Software Review: New Corel ParticleShop Brushes

Corel ParticleShop is part of Corel’s arsenal of advanced digital art studio software released in 2015. It integrated some of the technology from Corel Painter into a plugin to allow you to use Painter-based Particle Brushes in Adobe Photoshop CC and Lightroom. That was a great step forward in integration technology.

The plugin is powered by Corel Painter. If you own Painter 2015 or above, all of these brushes will work without the plugin. To use them with Photoshop or Lightroom, you will need the ParticleShop. When you purchase ParticleShop you get 11 brushes that include Storm, Smoke, Space, Light, Hair, Fur, Fine Art, Fabric, and Debris, to help get you going.

Since a plugin cannot work on its own, to work with ParticleShop you must have a host application. Generally, this is Adobe Photoshop, but it can work in Adobe Lightroom, and, as I said earlier, it works in Corel Painter as well. When you work with these brushes, you want to work on a finished layer since it will make changes to the layer that affect the image.

Since the original release, several new brushes have been released for ParticleShop to give you even more options when creating your artwork. Each of these packs contains 15 brushes.

• Wedding – This provides new brushes for creating new and unique highlights to give your wedding portrait (or any portrait) a little extra pizazz. The brushes include Fine Chiffon, Controlled Veil, Directional Veil, Love Letters, Star Writer, and Bubbles.

• Fantasy – This lets you create fantastical scenes, adding magical or angelic effects to your artwork. This brush set works really well with composite works where you want to add some mystical qualities. The brushes here include Angelic, Blaze, Clash, Lighting, Light Fall, and Rim Light.

• Atmosphere – This is a great brush set for creating clouds and other graceful upper-atmosphere effects that capture the look and feel of the sky. You can create cloud forms such as Altocumulus, Cirrocumulus, Cirrus, Stratus, and Cumulus. Ionized produces Northern Lights effects as well as Moon, Star, and Sun Rays.

• Combustion – These brushes let you create fire-themed effects like firestorms, red-hot flames, and billowing clouds of smoke. Fiery brushes include Billowing, Dragon, Rocket, and Flare. Heat-based brushes include Haze, Heat Wave, Heat Trail, and (also) Flare, and smoky ones like Incense, Smoke, Thin Smoke, and Wet Smoke.

• Graphic Impact – With this set you can add tangles, grids, graffiti, texture, and scribbles, adding “graphic impact” to your paintings, photos, or other artwork. Create shapes like Crystalize, Cubes, and Spiro, and warping shapes like Textureweave, Colorfloat, and Gridwarp that flow around the page. Others include Puff (smoke), Scorched (fire), and Scratches.

• Particle Crawlers – These will allow you to add a splash of innovation to any piece of work using lines, curves, and shapes that include Dandelion, Feather, Ice, Leaves, Shell, Cosmo, and Fire Spin.

As I said earlier, these new brushes can be used out of the box with Corel Painter 2015 and up, but to use them with Photoshop or Lightroom, you will need the ParticleShop plugin. Depending on your needs, these brushes can really work wonders, and priced at $29.99, they are also affordable. If you are looking for new ways to advance your creative work, then I highly recommend any of these brushes.