results starting with a photo of penguins. As with all art programs, you should look at their “gallery” site, which shows the work of artists who use the program. We especially liked the work of Andrew Jones from AndroidJones.com and Waheed Nasir, from WaheedNasir.com.

If you like cheaper alternatives and we always do — check out Art Rage, at ArtRage.com. It has many of the same tools as Painter. There’s a $40 version for computers– free for the first 30 days– and a $3 version for the iPad. ArtRageUs.net offers a free magazine with tutorials and FutureCanvas.net showcases the art created on the iPad.

If you like this kind of program, you should get a drawing tablet. We saw a nice Wacom “Bamboo” digital tablet and pen for $58 at Amazon.com; and they had used ones for $40.

You’ve got a loan document, a spreadsheet, an illustration, and a complex diagram — and you want to email them all to a client who doesn’t have the programs that would open those. “PDF Fusion” is a new $70 product from Corel that lets you put them all into one PDF.

Corel is a heavy hitter in the word processing world. Their “WordPerfect” is the main competitor to “Microsoft Word” and has long been a favorite among lawyers. Their graphics program, “CorelDraw” is big in illustrations and charts. And now, we were sort of awed by their new “PDF Fusion.” We have used a similar product, PaperPort, which has been around for more than a decade, but Fusion goes a lot further and is simpler to use. On top of which, it’s far less expensive than its most likely competitor, Adobe Acrobat, which costs $275 and up, depending on the version.

You start PDF Fusion by opening each file you want to add to the email package. The program lets you open files in 100 different formats, whether or not you have the programs that created them. This alone would be a big boon to almost anyone lost in today’s maze of different file formats. Drag and drop whatever files you want into the “assembly” area and they become part of the package. You can add hyperlinks to individual pages, black out (“redact”) certain sections, change the text and so on.

The program includes a Corel “print driver.” Try this with any oddball program you happen to have around. When you click the “print” command, choose Corel PDF Fusion from the menu, and voila, it turns into a PDF that anyone can open. There’s a 30-day free trial at corel.com.

Hand-marking each citation for a Table of Authorities can take hours – especially for firms managing multiple cases that all require legal briefs. Using the The Bluebook and the California Style Manual as authorities, Corel Perfect Authority locates, alphabetizes and cross-references citations in a document to create a Table of Authorities.

Corel Perfect Authority works with Corel WordPerfect Office X5 allowing law firms, paralegals, corporate legal departments and government agencies to reduce the amount of time spent manually creating Table of Authorities. This helps legal entities meet the citation formatting requirements of different districts or courts.

“Inkscape” is a free graphics program that is winning converts from the low-cost “Xara Extreme,” which in turn has won users away from CorelDraw, which was a cheaper alternative to Adobe’s very expensive “Illustrator.” Basically, what you have here is a market progression from costly to cheap to cheaper to free.

This book is a great guide to using Inkscape. Besides covering all the features, it includes excellent tutorials on how to design a business card, create an animation, make a three-dimensional cartoon, or an artistic drawing, or a technical drawing. The author, a website designer, says Inkscape is part of the “vector” revolution. Unlike bitmap editors such as Photoshop, vector drawings can be enlarged without getting the “jaggies,” those jagged edges you can see in low-resolution bitmap drawings and type. The program works on Windows, Mac or Linux.

graphics software often hold contests to show off the best work done with their programs and you can see some amazing pictures. Go to GraphicCompetitions.com and theArtList.com to find out about new contests. If you go to the home web site for any graphics program you can think of, they will almost certainly have a gallery.

The new CorelDraw Graphics Suite X4 has a list price of $429 ($199 for upgrades), which is pretty hefty, but nothing compared to the time cost of starting over. The large installed base of users should like the new features: There are 80 templates for producing business documents, advertisements, newsletters, etc. Each template can be further defined by selecting the type of business you want applied to the form. If you’d like to share your thoughts on any design, the program has a “ConceptShare” button that takes you to Corel’s Web site where you can look over and talk over other people’s designs.

A feature we’ve always liked in CorelDraw is the ability to bring in any bitmap drawing and automatically convert it to a vector drawing. In plain terms this means that enlarging a drawing that has been converted to vector art gets rid of the so-called “jaggies” you see as a bitmap gets bigger. The jaggies are those stair-step lines that appear on the edges when a bitmap drawing is made larger. The vector transfer routine can now be applied to mechanical drawings and signatures as well.

New features in CorelDraw X4 include 10,000 pieces of clip art, new type fonts, support for RAW camera files, and the ability to add notes to imported PDF files. You can save any files in formats that can be opened by users of Microsoft products and AutoCAD.

A new feature that should appeal to many writers, editors and type compositors is “What the Font.” Clicking on this takes you to the MyFonts.com Web site, which can identify what font is being used in a document someone gave you to work on. (Free trial at Corel.com.)