Corel Painter 11 review

Over the years Corel Painter has built up a well-deserved reputation as the most powerful creative bitmap editing program for computer-based artists. Key to its success is its wide range of brushes designed to mimic traditional artistic media such as watercolours, impasto, oils and so on.

Each new release tends to see a major new crop of brushes providing ever greater artistic realism. However this time the changes are relatively minor. There's a new range of Markers which let you create one continuous shade with a single stroke while further overlapping strokes build up the colour intensity. There are also a couple of new Pen variants which vary in width depending on the speed with which you draw, plus some new hard media brush variants and controls for the way shading changes when you vary the angle of your pen on your tablet (assuming it's tilt-sensitive).

A couple of these introductions might occasionally prove useful - the leaky marker in particular - but they hardly break new ground and, with hundreds of brushes, variants and parameters to choose from already, most users simply won't spot they are there. So what else is new? Good question. In previous releases, Corel has done good work developing Painter's artistic cloning capabilities for converting existing photographs into art. Bizarrely, however, this entire area, Painter's greatest strength, is left untouched.

And it's not as if there's a new focus of development to replace it. There aren't even any new filters. Instead Corel is left trumpeting the benefits of its new approach to colour management based on an Adobe-style system of embedded profiles. It should help when working with Photoshop but it adds extra complexity and scope for confusion. In any case, accurate colour matching is less of an issue for originated art than it is for photographs so, again, most upgraders simply won't notice this new highlight. It's even more unlikely that they'll notice the fact that the Colour wheel now also offers RGB sliders or that, if you increase the size of the Mixer palette, a couple of extra swatches appear.

Which means the one practical difference that the average user is likely to benefit from in Painter 11 is the new selection handling. Here there's a new Polygonal lasso and minor improvements to the other selection tools. And once you've made a selection, you can now call up a Free Transform tool to reposition, resize and rotate. In other words Painter 11 has finally caught up with the sort of selection power that every other bitmap editor has always offered.

So there you have it. Painter 11 still has a lot to offer the serious artist, but a full two years after Painter X there's almost nothing here of any interest for existing users. A massive disappointment.

Author: Tom Arah