By: Erik Vlietinck
Wed, October 06, 2004 - 9:34:01
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Painter is an artist’s delight: it has everything (and more) that you would find in an artist’s studio. Painter IX builds further on this foundation and adds many welcome enhancements and features. Corel Painter IX is the art application of choice for thos who want an abundance of options. For those who want only the strictest minimum (perhaps not to be distracted...), Alias SketchBook Pro is a better choice.

There’s probably not a graphic artist who hasn’t at least tried out one of the earlier versions of Painter. So, we are all familiar with the cloning capabilities of this program, the feature that allows you to clone an existing image in a Van Gogh-like way, and other such goodies. You are probably also acquainted to the many ways you can configure Painter’s many brushes, layers, paper types, and special brushes like the Liquid Ink and Digital Watercolor brush.

All that power translated in slow moving liquids on the virtual canvas. The speed improved considerably with Painter 8, but some brushes were still visibly slow. Enter Painter IX, where nothing is slow anymore. On the contrary, Painter now for the first time really feels like the real thing. Liquid Ink just flows on the canvas, digital watercolor just spreads out a tad slower than what you would expect from paper and real aquarel paint. In short, performance in Painter IX is no longer the issue.

What is then? Well, there’s not much too criticize anymore. Except perhaps the Welcome screen. Given the fact that the welcome screen is your first interaction with the program, I would have liked it to be more Adobe CS alike, and not resembling the sketch notebook that it looks like now, but that is my personal taste, of course. What I do like about the welcome screen is the tabbed interface, which instantly provides you with access to much of the features you want to adjust prior to working with Painter.

Brush control palettes are improved. Except for the fact that they are better integrated with the Mac OS X look, they are easier to understand and more efficiently tampered with. Some features are entirely new, like the Boost Slider which is said to enhance brush speed---not that I could notice any of that on my G5.

Painter IX can also be used as cartoon application. It probably lacks most of the features that you would find in ToonBoom Studio, but the basics are present. There’s the possibility now to set frame rates directly in Painter, ranging between 1 to 40 fps. There’s also the capability of painting on a per-frame basis, although that feature is subject to easy misunderstanding, not in the least because the manual isn’t very clear on the subject.

Images can be rotated and flipped, and once an image has been saved the first time, you can save it using the Iterative Save feature. This new feature saves a numbered copy of your file without you having to go through the save as dialogue each time you want to save a new composition. The Iterative Save holds the middle between Layer Comps in Photoshop CS and Version Cue. It is a bit more clumsy than those two, but it isn’t any less safe or efficient (except in terms of disk space, of course).

Just as Adobe did with Photoshop and the other CS family of products, Painter IX now has fully customizable shortcut keys. A well-designed extra is the ability to save your custom key set to a HTML page that will load in a web browser and can be printed for later reference.

The Tracker palette stores historical information about every brush stroke you applied to the canvas. It acts as a sort of virtual brush diary. From this palette you can recall previously used brushes in next sessions, or lock brushes so they become readily accessible. While it is a useful feature, I would have liked a real History palette better, especially because a history as you will find it in Photoshop can be saved as small scripts for later playing.

The most important new feature is the Snap-to-Path painting capability. This allows you to draw a path with the pen, and then apply paint to the path, without having to worry about a steady hand. Very useful, but sometimes difficult to find the path, especially so when it has no stroke.

Digital Watercolor has been improved in that paint can remain wet in between sessions. Also, the fringe of digital watercolor brushes can be changed dynamically, so that you can experiment after having painted part of your work.

Much to my surprise, KPT filters are back, and you don’t have to pay extra for them. KPT Goo, Gel, LensFlare, Lightning, and others are now installed in the Effects menu by default. They offer much pleasure, but I have always found them to be of little real value for subtle artistic results.

Photographers will like the Quick Clone feature (I know I do): instead of having to set up the complete cloning process yourself, Quick Clone automatically creates the right settings with one click. The settings can be changed in the Preferences, so that you can fine-tune this feature to your own requirements. Quick Clone is a great time-saver.

Colour management has been improved, in as much as it has been made much more easy to implement. It is easier to understand the choices you have to make, and making them is now a matter of selecting Color Management from the welcome screen and selecting the right options next to the different equipment icons.

Support for Photoshop has been drastically improved, with preservation of layers, layer groups, masks, and alpha channels. I thought the extra effort would have included support for 16-bit files as well, but that was a no-go. Painter IX supports 8-bit images only.

Finally, Painter IX offers exemplary support for the new Wacom Intuos 3 tablets. Every feature of those tablets is fully supported, including the touch strip and tablet keys.

In short, Painter IX has fully matured into a very powerful art program with so many choices, options, features and customization capabilities that it becomes dazzling. On the other hand, if you can refrain from changing all those features infinitely, Painter offers a tool that is unique in its support of your creative abilities.

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