Within the screen shown below you can adjust options, change materials, and specify focal points. Right clicking in this dialog box brings up a menu with additional options including options to save settings and load previously saved settings.

Clicking the Adjust button bring you to the Adjust dialog box where you can visually compare settings. Although it is shown here at a reduced size, this window can be maximized to fill your entire monitor if desired. I found this dialog box of little use, however, because the small previews do not accurately portray how the effect will look on a full-sized image. Unfortunately, the preview is a fixed size and cannot be zoomed or scaled for a more accurate preview.

As with most filter collections, the effects are a mixed bag. My favorite effects were the more traditional art styles like oil paint, watercolor, impasto, pastels, and color pencil. The non-traditional effects such as rectangles and triangles were my least favorite. Many of the others including silk screen, drawing, and collage worked well for high resolution images, but were disappointing on low resolution images. The background material option helps to vary the results of each effect, but I would have liked more user control. My original image is shown to the right; below you can see examples of each filter applied to this image.

All in all, Virtual Painter makes it extremely easy to turn photos into paintings and stylized art, though there are better choices for those who desire a more human-generated quality to their art work. The documentation is brief but adequate and although it assumes users will be using Paint Shop Pro as a host application, the collection should function within in any image editor with Photoshop-compatible plug-in support. Virtual Painter is available for Windows only from Jasc Software.