Corel Particleshop Plugin for Photoshop review, take the power of Corel Painter into Photoshop - Available for multiple other applications.

Particleshop Review In Few Words (Mini Review)

The power of Corel Painter can now be used in Photoshop. The Particleshop plugin is simply made for those who wants some of Corel Painter’s abilities. But are too used to Photoshop for their everyday work, either because they doesn’t have the time to learn Painter, or they are in an industry where using Photoshop is a must. Now you can paint directly from within Particleshop, similar to how you do in Painter itself.

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Quickly go to:-

Pros Of Particleshop
Cons Of Particleshop
Features
Supported Applications
Annoying Update Mechanism
Pressure Sensitivity Support
What Other Brushes Pack Are Available For Particleshop?
Buy Once, Use If On More Than An Application.
Particleshop Basic System Requirements
And Finally
See Also:-

Pros Of Particleshop

Brings Corel Painter to Photoshop.
Very easy to use.
Contains 11 brush out of the box, so there is no need to buy any more brushes at first.

Cons Of Particleshop

To benefit from the nondestructive new features in Particleshop 1.1, you will need to duplicate your layer to avoid losing its contents.
You are forced to update Particleshop every time there is an update.

Features

Works with Both Windows & Mac OSX. (Requires Windows 7 or later, Mac OSX 10.10 or later).
Works with a variety of Adobe & Corel applications. See the list below.

Supported Applications

Adobe Photoshop CS5, CS6, or CC.
Adobe Photoshop Lightroom CS5, CS6, or CC.
Adobe Photoshop Elements 13.
Corel DRAW X7.
Corel PHOTO-PAINT X7.
Corel PaintShop Pro X7+.

For this review, I tried Particleshop for Photoshop, but I expect it to be fairly the same for the other supported applications as well.

Particleshop is installed just like any application on your computer. After that, you will be able to use the plug-in from within your application. To access Particleshop in Photoshop, simply choose Filters > Painter > ParticleShop from the main menu. And the plug-in will open.

The user interface of Particleshop looks kinda similar to Corel Painter, but it is much simpler. You have 5 tools inside the plug-in, these tools are the brush, blender, eraser, eyedropper, color wheel tools respectively.

Beside the tools, the available settings in Particleshop are similar to Corel Painter, the settings allows you to adjust the brush size, opacity, or turning the pressure sensitivity on & off (we will get to that soon). There are other settings that will appear based on the brush you are currently using right now.

Particleshop comes with a starter pack out of the box, which is a collection of 11 brushes provided by Corel, so you won’t have to buy any more brushes to use the plug-in. But you have the choice to get additional ones from Corel if felt the need to.

The starter pack contains the following brushes, Debris, Fabric, Fine Art, Flame, Fur, Hair, Light, Smoke, Space, Storm, Superhero. Each brush is a sample of the brushes in the other packs available for sale from within Particleshop itself.

Once you are done making your strokes, you hit the save button, and then you will be presented with the following dialog::-

If you chose the first option, “Merge brushstrokes with source contents”, you will see the strokes you made on the current layer you selected prior to launching Particleshop . That action can’t be undone.

If you selected the second option, “Save Only The brushstrokes”, you will get a layer with the strokes you made only, and the brush you selected prior to selecting the plugin will simply disappear. So to avoid losing the layer contents you want to apply strokes on, duplicating the layer prior to launching Particleshop is a must. It would have been better if Corel simply kept the selected layer and created a new layer with the strokes in it. Instead of requiring us to manually duplicate the layer each time we want to use Particleshop nondestructively.

As far as I know, the non-destructive option only works in case your application supports layers.

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Annoying Update Mechanism

One problem if there is an update, in which case you will be forced to download it, or you won’t be able to exit the plugin, which feels kinda frustrating. This is something I hope to see fixed in an upcoming version of Particleshop .

Pressure Sensitivity Support

Particleshop supports pressure sensitivity of graphics tablets. If you are not familiar with graphics tablets, this is a setting that allows you to vary the size of your stroke based on how much pressure you apply with your graphics tablet stylus. This works pretty similar to how pencils & traditional drawing media works.

To show you how that works in Particleshop, the following stroke are all made with the Fine Art brush, which is part of the Starter Pack. The settings for all the 3 strokes are identical, but the amount of pressure I applied with my graphics tablet (the Large Wacom Intuos Pro) is different with each time, which resulted in thicker texture the more pressure I applied.

What Other Brushes Pack Are Available For Particleshop?

There are 11 packs available for sale. In fact, the starter pack that comes with Particleshop out of the box contains one brush from each of the brushes. The available brushes pack available at the time of writing this review are:-

Dust & Debris.
Fabric Fantasy.
Fine Art.
Flame.
Fur.
Hair.
Light it up.
Smoke & Steam.
Spaced Out.
Storm.
Super Hero.

Buy Once, Use If On More Than An Application.

If you have more than one of the supported applications above, you only need to buy Particleshop once, and then you can use it from one or more of the supported applications you have. And on up to 3 machines at any given time.

Particleshop Basic System Requirements

Processor:- Intel Pentium 4, AMD Athlon 64 or AMD Opteron (Intel Core 2 Duo or higher recommended).
Ram:- 2 GB (4 GB recommended).
Screen Resolution:- 1024×768 resolution (1280×800 recommended).

And Finally

Particleshop is a very nice way to get the power of Corel Painter on Photoshop, I pretty much hope this plugin gets even more features & capabilities in the future, but as far as I have seen from V1.1, it looks promising. Unfortunately, as far as I know, there is no trial version for Particleshop yet. Or I would have recommended that you download it right away.

I hope you liked my Particleshop review, and see you again in another review. ^^