The best in artistic disarray. A small review of Corel Painter X3
Overview of the package Corel Painter X3, which remains the unsurpassed standard in the field of computer simulation of natural tools and materials for artists.
Two years after the release of the twelfth version of Painter, Corel released the X3, consonant with the X in the name of the flagship CorelDRAW X6. The most anticipated innovations relate to work with brushes, the main bet was clearly made on improvements in this direction. Let's start with them ...
Search brushes | A text search field appeared in the upper right corner of the program. It is enough to enter the name of the brush or a part of its properties, for example, “oil”, and these brushes will appear in the drop-down list. Moreover, there may be several key words - “flat oil”, etc. Considering that there are 30 types of brushes in Painter and each one contains several subspecies, this is a great help. The barrier can only be difficulties with English and international dislike of artists to work with the keyboard. In addition to the list of brushes, the search shows a preliminary view of the brush, according to which it is easy to make a choice. Holding directly from the list, you can draw out the brushes by creating your own palette of brushes. By the way, specifying X3 or 13 in the search, you will see brushes that appeared in the new version.
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Jitter brush options | The parameter jitter, familiar from some illustrative packages, is responsible for the naturalness of the strokes. In the new version of the parameters of some brushes, you can set the degree of unevenness or fluctuations in the process of drawing. These can be grain, brush size, transparency, slope angle, ink quantity, color expressiveness and airbrush parameters. By setting the degree of variability, you can give that same roughness and appearance inherent in natural tools. The oscillation of the general parameters can be set for all brushes, but in addition, 25 more parameters specific for certain types of brushes have been added.
More brush settings | In general, the brush settings palettes have more parameters, which makes it possible to more flexibly adjust parameters and view changes in real time. And the Advanced Brush Control palette displays the parameters in the context of the selected brush, without overloading the interface with extra palettes. Otherwise (if you display all the variety of brush settings), the program window will resemble the cockpit of a passenger airliner.
Guides for perspective | The new type of guides facilitates drawing in view of the perspective and replaces the perspective grid. One, two, and three-point perspectives are available in the settings. A special tool allows you to flexibly adjust the point of convergence. Included are four pre-settings for perspective distortion. The guides, as usual, can be included in the sticking mode in order for the strokes to be built in the given directions.
Clone mode | Improvements have undergone cloning mode, becoming more visible. Now the original image can be “put on” under the cloned, so that it will shine through, or display it aside - the cursor in the form of a cross will indicate the position of the cloned area.
Miscellaneous | Of the improvements that do not claim to be revolutionary, I will mention the Reference Image Panel, where you can upload a file in one of the main formats and use it as a source of inspiration, or take color samples from it with a pipette. The Mixer palette, among other things, now allows you to select one of four color palettes created by Corel Painter's masters: Jeremy Sutton, Karen Bonaker, Skip Allen, and John Macolm. The benefits of these palettes in the program seem to me dubious, although the opportunity to look over the shoulder of the leading figures of the profession can really inspire someone. Expanded support for multi-touch gestures in the entire line of Wacom tablets including Intous 5 and Cintiq 24HD. In terms of performance, work has been done to support the work with the entire amount of memory for Mac users. And subjectively, the stability of the program has increased.
Photoshop format support | Improved support for Photoshop (PSD format) as the main competitor and at the same time true Painter workmate in the artist's work - the work with alpha channels has been fixed, but not everything is transferred either during export or during import. In an empty document saved from Photoshop CS6 with one text layer with no effects, Painter found unsupported effects or modifying layers, although there were none, which indicates a lack of understanding of the PSD format.
And yet, despite the long-standing acquaintance with Painter, the feeling of annoying gaps in the product concept does not leave me. For example, such trivial operations as working with layers, only now acquire basic capabilities. Developers presented as an improvement the ability to transform several layers at a time!
What's next | In the next free updates, Painter will support Leap Motion technology. With the help of a small device that reads the movement of the hand in the air, it will be possible to draw without any hand-made tools like a tablet and a pen, just with all fingers. Just the other day, HP introduced the first laptop equipped with a similar sensor, called the HP Envy 17 Leap Motion Special Edition. It is still unclear how much this will be in demand, since technologies like Kinect or tools like theremin do not go away into oblivion, but occupy a rather narrow niche.
Results | Painter on the field of digital painting is “perpendicular” to other products, without competitors due to the magnificent imitation of natural tools and materials used by artists. However, it would not hurt the developers to take a closer look at the most popular functions of the best vector and raster editors. The new version expands the tools at the expense of additional properties of brushes and convenient search capabilities on them.
