 By
Dale Farris, Reviews Coordinator
Golden Triangle PC Club
April 2008
The new Corel Painter X—the world's most powerful natural media painting and
illustration software—features unique digital brushes, art materials, and
textures that mirror the look and feel of their traditional counterparts.
Setting the standard for digital painting and illustration, the Corel
Painter X digital art studio introduces new composition tools, unparalleled
performance, and the all-new RealBristle painting system that models
traditional brushes like never before—right down the individual bristles on
the brush!
Designed for Artists, Designers, and Photographers …and the next generation
of Creative Professionals!
Commercial Designers
Commercial designers require powerful tools for their craft. That's why many
of the world's foremost illustrators, automotive concept designers,
industrial designers, architects, and graphic designers use Corel Painter.
Corel Painter X enables commercial designers to vividly capture their
creative vision and handcraft distinctive designs, illustrations, and logos
for their clients.
Entertainment Artists
Leading artists in the entertainment industry use Corel Painter to produce
some of the world's best-known movies, comic books and video games.
Professional entertainment artists can speed their production time by using
Corel Painter X—leveraging their natural talents and techniques—to create
astounding scenes, characters, vehicles, and textures.
Professional Photographers
In recent years, Corel Painter has sparked a new trend in the professional
photography market as photographers explore the creative possibilities of
turning their photographs into paintings. Corel Painter X offers
photographers new revenue streams by making it easier than ever to create
breathtaking, hand-painted works of art from their photographs.
Fine Artists
Many fine artists use Corel Painter as their primary art medium. Their works
appear in galleries around the world, demonstrating that digitally-created
art has become an accepted medium on the world's art scene. Corel Painter X
enables artists to experiment with new techniques, without investing the
time and money that would ordinarily be required with analog mediums, and
achieve results that emulate those of their traditional counterparts.
Students
Educators around the world are harnessing the power and ease-of-use of Corel
Painter to help enhance the learning experience and provide students with
the skills they need to succeed as leading creative professionals.
Product Highlights and New Features
Corel Painter X offers a broad range of tools and features that inspire
creativity, increase performance, and further extend compatibility with
other industry-standard tools and applications. It delivers an impressive
array of new features that provide unprecedented power to replicate
traditional art media—right down to the individual bristles on the brush.
Increased Performance:
Corel Painter X has been optimized to provide artists with the fastest
version of Painter—ever! Depending on system hardware, brushes perform up to
35% faster—and file opening and saving is up to two times faster!
New RealBristle Painting System:
The new RealBristle Painting System heightens the responsiveness of the
brush and represents a major milestone for digital painting. Artists can now
faithfully replicate the sensation of the interaction between the paint, the
canvas, and the brush.
New Composition Tools:
New composition tools help artists and photographers visually arrange a
blank canvas prior to sketching or painting, or create an aesthetically
pleasing composition from a photo using the Divine Proportion tool and the
Rule of Thirds. Used throughout history by artists, designers, and
architects alike, the Divine Proportion will help you compose your paintings
like the masters! Similarly, professional photographers often use the Rule
of Thirds to compose their photographs.
New Workspace Manager:
Corel Painter X allows you to easily customize and back up your workspaces
as well as export and share them with your friends and colleagues.
Enhanced Photo-Painting System:
It's now easier than ever for photographers to create stunning paintings
from photographs! Major improvements offer greater control when
Underpainting, and the new Smart Strokes technology adds more intelligence
during Auto-painting.
The Underpainting palette includes color schemes based on various artistic
styles, such as Impressionist, Classical, Modern, Watercolor, Sketchbook,
and Chalk Drawing. You can also match your Underpainting's palette to that
of any open image
The Auto-Painting Palette transforms a
photograph into a painting by automatically applying brushstrokes while
intelligently changing stroke size and direction using new Smart Stroke
technology.
New Downloadable Training Videos:
Get up and running quickly with the new training videos by Painter Master
Jeremy Sutton!
