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09/21/04 @377
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Corel Painter IX Unveiled
Corel today announced that Corel® Painter™ IX, the world's most powerful Natural-Media® painting and illustration software, is now available for pre-order. Hitting the streets in October, Corel Painter IX allows commercial designers, photographers, and professional artists to use their natural talents and techniques to create breathtaking works of art. 
Corel Painter IX is a highly-sophisticated painting and illustration application designed to capture the intricate nuances of traditional art tools while taking advantage of the incredible power of digital media. It is the must-have software for creative professionals, whether they're in film making, game development, commercial design, illustration, photography, or fine arts.
"Professional users tell us time and again – there is simply no substitute for Corel Painter. Painter is the only application that has the power and versatility that enables them to create the masterpieces they build their reputations on," said Nick Davies, Director of Graphics for Corel.
"Setting a new standard for performance, Corel Painter IX introduces tools that redefine digital art. Creative professionals who work either traditionally or digitally should give serious consideration to the benefits Corel Painter IX can offer to their creativity and workflow," Davies continued.
The new Painter IX welcome screen, artwork by Ryan Church |
Performance and Productivity
- Improved Speed – This is the fastest version of Corel Painter yet. Some brushes perform up to 10 times faster, and most brushes work, on average, twice as fast.
- New Welcome Screen – Getting down to the job at hand has never been easier, thanks to the new Corel Painter IX Welcome screen, which launches on startup and provides access to a Corel Painter Master gallery, lynda.com training, brush tracking, and more.
- New and Enhanced Brush Control Palettes – Providing easy access to all brush settings and controls, users can now make on-the-fly changes to brush settings and variables by simply dragging sliders – without any disruption to their workflow.
- New Frames Per Second Control – Animators can now test frame rates directly in Corel Painter. With the new Frames-per-Second Control, frame rates can be set and previewed in a range of 1 to 40 frames per second.
- New Customizable Shortcut Keys – Corel Painter now offers creative professionals an unprecedented level of control over their workflow by enabling complete customization of shortcut keys.
Creativity - New Artists' Oils Painting System – A milestone in the evolution of digital art, this new painting system creates a new level of realism for digital painting, delivering oil paints that truly behave like traditional media. They blend, mix and feel 'organic'. Artists' Oils blow away previous notions of what is possible in the digital realm.
- New Snap-to-Path Painting – When users need to paint or draw a perfect curve or shape, Snap-to-Path Painting is a great time-saver. Snap-to-Path Painting makes it possible to constrain a brush stroke along a vector path or shape, creating a distinctly 'made-by-hand' Painter look.
- Improved Digital Watercolor – Digital Watercolor has been significantly enhanced in Corel Painter IX. Paint stays wet between sessions, enabling artists to start one session where the last one ended. Digital Watercolor emulates the traditional watercolor painting experience more realistically than ever before.
- New Quick Clone – Ideal for photographers, Quick Clone enables the easy transformation of a photo into a painting. This new feature speeds up the image-cloning workflow, reducing five complicated steps to one simple click.
the Painter IX interface with artwork from Cher Threinen-Pendarvis |
Compatibility - Enhanced Adobe® Photoshop® Support – Moving between Adobe Photoshop and Corel Painter is easier than ever. Files saved to the Adobe Photoshop (PSD) file format open in Corel Painter, with layer masks, alpha channels and layer sets (layer groups) maintained. New layers are now added above the selected layer, layers with different merge modes are collapsible, and it is now possible to hide or display multiple layers by simply clicking and dragging.
- Enhanced Wacom® Support – Corel Painter IX features support for Wacom's newest pen tablet model — the Wacom Intuos®3 — and the entire Wacom tablet product line. The Wacom Intuos3 has touch strips that can be configured to control brush size, zooming, and many other functions, eliminating the need for a keyboard.
- Enhanced Color Management – Supporting industry-standard ICC4.0 profiles, Corel Painter IX Color Management enables color matching between on-screen and printed colors.
Learning - With improved Help; a revitalized User Guide; tutorials from leading graphics professionals; free training videos from lynda.com; and academic courseware specifically designed for educators; getting started with Corel Painter IX is easier than ever!
Pricing and Availability
Corel Painter IX is available for pre-order starting today through Corel and select partners. A free trial version is also available for download. Please visit www.corel.com/comingsoon for more information. Suggested retail pricing for Corel Painter IX is $429 (US) for full, $229 (US) for upgrade and $99 (US) for the education edition.
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Its interface is the same as Painter 8 - i.e. Photoshop-like.
This means you still can't change brushes quckly without making custom palettes, just like it was in P8. But at least you can change the brush settings without having to open the annoying brush constructor dialog like you had in P8, which is probably the most significant fix in this version.
The speed is maybe faster, and since they claim it as a major improvement, it probably is. But you will not really benefit from it unless you are using some really complicated, processor-heavy brushes. For most of the tools, your stroking speed is still going to be the limit in any version of Painter, so you'll see some small improvement - but don't expect miracles. The new watercolor tools diffusion still struggles with it, I'm afraid: feels like glue with any practical canvas size.
They (finally) fixed the issue with "flip canvas" command ignoring the floating layers, and the "wet" layers now do not "dry" when you save the file. There are some more such fixes to bugs and design flaws.
There are some small nice improvements, like automatic incremental saves, hotkey customization and the like. A wider set of KPT seems to be included, or at least I don't remember seeing Shapeshifter bundled before. Snap-to-path painting is a nice addition.
The major touted Artists Oils is an improved version of impasto brushes. You can now have individual bristles picking different colors, which is especially nice when you work with the mixer palette. The included brushes also dry out faster, and pick depth info a bit differently, making the emergent texture more interesting. However, none of the included brush variants are tilt-sensitive; they all are round, not flat, even the "palette knife" ones - which is odd, to say the least, because you can turn tilt sensitivty on for individual variants if you dig into the brush settings. (You can't control any other thing about it, though, not even the rotation angle.) Overall a very nice new tool, and finally making all the recently introduced things like depth channel and brush color picking work to some good results.
The proudly advertised "welcome screen" is more of an annoyance for me. When I open the program, I know what I want to do with it, no need for a silly "wizard" to guide me, thank you. (Though they use it to showcase work by a selection of artists - nice, but does not outweigh the annoyance.)
The about box is the UGLIEST about box I've ever seen in any version of Painter.
In short: Some fixes to the problems that came none too soon, including one major one introduced in the previous version. One new brush method. One new control method (the path conformance). Some compatibility fixes, some speedup you ain't gonna notice much, some new bells and whistles irrelevant to the process of painting, a new version number, a new "program activation" way of improved big-brothering and a new increased price.
Verdict: Why does this qualify for a new major version? It qualifies for version 8.5 at best, and would if the program was still designed by Metacreation - the change is certainly no bigger than between 5.0 and 5.5, especially considering that a lot of it is fixes for bugs and problems, and there are precious few earnest new major features here.
Good tool, bad marketing policy.
09/22/04 @731
09/23/04 @312
I'm a Beta tester for Painter 9 and have been using the software for some time now. I actually think its a nifty upgrade, the workflow is dramatically increased. The artists oils alone are a great reason to pick up the ugrade, they simulate the feel of oils very very well!!!
I think a day or two of using new software really isn't enough time to determine its value. I will admit at first I had some of the thoughts that re mentioned above. As I spent some time with the product I found more and more little additions I enjoyed.
Phil
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