Throughout its long and chequered career – first under MetaCreations, then Procreate and now Corel – Painter has always stood out as the artistic and creative computer application bar none. The reason is simple: Painter's unique range of natural media brushes.
Of course, other software developers have jumped on the bandwagon simply by making a brushstroke grainy and calling it 'charcoal' or darkening its edges and calling it a 'watercolour', but Painter is different. It looks closely at how the brush, paint and paper work together to produce their effect and then tries to replicate it.
The trouble is that the interaction of natural media is inherently complex. To produce a watercolour brush that diffuses and interacts realistically with the pigment already on the canvas involves controlling factors such as wetness, drying rate, evaporation threshold and wind direction. And these are only the parameters unique to the watercolour. Add in shared parameters, such as opacity, angle, resaturation and grain, and there's dozens of factors at work. In other words, Painter's natural media power comes at a price.
The problem with this was that previous versions of Painter never hid this underlying complexity – the user was bombarded with the different brush and material controls. Painter's desperate attempts to undo the damage and make the environment friendlier, by grafting on the odd pullout drawer and throwing in some large but unrecognisable icons, just made things even more confusing. 'Idiosyncratic' is one word for Painter's previous incarnations, but 'dog's dinner' is closer to the mark.
The end result was a strangely contradictory program: fantastically creative but at the same time intimidating in its technical depth – the one thing guaranteed to put off the intended artistic audience. Thankfully, Corel has recognised this fundamental problem and has completely overhauled the Painter interface. Overhaul doesn't do it justice; it's like opening a completely new program. The first thing that hits you is the space opened up by removing the old MetaCreations clutter. Your second thought: but where is everything?
Tools of the trade
Let's start with the toolbar. In the past, this was a free-floating horizontal palette with scratchy icons in no particular order – it almost seemed like an afterthought. Now, the toolbar is central to your work in Painter and docked vertically on the left. It has also been rationalised and split into separate sections dealing with image editing, vector editing, formatting and display.
Below these are the current foreground and background colours, and lower down are small thumbnails for the current Paper, Pattern, Gradient, Nozzle, Weave and Brush Look libraries. Click on the thumbnail and you can choose from a drop-down list of presets, or call up the associated palette for greater control. It's amazingly streamlined compared with the old Art Materials palette, but it would be even better if options that weren't relevant to the current brush were greyed out.
Once you've selected your tool, you set its main parameters with the new Property Bar that runs under the menus. This is handy for swapping between major tool variations such as the various node-editing options and for controlling text without having to open the Text palette. For the different brush tool variations, it means you can quickly set size, opacity and other context-sensitive settings such as resaturation, grain and bleed (although this would be even easier if the settings were provided as sliders). There's also a useful Reset button to set any tool back to its defaults.
Running down the right is the area intended for Painter's palettes. There are now more of these than ever, as each of the previous palette sections, such as Colour Variability and Colour Info, have been promoted to palettes in their own right. They can be grouped and ungrouped, as well as hidden and revealed, and it's possible to save and reload particular arrangements to set up the environment exactly as you want it. The end result is a much cleaner, more efficient and inviting interface.
By default, Corel sensibly brings together all those palettes that deal with colour, although the sheer range can still be off-putting. Corel's latest addition is the Colour Mixer, which is designed to mimic an artist's palette. It offers a choice of primary colours, a Brush and Palette Knife to mix them and an Eyedropper to pick up the colour. Many Painter users already worked in a similar way using a separate image for colour mixing, but it's certainly handy to have a dedicated palette, especially with the ability to save settings and automatically generate colour swatches as needed.
Sweeping changes
So far so good, but something important is missing: where are Painter's brushes? These remain fundamental to the software, but Corel has chosen to downplay their central role with the understated Brush Selector hidden away at the end of the Property Bar. Essentially, this takes the form of two simple drop-downs – first you select the category, then the actual brush variant. The drop-downs can take the form of visual thumbnails or even sample strokes, but it's easier to choose from the list of names.
The choice of brushes is straightforward, but the range is astonishing. Corel has added 400 new brushes across 30 categories, of which nearly half are new. It sounds like a revolutionary increase in power, but there has also been some creative accountancy at work here. Many of Painter's former categories have simply been split – a good example being the Dry Media brushes, which have been divided into Chalk, Charcoal, Crayons and Pastels. And, within each category, new brushes are usually basic variations of shapes and sizes.
In fact, only one brush category is completely new – Digital Watercolour. This in itself is strange, as watercolours have always been one of Painter's strongest areas, and no-one could say the new brushes are as realistic as the old ones. This is hardly surprising as there are only two dedicated parameters at work here – diffusion and wet fringe. But, in a way, that's the point.
Painter's existing complex watercolours can only be used on their own dedicated 'wet' layers and it takes time and processing power to apply them. The new Digital Watercolours are much simpler and faster, and can be mixed with other brushes to produce attractive results.
By providing a much wider range of brush presets, along with the Property bar for setting the most important brush parameters, there's no shortage of immediate creative power, but there are still occasions where you want greater control. This is where Painter's new Brush Creator dialog comes in. In its main Stroke Designer tab, you can select one of the 16 control sets, such as General, Well, Liquid Ink and Impasto, and the associated parameters appear next to it (a lot simpler than the former Brush Controls palette's scrollable system). What really makes the difference is the large preview canvas to the right of the dialog, where you can try out changes before using them in earnest. What's more, the dialog stays open so you can seamlessly swap between your current image and the Brush Creator whenever you want to fine-tune your brush.
Of course, it's a lot to ask users to understand what they can do with each of the 16 control sets, let alone each of the parameters spread between them. The Brush Creator dialog's additional tabs aim to make this easier. Using the Randomizer tab, Painter generates random variations on the current brush, which are displayed visually as preview strokes. T