Based on COREL Magazine
Two years after the release of the twelfth version of Painter, Corel released the X3, consonant with the X in the name of the flagship CorelDRAW X6. The most anticipated innovations relate to work with brushes, the main bet was clearly made on improvements in this direction. Let's start with them ...
Search brushes | A text search field appeared in the upper right corner of the program. It is enough to enter the name of the brush or a part of its properties, for example, “oil”, and these brushes will appear in the drop-down list. Moreover, there may be several key words - “flat oil”, etc. Considering that there are 30 types of brushes in Painter and each one contains several subspecies, this is a great help. The barrier can only be difficulties with English and international dislike of artists to work with the keyboard. In addition to the list of brushes, the search shows a preliminary view of the brush, according to which it is easy to make a choice. Holding directly from the list, you can draw out the brushes by creating your own palette of brushes. By the way, specifying X3 or 13 in the search, you will see brushes that appeared in the new version.
')
Jitter brush options | The parameter jitter, familiar from some illustrative packages, is responsible for the naturalness of the strokes. In the new version of the parameters of some brushes, you can set the degree of unevenness or fluctuations in the process of drawing. These can be grain, brush size, transparency, slope angle, ink quantity, color expressiveness and airbrush parameters. By setting the degree of variability, you can give that same roughness and appearance inherent in natural tools. The oscillation of the general parameters can be set for all brushes, but in addition, 25 more parameters specific for certain types of brushes have been added.
More brush settings | In general, the brush settings palettes have more parameters, which makes it possible to more flexibly adjust parameters and view changes in real time. And the Advanced Brush Control palette displays the parameters in the context of the selected brush, without overloading the interface with extra palettes. Otherwise (if you display all the variety of brush settings), the program window will resemble the cockpit of a passenger airliner.
Guides for perspective | The new type of guides facilitates drawing in view of the perspective and replaces the perspective grid. One, two, and three-point perspectives are available in the settings. A special tool allows you to flexibly adjust the point of convergence. Included are four pre-settings for perspective distortion. The guides, as usual, can be included in the sticking mode in order for the strokes to be built in the given directions.
Clone mode | Improvements have undergone cloning mode, becoming more visible. Now the original image can be “put on” under the cloned, so that it will shine through, or display it aside - the cursor in the form of a cross will indicate the position of the cloned area.
Miscellaneous | Of the improvements that do not claim to be revolutionary, I will mention the Reference Image Panel, where you can upload a file in one of the main formats and use it as a source of inspiration, or take color samples from it with a pipette. The Mixer palette, among other things, now allows you to select one of four color palettes created by Corel Painter's masters: Jeremy Sutton, Karen Bonaker, Skip Allen, and John Macolm. The benefits of these palettes in the program seem to me dubious, although the opportunity to look over the shoulder of the leading figures of the profession can really inspire someone. Expanded support for multi-touch gestures in the entire line of Wacom tablets including Intous 5 and Cintiq 24HD. In terms of performance, work has been done to support the work with the entire amount of memory for Mac users. And subjectively, the stability of the program has increased.
Photoshop format support | Improved support for Photoshop (PSD format) as the main competitor and at the same time true Painter workmate in the artist's work - the work with alpha channels has been fixed, but not everything is transferred either during export or during import. In an empty document saved from Photoshop CS6 with one text layer with no effects, Painter found unsupported effects or modifying layers, although there were none, which indicates a lack of understanding of the PSD format.
And yet, despite the long-standing acquaintance with Painter, the feeling of annoying gaps in the product concept does not leave me. For example, such trivial operations as working with layers, only now acquire basic capabilities. Developers presented as an improvement the ability to transform several layers at a time!
What's next | In the next free updates, Painter will support Leap Motion technology. With the help of a small device that reads the movement of the hand in the air, it will be possible to draw without any hand-made tools like a tablet and a pen, just with all fingers. Just the other day, HP introduced the first laptop equipped with a similar sensor, called the HP Envy 17 Leap Motion Special Edition. It is still unclear how much this will be in demand, since technologies like Kinect or tools like theremin do not go away into oblivion, but occupy a rather narrow niche.
Results | Painter on the field of digital painting is “perpendicular” to other products, without competitors due to the magnificent imitation of natural tools and materials used by artists. However, it would not hurt the developers to take a closer look at the most popular functions of the best vector and raster editors. The new version expands the tools at the expense of additional properties of brushes and convenient search capabilities on them.
Based on COREL Magazine
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/200450/
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