Feature: Corel offers a free Painter XI.5 upgrade
Motivation: There are a lot of new features in this free upgrade

Corel Painter IX has a deserved reputation for being one of the best trompe d'oeil (deceive the eye) natural media paint programs in the business. With brush tools like Impasto for a heavy raked oil look to digital water color with sophisticated drift and dispersion effects, Painter can approximate the actions and interactions of a lot of natural media to give your drawings and paintings not only with a natural look - but when used cleverly a super-reality look. So when the new IX.5 upgrade came available, free to existing Painter IX users, this party was more than interested. When I checked out the number of new features in IX.5, this review immediately resulted.

The New Features

Painter IX.5 has a series of three new automated features - Underpainting, Auto-Painting and Restoration that are popup palettes (why Corel does not just add them as commands to the Effects or Canvas menus is beyond me). These automated tools have two benefits - they introduce new users to the capabilities that Painter can deliver at low cost, high appeal. Second, they semi-automate processes that sometimes are hard to do. For example Auto-Painting gives users a sampling of a wide range of brushes and/or patterns (depending on use of cloner brushes). Underpainting is like Quick Fix in Corel PaintShop Pro - quick tonal and styling

adjustments can be easily applied. Finally Restoration introduces users to the Cloner brushes and their effectiveness when used with Pattern, Look and Paper resources. I use these tools either to do quick fixes (Underpainting - where did they get this name ???) and to try out new brushes on an empty canvas with Auto-Painting. But on my machine, a dual core Pentium laptop, Auto-Painting often works so fast I cannot control its effects the way I would like. On the other hand, because all of these tools respect Painter's selections/masks - one can control precisely the area where these effects will be applied. The screen shot above shows the use of all three options on a blank starting canvas.

Painter also features the addition of 3 "new" tools - a Paint Stroke Cloner tool familiar to most photo edit program users. With a whole set of cloner brushes, convenience of cloning from the working image must be the reason for this tool. Second, the Eraser tool now erases all the effects of of brushes like Impasto and Watercolor - unlike the Brush erasers which are more selective. Third, the Cloner tool selects the last used cloner brush and variant - this reflects the need to switch between tools when using a cloner brush.

IX.5 has expended support for its own and 3rd party graphics software. On the home front, Corel Painter IX.5 can now read .pspimage files from PaintShop Pro, store .RIff and other files in Corel Photo Album 6/Snapfire. In addition, IX.5 continues to add support for more Photoshop features and interactions with Wacom pens. In the case of the latter, Wacom and Painter have a small cottage industry in which its pens and tablets work hand in glove with each other.

Take the new Art Brush features. These are designed with calligraphy and and specialized illustration in mind. Wacom has designed its 6D Art pen with programs like Painter in mind - "refined, variable control of artistic pens, brushes, markers, and more. With six dimensions of pen control including 360 degrees of barrel rotation, and 1,024 levels of pressure-sensitivity, the design possibilities are endless".

And indeed this party was suitably impressed with a live demo and tryout of the the 6D Art Pen combined with Painter IX.5's Art Pen brushes. The calligraphy possible was stunning.

But the Art Pen Brushes sensitivity to direction and speed gets picked even when using a mouse. I was impressed with the range of effects possible with these brushes - the screenshot at the left shows some texture and jitter effects possible with the new brushes. Most importantly, brushes that have these complex interactions with speed , direction and pressure tended to "slow down" in older versions of Painter - not so in IX.5 (see note just below on performance).

In addition, to the Art Pen Brushes there have been about a dozen small improvements to brushes and other Painter commands. In addition, the KPT Collection has been tweaked to work more seamlessly within Painter. KPT Collection is just a natural fit with Painter - its Goo, Gel, Pyramid Strokes, Lightning, Reaction, and ShapeShifter commands. Goo and Gel are almost like whole new brush categories and Reaction adds a new dimension to Painter's own Woodcut effect(see the screenshot above for Reaction effect in the background). In sum, The such that, all things measured, IX.5 comes out as a solid upgrade.

The Cautions

But Painter also has a reputation on the Windows side of being mixed in terms of reliability - conking out in some operations with complete system failure. Also the speed of operations can be quite mixed. However, in the last two versions of Painter IX Corel has truly improved the Windows side. The speed of operations and especially brushes, even with large 3-8MB files is remarkably crisp. Reliability has also improved with no out-right crashes in all our testing so far - but that is limited to just a week of 2-3 hour sessions. So give IX.5 a score of 8 on 10 here. I would score IX.5 much more - because the speed and reliability improvements are so valuable, but until I more experience with the program, I am hanging back.

Painter has a number of anomalies that I thought would get corrected when it joined the Corel fold. Both of Corel's paint programs, PaintShop Pro and PhotoPaint, do 4 things very well.
1)Their property bars allow extensive control of any toolbox command selection.
2)Their effects and adjustment dialogs offer the best preview + setting options in the business.
3)When previewing files in the Open dialog, one can see a thumbnail of most graphic file types.
4)Their user customizations for keyboard and icon shortcuts plus palette layout are superb.
Lets see how this edition of Painter starts to incorporate these advantages.

On the property bar, Painter continues to add more settings to the property bar - especially for brushes. But there are still some missing capabilities. Example, for masks I cannot specify a feather option - I must do this as an added second step. For the the Crop tool I can set preset ratios but I don't have reading for each side of the crop rectangle - in short the painter developers should take a peak at what the PiantShopPro gals and guys are doing with their Crop tool - give Painter a 6.5 on 10 score here.

In contrast, Painter continues to have one of the weakest preview capabilities for its effects and adjustments. Yes I know the brushes and natural media are the center of attention; but Painter is starting to depend more on its expanding set of effects and adjustment tools . Time to shore these up score IX.5 like Photoshop 3 on 10. And despite mentioning the defect on thumbnail previews in the Open dialog, Painters developers continue miss this one. On customizations, Painter has also improved, now allowing layouts to be saved and recalled plus palettes to be customized. In addition, Edit | Preferences allows users to customize keyboard shortcuts extensively. Score IX.5 with 7 on 10 here.

So until these very important usability items get fixed, Painter will always be considered a specialized player and with a significant learning curve/usability price to pay. However, having said that, there are a)some approaches to using and learning Painter which we cover here and b)Painter truly has natural media look that is hard to match. In fact, Right Hemisphere has moved its Deep Paint program more to the 3D image rendering market and attacking the key requirements in that arena. There are Microsoft's Expression and ACDsee's Canvas but these are taking mixed vector/bitmap orientations with consequent less emphasis on natural media. Finally there is Eusoftware's Wizardbrush which is in the Painter mold but about 3-4 generations behind.

So if you want to add a natural painterly look to your images, with nearly unlimited control of the brushes and tools, Corel Painter at $350US (street price new) is one of the better and still improving tools to get your own distinct styling for your images.