New Universal Mixer palette:
For multicolor selection, the new Universal Mixer palette gives you better
control over color blending between the Mixer palette and the canvas.
Dodge and Burn Tools:
Dodge and burn capabilities have been improved with the addition of two new
image enhancement tools to the toolbox. Now preparing photos for paintings
is easier than ever!
Enhanced Adobe Photoshop support:
With improved layer grouping and combining, and enhanced support for layer
merge modes, artists can more efficiently work between Corel Painter X and
Adobe Photoshop.
Enhanced Wacom Support: Artists can use the entire Wacom product
line—including the Cintiq 21 UX interactive pen display, the Intuos3 pen
tablet, and the Wacom 6D Art Pen.
New Printed User Guide:
Full and Upgrade customers receive a color printed User Guide which provides
useful reference information and fast solutions. Also includes a 16-page art
gallery.
New Match Palette effect:
The new Match Palette effect lets you match the color and intensity between
two images. Just open an image that features your desired color scheme and
use the Match Palette effect to bring the desired color scheme to the image
you want to change.
Windows Vista Support:
Corel Painter X is compatible with Microsoft's latest operating system -
Windows Vista.
Intel-based Mac Support:
With support for Universal binary specifications, Corel Painter X is
optimized for use on Intel-based Mac computers.
What's Included with Corel Painter X?
Main Application:
Corel Painter X – Mac OS and Windows versions
Content Libraries of unique textures, gradients, nozzles, patterns, stock
photos and brushes, including the new RealBristle brush category
Documentation
Printed Documentation – Full-color, printed User Guide including art gallery
Electronic Documentation – Help files (HTML) and User Guide with advanced
topics (PDF)
Training
Access to select downloadable training videos featuring renowned Painter
Master Jeremy Sutton
What's Up With Painter X?
Corel Painter X is the newest upgrade to this always solid, powerful
illustration and design program that provides amazing electronic tools that
emulate the process of artistic design. This newest version 10 continues in
the long tradition of Corel of including many new features, upgrades, and
innovations to the program that provide on a PC a tool that brings the
experience of painting from a canvas to the computer. In this program, you
can actually use all the various tools used in painting, including brushes,
palette knives, pens, pencils, airbrushes, chalk, pastels, and so on, while
also allowing you to work on paper, canvas, or just about any other
real-world medium you can think of.
In addition, in this upgrade, a noteworthy improvement is not so much an
art-creation improvement as a technical upgrade: The program now runs
natively on Intel-based Macs, as well as in Windows. Improvements under the
hood add up to performance gains all around (especially for MacIntel users),
gains that alone would be worth the price of an upgrade. Luckily, increased
speed and compatibility are not all Painter X has to offer.
One of the neatest of the many upgrades is the new RealBristle brush
category, which lets you exercise control over the hairs that form your
virtual brush. Tweak the settings to control the overall shape of the brush
tip, bristle length and rigidity, and "fanning," which is how much the
bristles splay on the canvas. Painter has long offered brushes that make
bristley-looking strokes, and the advances here can be subtle to the
untrained eye and hand. However, experienced digital artists—especially
those from a "real world" painting background—will find that these subtle
improvements in the brush control can mean dramatically improved results.
The ability to use multiple colors from the Mixer palette with brushes
besides Artists' Oils is also new in Painter X. The Mixer palette now lets
you mix and paint with multiple colors with Painter brushes using the dab
types Camel Hair, Flat, Bristle Spray, Watercolor Camel, Watercolor Flat,
and Watercolor Bristle.
Dab types are listed in the Window menu's Brush Controls palette under the
General category. You can set just about any brush to have these dab types,
which means the brush can lift colors from the Mixer palette once you choose
one of the above dab types.
As you might suppose, a graphics tablet is highly recommended gear for using Painter,
and the RealBristle brushes take full advantage of Wacom technology,
including the 6D Art Pen. A related and excellent new Painter feature is the
"Enhanced Brush Ghost" preference that adds dynamic visual feedback to your
brush cursor, showing the angle, tilt, and rotation of your stylus relative
to the tablet.
