Corel Painter 2015 is the latest release of Corel’s advanced digital art studio software, which aims to allow artists to pursue their creative endeavors in new and inspiring ways. It includes not ony the traditional style of painting in a digital environment, but creating works based on photographs as well. And of course you don’t have to clean up a mess or expose yourself to vapors and chemicals.
Corel Painter 2015
Corel Painter is aimed at five major groups. One is commercial designers who require tools to create their visions for architecture, graphic design, and illustration. Next are concept artists who need tools to speed their production time as well as create astounding scenes for animation, movie, and video games. In recent years, photographers too have begun using Corel Painter to explore new avenues for creative work, and additional revenue. Then there are the fine artists who use digital as “just another medium” within the world of fine art. Finally there are students and teachers of art or design who want the ability to learn their craft without the cost that comes with using real-world materials.
What is new with this version of Corel Painter?
Corel Painter 2015 – Art by Don Seegmiller
• Particle Brushes are physics-inspired brushes that emit particles from a central point. These particles then draw a pattern of lines or paths as they move across the canvas. The paths of the particles can be controlled with precision or you can introduce randomness through the Particle Brush control panel. There are three types of Particle Brushes: gravity brushes which use force to shrink and grow with movement; flow brushes which emit particles along a path and flow out from the center of the brush; and spring brushes which create shapes that bend and distort with movement, appear held together by elastic springs, and bounce back toward the center of the brush. You control a brush’s behavior by manipulating a variety of real-time input factors.
• Real-Time Stylus and Windows Tablet PC support means that you now have mobile support for Corel Painter. The mobile interface works to maximize screen space while giving you a lot of the same tools that you have in the desktop application, including paint, eyedropper, paint bucket, eraser, crop tool, transform, and the grabber. You even have layers, for detailed control.
• Custom user interface palette arrangements now offer preset layouts to choose from. These arrangements allow you to hide, display and reposition elements within the workspace. What this means is that if you are in a traditional painting workflow, you can have one set of arrangements. If you are in a design workflow, you can have another completely separate setup, and if you work with photographs, a third. The ones that come with Painter 2015 include one for illustration, one for photo art, and one for getting started with the new particle brushes. There is also a quick switch option that allows you to switch between your two most frequently used arrangements.
• Jitter Smoothing lets you control the randomness of your digital brushes. This is an improvement on the Universal Jitter that was added in the X3 version of Painter to add randomness to your strokes. Jitter Smoothing improves on this functionality to make your strokes more realistic and makes your brushes even more customizable, giving you options to control the smoothing through angle, flow and color.
Corel Painter 2015
• Native 64-bit application for Mac now provides performance improvement that has only been available on the PC version. This means that you now have faster speed especially in intensive operations such as working with layers, transforming, rotating, and zooming. You will also see better accuracy and improvements to brush performance.
• Cross-Platform CPU performance optimizations include brush improvements, dialog improvements, and optimization of power consumption which will really help those who use Painter on a laptop computer.
• Real-Time Previews of effects such as image lighting and surface texture let you see the effect applied as a real-time preview, as opposed to seeing it applied to a preview window as in prior versions. This means that you can see what the effects will look like while you are still in the dialog box, as opposed to going back and forth between the image and the dialog panel.
Corel Painter 2015
• Brush tracking has been improved quite a bit. It now allows you to calibrate each brush individually. This gives you the kind of control that you would have if you were using real-world art materials. Since some brushes work better with a lighter touch, you can make that adjustment; other brushes work better with more pressure so you can adjust to that as well.