PAINTER 7
Page 1
Painter will, like PSP and PI, apply a painterly effect over all the image, but it will also let you paint the picture yourself, so you determine the direction of the brush strokes, the size of the brush, and the whole look of the finished painting. First, we will look at Painter auto cloning which applies the effect you choose to the whole of the painting.
First we have to make a clone of the image. Open the photo (mine was photo.bmp) in Painter, and select Clone from the File menu and click on it. This creates a duplicate copy of the photo, although you will not notice because it is exactly on top of the original.
Then, we have to assign an image which is to be the one we are going to clone. The illustration on the left shows that when we use File>Clone Source, there are now two images to choose from - the photo and the clone copy. Since the clone copy is going to be the one where we build up the artistic image, the source has to be the original photo.bmp, so that is the one to check.
Next, we must select the clone brush. If you do not have the brushes display or the tools display showing in the workspace, go to the Window menu and click on Show Brushes and/or Show Tools. If at any time I mention a display and it is not in your workspace, go to the Window menu and select it to show. In the tools display select the brush.
In the display of brushes, click on the clone brush - the one outlined in red in the picture on the right. If you have only 5 brushes shown, and that is not one of them, click on the small triangle in the purple line, just below the centre brush. This will drop down the complete selection of brushes. The greyed out ones are the ones showing in the top line. The cloner, if it is not in the top line, will not be greyed out. Click on it and it will jump to the top line and one of the others will be removed to make room for it. It will have the red line around it showing it is the selected brush. Click the triangle in the purple line again, to close the brush selection box.
Below the brushes you have two selection boxes. 
We could have selected the clone brush by clicking where it says Cloners now, and selecting that from the list of brush types. Now we have to choose a cloner brush from the complete list, so click on the words in the right hand of these two boxes (I have know way of knowing what it will say in that box in your copy of Painter, because it depends what brush was last used.) This is the list you will see.
Not all of these brushes are available for auto clone. If you go to Effects>Esoterica and auto clone is greyed out, you have chosen one that does not auto clone. Driving rain, however does auto clone, so go to the Esoterica menu and click on it. The program will start applying the effect and it will build up in the picture. Left click when you have the effect you want and the build up will stop. If you think you should have clicked earlier, use Edit>Undo auto clone and try again.
This is the effect I got with driving rain.
You have quite a lot of control over the look of your auto clone. The brush controls panel on the right gives you control over size and opacity. Colours are greyed out because we are cloning, and freehand and straight lines apply to painting rather than to cloning.
The settings you see in the box are the ones I used with the Van Gogh brush and auto cloning, and this is the result I got. But do not confuse using auto cloning with the Van Gogh brush with the Esoterica menu option Auto Van Gogh. They effect will be the same if you are using a Van Gogh brush, but if you Auto Van Gogh with the driving rain brush, the effect will be quite different.
Play with your photo now. Try the other cloners - find out which will auto clone and which will not. Change the brush size and opacity. Experiment till you are really familiar with the auto cloner. Save the pictures you like. So long as the clone copy is the selected image, you will be saving your transformed image. At any time you can make a new clone copy, simply by clicking File>Clone again. But you will get a clone of the clone unless you either delete the existing clone or move it slightly out of the way and select the original photo before clicking on the clone option.
On the next page we are going to transform this picture into an oil painting, actually painting the strokes, changing the brush stroke size and direction where appropriate.