Painter X bristles with new features

 

Gallery

Posted on 6 Feb 2007 at 07:53

Corel has announced the release of Painter X, its natural painting and illustration software.

Described as the next-generation art studio that blurs the line between traditional and digital art, Painter X introduces new composition tools as well as Corel's RealBristle Painting System. According to Corel, it is designed to reproduce real brush effects down to the individual bristles.

The new composition tools comprise the Divine Proportion, which provides guidelines that follow the Divine Proportion (also known as the Golden Ratio) to enable artists to compose their images like the Masters, and the Layout Grid tool, whose guidelines follow photography's Rule of Thirds, though it can also be customised to other grid patterns.

Painter X also includes an improved Photo-Painting System to make it easier to create paintings from photos. Building on the Photo-Painting Palettes in Corel Painter IX.5, it adds an Underpainting Palette that includes colour schemes based on various media styles, such as impressionist, classical, modern, watercolour, sketchbook and chalk drawing. Users can choose a colour scheme that matches the colours of any open image.

The Auto-Painting palette has also been updated with the addition of a Smart Stroke Painting option, which applies brush strokes that follow the forms of the original photo, changing brush size, stroke length and pressure based on the detail and focal areas of the original.

Other new features include the Match Palette effect, which lets users match the colour and intensity between two images, and the Universal Mixer palette, which provides greater control over colour blending between the Mixer palette and the canvas. There are also new Dodge and Burn tools for respectively lightening and darkening areas of an image.

Painter X provides speed improvements in brush performance, opening and saving RIFF files and rendering effects, particularly on Intel Macs, states Corel. Colour management has also been improved for more accurate colour reproduction using ICC 4.0 industry-standard profiles. Users now only need to set up their colour management options once and Painter retains those settings until further adjustments are made. With support for industry standard ICC4.0 colour profiles, Corel Painter X enables artists to focus specifically on their work. Compatibility with Adobe Photoshop has been improved. Layer behaviour is similar to Photoshop, making it easier to move files between the applications, while files saved in the Photoshop (PSD) file format open in Painter with layer masks, alpha channels and layer sets (groups) maintained. Painter X also supports many Photoshop plug-ins for Mac OS X.

There is also extended support for Wacom tablets, including the Cintiq 21 UX interactive pen display and the Intuos3 pen tablet, while the RealBristle Painting System has been designed to provide close integration with Wacom's 6D Art Pen.

'Throughout the development of Corel Painter X, we turned to our customers - including some of the industry's top artists, designers and photographers - to ensure that we were delivering the ultimate art studio for creating their masterpieces,' said Rick Champagne, Product Manager for Corel Painter. 'We asked them to give us their perspectives on the essence of Corel Painter and what it meant to them and their work. "Art and Passion" was the resounding response. These inspirational themes guided us throughout our development and set the tone for the entire application. As a result, Corel Painter X is the most natural, organic and powerful version yet.'