Getting Intimate with Corel Painter IX

Speed has always been a factor in selecting a graphic program and with that fact in mind, Corel Painter IX has been endowed with brushes that can go up to ten times faster than version VIII. This is an important feature that all designers are sure to be grateful of.

A new Rotate/Flip command for the canvas has been added with customizable shortcut keys function that is sure to help speed up your work. An enhancement to the brush tracker feature is present called the "Iterative save." This is comparable to Adobe Photoshop’s layer comp feature. Users can now use a "snap to path" painting tool that can really add some speed to drawing while using shapes, and paths.

There is new category of natural media brushes, called Artists' Oils, which act more like traditional oil paints enabling the digital artist create artworks in the manner that natural painters make theirs.

With textured surfaces, brushes, and tools, you can mimic painting and drawing with chalk, pastels, watercolors, oils, crayons, pencil, felt pens, ink, and more.

The Digital Watercolor now features paint that remains "wet" between sessions enabling the artist to play with the brushes even after he has painted the strokes.

The inclusion of cloning tool called the Quick Clone helps in making the cloning process faster and simple. You will only have to click on the menu and you are now set make clones.
Version IX has even included a total of 7 KPT filters namely Gel, Goo, LensFlare, Lightning, Pyramid Paint, Reaction, and ShapeShifter which are good effects that the artist can play with.
Painter has even gone to address compatibility issues with Adobe Photoshop enabling itself to open images in PSD format complete with layer masks, channels and layer sets maintained. It has also included support for Wacom Intuos3.

Included also are additional learning resources including a 175-page spiral-bound handbook containing artwork and tutorials from Painter experts, tutorial movies from Lynda.com, and a updated User Guide in PDF format.
In essence, having Painter IX is a software that should be in a digital artist’s toolbox. It has features that are sure to give the digital artist an edge.