Painter X isn't just about the mechanics of painting. The program also
includes new tools to help you take advantage of some of the theories behind
the art. Corel's latest offering utilizes the concept of "divine
proportion," a centuries-old compositional technique based on a ratio said
to occur throughout nature. From painter Leonardo da Vinci to architect Le
Corbusier, artists in just about every discipline have used the divine
proportion (also known as the golden ratio) to structure their works.
Painter X helps you to take advantage of it by means of a customizable
spiraling overlay. The eye of the spiral should rest over the focal point of
your composition, with points of lesser interest arrayed at key points along
the spiral. Use this system to create a pleasing composition that adds to
your work's appeal.
Another new feature, one perhaps more familiar to photographers, is the new
Layout Grid's "Rule of Thirds" preset. This provides another handy
compositional aid. Basically, this places an imaginary grid composed of nine
equal-sized boxes over an image to help you line up your subject or subjects
on one or more of the four spots where the vertical and horizontal lines
cross. Placing your subjects near one of these spots can improve the
aesthetics of your image. This is also a technique that's been used for
centuries in both painting and photography, and it's a welcome addition to
Painter.
First introduced in the "lite" program Painter Essentials 3, Painter's
Auto-Painting palette let you automatically apply a hand-painted look to
digital photos. Now, in Painter X, the new Smart Stroke feature uses edge
detection to apply the strokes intelligently to the contours and discrete
areas in your photo. This elevates the entire auto-painting process from a
"fun gimmick" to a useful tool.
Every copy of Painter X comes with a little man inside the software who
paints for you. Or at least it seems that way, thanks to the new Smart
Stroke settings in the Auto-Painting palette. When you click Smart Stroke
Painting and Smart Settings and turn on Auto-Painting, Painter applies brush
strokes with varying widths, lengths, and pressures to follow the forms of
the original photo.
One of the differences between a photo and a painting is that generally, a
painting has a limited color scheme while a photo has more random colors.
With this basic art concept in mind, Corel added three tools in Painter X to
help photographers create limited color schemes in paintings from photos.
Two of these tools are in the Underpainting Palette in the Color Scheme
drop-down menu. First, there's a new list of color schemes based on media
styles, such as Impressionist, Classical, Modern, Watercolor, Sketchbook,
and Chalk Drawing. With a photo open, you select one of these schemes and
Painter updates the photo's colors to match the selected scheme.
Second, you can now also choose a color scheme that matches the colors of
any open image by selecting the open image in the Color Scheme drop-down
menu. Want to use Monet's color palette? Open a photo and a Monet and choose
the Monet in the Color Scheme menu.
Once you've chosen a color scheme or an open image, you can then adjust the
results using the sliders in the Photo Enhance section of the Underpainting
palette. The third way to adjust your color scheme is with Painter X's new
Match Palette, found in the Effects menu under Tonal Control. Using Match
Palette, you can bring in the colors from another image, which is similar to
the Color Scheme menu in the Underpainting palette. The difference is that
with the Match Palette, you adjust how the source image combines with the
current image.
Photographers like to offer painterly photos as another possibility to their
clients, and Corel really hit the spot for photographers with the
Auto-Painting palette (introduced in Painter IX.5) and these enhancements in
Painter X. When you use them together, Painter X's smart stroke features and
the color scheme options speed up the painting process without creating
cookie-cutter filter effects.
The new Layout Grid composition tool provides guidelines that follow
photography's Rule of Thirds but can be customized to other grid patterns.
The grid helps you to visually arrange the canvas or a photo before you draw
or paint. The Layout Grid is an alternative to the Divine Proportion tool:
Artists will probably be more familiar with the Divine Proportion concept,
while photographers will probably relate to the rule of thirds in the Layout
Grid. You can use either when you're painting from scratch or turning photos
into paintings.
