Corel Painter IX

Corel Painter stands out from other bitmap applications because, rather than editing existing work, its emphasis is on the creation of original art. Central to this is Painter's amazing range of art media tools, such as its oil brushes and watercolours, designed to mimic their real-world counterparts.

Previous versions have produced impressive results, but such lifelike performance comes from calculating a bewildering amount of interacting parameters on-the-fly - going some way to explain Painter's longstanding reputation for bugs and lack of speed. Thankfully, Corel has put responsiveness and reliability at the top of the list in this latest release, and while we'll have to wait to see how robust the application proves in the long term, Corel claims the speed of Painter's brushes has improved by up to ten times and by an average of two. That's not an unfounded claim, but you'll still need a powerful system to really do this program justice. Alternatively, you can now increase the speed of many brushes with the new Boost setting in the Brush Control's General tab, although why it isn't on by default is unclear.

Of course, efficiency doesn't depend exclusively on speed, and Corel is also promoting a host of new productivity enhancements, such as the ability to create your own customisable keyboard shortcuts. There's also the new Welcome screen, which provides access to recently used files, brush tracking and an improved range of tutorials. Integration with Photoshop has also been improved, with support for PSD-based layer sets, layer masks and alpha channels. There are also new commands to rotate images, to automatically save numbered versions of your file and to set up cloning in one step rather than the usual four.

But these are really just minor tweaks. Painter's real power stems largely from its brushes, and Corel is making much of version IX's ability to access all the parameters that define a brush from the numerous Brush Controls palettes - no less than 19 options present themselves, from Size and Spacing through to Colour Expression and Colour Variability. It's difficult to get too excited about this, however, as it's exactly how Painter used to work before version 8 rationalised the chaos with its excellent modeless Brush Creator dialog. Rather more useful are the changes to the Tracker palette, which stores the settings for the last 20 brushes used. Now you can lock brushes to stop them dropping off the Tracker list and settings are stored between sessions. It's definitely a step forward, but it would be better if all brushes were automatically stored with their images.

It isn't just the handling improvements that will get Painter users excited, as there's also some new creative power. A revamp of Painter's Digital Watercolour brushes means that paint will now stay wet between sessions and that you can now retrospectively control the fringing effect caused by pigment pooling at the edge of strokes. New options are also provided by the bundling of a number of Corel's KPT filters - Gel, Goo, LensFlare, Lightning, ShapeShifter, Reaction and Pyramid Paint - though it's only the last two that are clearly artistic in intent.

All very nice, but Corel Painter IX is seriously in need of a must-have killer feature, and this comes in the shape of an entirely new category of brush - Artist's Oils. Painter has always offered impressive oil brushes, mimicking the effect of loading a bristled brush with viscous paint, interacting with strokes already laid down, running out of paint and revealing any underlying paper grain. But Artist's Oils takes this one step further; what's different is the way they've been designed to interact with the Mixer palette. Here you can mix pigments based on real-world oil paints - Prussian Green, Burnt Sienna, Cadmium Orange and so on - and then sample the colour ready for painting. Crucially, you can also now sample an area of the Mixer's paint, loading the brush with various pigments simultaneously. And, with the new Dirty Mode option selected, the brush doesn't automatically start fresh again for your next stroke so that you regularly need to reload from the Mixer, and any paint remaining on the brush interacts with the new paint that you pick up. It takes some getting used to, but it mimics perfectly the process of applying paint and using a mixing palette.