Corel Painter IX.5 [OLD VERSION]

Painter occupies a very particular niche in the world of digital imaging software. Though the latest versions of Photoshop sport an excellent brush tool and ample brush controls, there is nothing to match the power and possibilities of Painter's brush creator. And Painter is truly unique in its emulation of natural media, ranging from thick impasto strokes to naturally drying watercolor, and oil paints that stay wet as long as you please. There is a mixer palette which works exactly like an actual one: new colors can be mixed on the fly as if mixing actual pigments rather than colored pixels. Of course, the digital environment also offers possibilities not available in the real world, and apart from the natural media Painter therefore offers a whole array of fantasy and pattern brushes, as well as distortion filters and blender. As all these can be adjusted and turned into new brushes according to taste, the possibilities are truly limitless. Layering options are numerous, and come with an array of blending methods more extensive than that in PS. Selection possibilities are excellent too, with highly accessible options for saving and reloading particular complex selections. There are some nice filters as well, including a particularly fine bevel tool that allows detailed control of complex bevels. There are, of course, many plug-ins available that can be added according to budget and taste, such as the KPT filters. Painter includes the usual vector pen and shape options, which are excellent for making precise selections or creating smooth shapes.This is, as the name suggests, a painting program. It is not primarily an image editor. It can be used a such, but obviously yields to Photoshop in that regard. It appeals strongly to the individual creativity of the user, and can be inspiring to work with. If you are familiar with PS, you'll have to get used to the Painter interface, which puts similar functions in different places than PS. There are some nifty solutions, such as the possibility of creating a custom box of drawing tools: simply drag the thumbnail of the desired brush into the work area. On the other hand, some options on offer seem superfluous or even confusing. E.g., the "paint outside"/"paint inside"/"paint everywhere" switch achieves something just as easily done by inverting or discarding a selection. As usual with such high end programs, the array of options is apt to make for a cluttered workspace. Fortunately, palettes are all floatable and collapsible.Downsides? Well, yes. Apparently recent versions of Painter have gained speed compared to earlier ones, but the program still seems to have some serious memory management issues. On my PC (1.6Ghz P4, 1Gb RAM, 250 GB harddisk, nVidia GeForce FX 5950 256 MB videocard, Windows XP Home SP1), routine operations like loading a selection or changing the zoom level, and even saving, regularly lead to program freezes that can last for some time (as in: go downstairs, make yourself a cup of coffee), though on the plus side I've experienced no actual crashes. Some brush types also tend to be excruciatingly slow to respond, especially with large brush sizes, which rather detracts from the natural painting feel.Still, Painter remains a more than worthwhile addition to any collection of digital imaging tools. Make sure you also have a drawing tablet, or you will not reap the full benefits of Painters possibilities.

We have used the Painter software with a Wacom pad for many years. It has been a reliable and remarkably intuitive program that can be used at many levels. My wife has used it professionally in her work, and wouldn't be without it.Our focus has been more in the area of painterly fine art, and it is in this category that Painter has been a stellar performer for us. We used Painter V for many years, but when it wouldn't install on Windows XPMCE, we upgraded to this version of Painter. We have used it now for three months without any problems. We have not had any occasion to want to contact technical support, so we cannot address the problems in that area mentioned by some others.Our grandson is an art major at our local university. We gave him the Wacom pad and Painter IX.5 for his birthday. He started using it immediately with his Apple laptop, and had produced some very nice work within two days. The point being, it is more user friendly than many other programs out there. Our children and grandchildren both have used it with excitement, and a feeling of accomplishment at their respective levels.In combination with the Wacom Pad, this program has done a most satisfactory job for our family. All of us recommend it highly.

I did like this program. There are shorcomings. The selection tools are nowhere near as good as what Adobe supplies but it offers some options that Photoshop doesn't have that are really useful for one who combines natural drawings with the digital medium.Then, for no apparent reason as I do a file save every few minutes, it crashed. And it destroyed a file that I'd worked on for a week. There's 128k left (out of about 35MB) and I can't recover it. I phoned customer support. Their recording had all the information about how to buy things but ran for several minutes before (finally) giving an alternate number to call for tech support. I didn't call that one. After several minutes of listening to a recording that had nothing to do with my needs at that moment I was in no mood to listen to another. The support number SHOULD be listed on Corel's help page along with the other numbers listed. A customer SHOULDN'T have to jump hoops to find it!Does anyone from Corel read these things? I hope so, because this is where I stand now.They are not getting any more of my money. Crashes do happen. But they shouldn't take the last saved version with them when they decide to explode. In eight years I've only ever had something like that happen once. It was with GoLive 6.0 and that appeared to be caused by a memory management issue as well. But that program creates back up sites as one works. It doesn't log all of the small saved changes so what's left after a serious crash may not be a completely up to date but it did leave something that could be worked with. Painter didn't. It does offer the iterative save feature (which I will do when I use this program again) but that tends to seem wasteful since each iterative save puts a completely new file on the hard drive. I wouldn't be so mad if there was support staff on hand to suggest options I might not be aware of. But there wasn't. As is often the case now support for a product is moved to the back of the bus where it's hard or impossible to find (which is probably done in the hope that customers won't use it).This could be a great program. It offers digital artists an array of brushes that's to die for. The effects pallette is impressive and the lighting pallette is a joy to work with. The selection tools are another matter. To begin with they've barely been improved on since version 4 when they were owned by Meta Creations. And the old ones used to shut down properly. The current ones don't always do that too well. And they aren't very good about showing the user when it's happening either. It's probably something to do with the memory management issue that another reviewer mentioned. Whatever the case these tools shouldn't wipe out files that have been saved at least a hundred times over the course of a week. Right now they're fully capable of that.The bottom line: the ssues with the selection tools prevent this from being a great product and the lack of accessible support makes it a 'buyer beware'. The buggy selection tools could be lived with if the support was there. But it isn't. Until Corel is interested in supporting their product as well as selling it, don't buy it.