Painter has always had a cursor that adjusts in width based on size settings
in the Property Bar, which is similar to Photoshop's cursor. However,
Photoshop's cursor remains visible when you apply a brush stroke, but
Painter's would disappear. In Painter X, the cursor now shows the size of
the stroke continuously.
Painter's Dodge and Burn tools have been enhanced and added to the Toolbox,
making them more readily accessible. With every Painter upgrade come new
libraries of goodies, and Painter X is no exception. There aren't enough
hours in the day to play with all the new gradients, nozzles, patterns,
stock photos, and paper textures.
Some changes may not be visible, but they are definitely felt. Painter X is
faster than Painter IX, which was itself very fast. Operations such as
opening images and painting with the brushes are very speedy in this
version.
There are many more new features and enhancements that make Corel Painter X
a compelling upgrade for current users and a must-have program for anyone
with a serious interest in digital painting.
Minimum System Requirements
Windows
P-III 700MHz or faster processor
Windows Vista, XP, 2000 (Latest SP)
360MH free hard disk space
256MB RAM (512MB RAM recommended)
Mouse or tablet
24-bit color display
1024 × 768 screen resolution
CD-ROM drive
NOTE:
As you might expect with this high powered designer program, the more
RAM and the faster the CPU, the better this program will work. Most all
similar graphics design or illustration programs are resource intensive applications that will
severely challenge minimally configured systems. I strongly suggest folks
considering this application seriously consider running this with 1GB RAM and a
higher end processor. In addition, this minimum hard drive
space is based on a typical install, and a user should remember storing
numerous graphics files can easily eat up hard drive space.
Price
$419 full price
$219 upgrade price
Bottom Line
Corel Corporation
With the introduction of CorelDRAW in 1989, Corel helped to define
computer-generated graphics. Since that time, the company has built a global
reputation for excellence in software innovation and design, earning it the
trust and loyalty of millions of users worldwide. With CorelDRAW Graphics
Suite and WordPerfect Office, Corel continues to provide customers with two
of the world's most recognized software titles.
Understanding that visual images power the communication of ideas,
professional designers, students and business users alike turn to CorelDRAW
Graphics Suite to accelerate their productivity and amplify the impact of
their work. The premiere graphics suite for Windows, it delivers unrivaled
value with three award-winning applications in one box: CorelDRAW for vector
illustration and page layout; Corel PHOTO-PAINT for professional digital
imaging; and Corel R.A.V.E. for motion graphics creation.
Corel's award-winning line of graphics products also includes Corel Painter,
the digital sketching and painting tool of choice for fine artists,
photographers, commercial designers and story-board artists, Corel KnockOut,
the Corel KPT Collection and Corel DESIGNER, a set of precision tools for
creating detailed technical drawings.
WordPerfect Office is Corel's office productivity suite. The company
supports a high number of users worldwide who depend on the unique
capabilities of WordPerfect Office—a feature-rich, value-priced suite that
combines word processing, spreadsheet, presentation and address book
applications. Widely deployed across government departments, legal firms and
small-to medium-sized businesses, WordPerfect Office is compatible with
popular file formats such as Microsoft Office, PDF, HTML and XML - making it
easy for users to share information with their colleagues and clients.
Every day, millions of users depend on Corel software to capture and
communicate their ideas. Although these individuals may have different
priorities, they share a need for powerful, dependable software that enables
them to easily capture and share their ideas with others. Corel is dedicated
to addressing these needs with exceptional software that is responsive,
efficient and enjoyable to use.
With its headquarters in Ottawa, Canada, and regional offices in the United
States, Europe and Australia, Corel works with an established network of
International partners to serve its customers around the globe.
Contact:
Kelly Manuel
PR Manager, Graphics
Corel Corporation
46430 Fremont Blvd.
Fremont, CA 94538, USA
613-728-0826, Ext. 1223
Cell: 613-668-5483
kelly.manuel@corel.com
www.corel.com
To order, call 1-800-772-6735 (Monday-Friday, 9:00am. - 7:00pm EST) |
Corel Painter X