Thread: Corel Painter 11

Corel's Painter is meant for 2D artists who normally use a canvas and painting and drawing tools to create artwork. The interface hasn't changed a lot from previous versions. One of the nice features of Painter is the mixer window that lets you add and mix colours like they would m a real palette. Painter even lets you use different kinds of canvas and there are some brushes like the watercolours that won't work on regular canvas.

Thankfully, layers are present so you can separate bits and pieces of a painting. The watercolour and spray paints spread on paper like they would in real life. So, there is very good attention to detail and at the same time, it makes Painter good fun to use.

There is no shortage of of brushes and there are plenty of presets for each kind of brush. The application is really simple to get used to and layout is more or less like any other image editor. There is basic provision for creating animations as well. Although, painters don't usually use effects tools, there are the basic effects such as blur and color tone changing tools in Painter.

The improvements and additions to this version are basically a few brushes. There is a noticeable improvement in performance. We tried on different systems including a Pentium 4 with a gigabyte of RAM and it ran perfectly fine. We also had the Wacom lntuos 4 tablet with us for review and it worked well with Painter.

Painter 11 is excellent for anyone deeply interested in painting and sketching. There are a few alternatives but Painter is probably the most matured one of the lot.
A slightly simpler and open interface would be nice.