Corel Painter 11 review

It's the only software of its kind, but Painter has never rested on its laurels, and this is a significant upgrade to Corel's painting and drawing program.

The main screen remains much the same, but loyal users will appreciate the lack of surprises. Dragging the Mixer palette off its dock now enables it to be resized, giving you more room to experiment. The Colours selector can also be enlarged, and you can nudge the selected tint with the cursor keys for finer control.

A few other tweaks introduce basic editing tools that Photoshop users may have been missing in Painter. There's a polygonal marquee (more commonly know as a lasso), a much improved 'magic wand' to auto-select areas of similar colour, and a Free Transform tool that makes operations such as scale, skew and rotate easier to apply.

We take colour management for granted in other imaging programs. This is the first release of Painter with full ICC profile handling, ensuring tagged files from digital cameras or programs such as Photoshop are rendered correctly. It's easier to set colour options - though Corel's explanations could be clearer - and you can apply another profile to 'soft proof' output on a device with a different colour space, such as a printer.

One item that remains near the top of our wish list is a higher number of undo steps. The maximum of 32 steps just isn't enough to let you paint without worrying about being able to change your mind.

Even on today's fast PCs, Painter can't keep up with quick strokes using its larger and more complex brushes, so a speed improvement is one of the first things users look for in each upgrade. There's been no big leap, but things do feel more responsive, with Corel claiming a 30 per cent boost. The default canvas and brush sizes remain conspicuously low resolution, and at larger sizes you'll see appreciable lag and occasional alerts asking you to wait while a change is processed.

A big new feature of Painter X was Real Bristle, which used dynamic factors such as the speed of the cursor's movement to make brushes respond more like the real thing. This has now been extended to 'hard' and 'dry' media, and the 40 new brushes include some excellent chalks, crayons and shading pencils. Everyone will benefit from velocity response, which makes quicker strokes come out narrower or less opaque, and there's also more use of tilt, which is supported only by more advanced graphics tablets. Painter is usable with modest input devices - we used Wacom's Bamboo Fun Medium (£132 including VAT from www.amazon.co.uk) - but you may feel you're missing out unless you upgrade to the likes of Wacom's Intuos series.

Different strokes

The variety among the new brushes reflects the wide range of tasks to which Painter is suited. For visualisers, there's a whole set of Markers with a suitably inky feel and a quick build-up of colour when strokes are overlaid. We were disappointed that none of these had the properly scratchy feel of a worn Magic Marker, but the splotchy Leaky Marker is a new favourite. At the other end of the scale, the Real Blenders help get crucial colour details just right in finished artwork.

If you've ever been frustrated by the lack of colour management and selection functions, Painter 11 will be a welcome upgrade. Within the painting tools themselves, the new brushes and enhanced responsiveness bring everyday benefits. At over half the price of the full version, the upgrade does seem a little expensive, and we don't understand why Painter costs the same to download as the boxed version, which comes with an extensive printed manual (otherwise supplied as a PDF) and extra media files. For new users, though, Painter 11 is reasonably priced for a professional package, and now more powerful than ever.