Product Reviews

It has been over 16 months since the last release of Painter, Corel's 'natural media' painting tool. The last major upgrade to version 8 saw Corel take Painter to a new professional level, but judging by the lacklustre interest the company has shown in promoting it, many Painter users feared it would suffer the same fate as Bryce 5 and be sold off cheaply to yet another developer. Thankfully, Corel thought differently and is about to release the most powerful version yet, Painter IX.

Boasting more than a dozen new and improved features, Painter IX has been completely rewritten from the ground up. Corel claims the entire program is more than 10 times faster than previous versions and has improved stability. In terms of operational speed, there are significant differences. Now most brushes and painting effects work in real time, even on 500MHz Macs.

A new welcome screen similar to the one found in Adobe's Creative Suite is the initial interface to Painter IX. Here, you have quick access to recently used files, templates, new tutorials and settings for colour management and brushes. The welcome screen will probably frustrate experienced users, so there's an option to remove it and jump straight into the program.

Taking another cue from Creative Suite is a new Shortcut Keys dialog. Using the same command interface as all of Adobe's CS products, keyboard shortcuts can be assigned, unassigned and swapped to any common task. Usefully, Painter now allows you to print out a list of these shortcuts.

Painter IX includes a new iterative Save feature that allows you to generate numbered versions of a file so you can create

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restorable backups of documents. This feature will drain disk space if you're creating high-resolution documents, but it's a useful feature that doesn't slow down the use of the program as Photoshop's History snapshots or Layered comps do.

There are a couple of outstanding new features. A new set of brush control palettes provides on-the-fly brush control using Painter's dials, sliders and measurement settings. One of the great criticisms of all previous versions was that the ability to create realistic brushes was hidden behind a difficult-to-use interface. Meanwhile, the new Boost control in the General Brush Controls palette lets you accelerate the speed of the brush while you're painting.

Another great new feature is the new Artist Oils Painting system. Once you've mixed your colour in the Mixer palette and start painting on a canvas, each dab of the brush loads a finite amount of 'oil' that runs out while you're painting, just like real paint. Similarly, brush strokes on the canvas interact with existing 'wet' brush marks already on the canvas to create a highly realistic oil-painting effect.

Corel has also improved the Digital Watercolour feature introduced in Painter 8. Since Painter's Digital Watercolour is semi-transparent, artwork that relies on its use isn't as easy to amend as opaque media found in oils or acrylic. In Painter 8, the Digital Watercolour feature was only available during a single session so the feature was virtually redundant on complex images. Now Digital Watercolour paint stays wet between sessions allowing for limitless editing.

Corel clearly sees Painter IX integrating with Adobe's CS. The program is fully compatible with the latest PSD file format, including full support for layer masks, blending modes and layer sets. Similarly, it includes an intuitive colour management system that presents a selection of ICC profiles for a variety of devices using a simple flow chart.

Once again, Corel has released a version of Painter that pushes the standard of digital painting to a new level. This is an essential upgrade for existing users, while those new to digital painting will be pleased to hear that this is the most accessible version of the program to date.