Corel Painter 11

Creative Art Studio Software for Windows and Macintosh

Corel Painter is the ultimate creative art studio software for Windows and Macintosh. If your talents lean toward the artistic, Corel Painter is a must-have tool for maximum creative expression in a digital environment. With textured surfaces, brushes, and tools, you can mimic painting and drawing with chalk, pastels, watercolors, oils, crayons, pencil, felt pens, ink, and so much more.

• Hundreds of brushes in over 30 mediums with the ability to customize or create new brushes with infinite variety. Painter brush mediums include: acrylics, airbrushes, artists oils, blenders, calligraphy pens, chalks, charcoal, cloners, colored pencils, conté, crayons, digital watercolor, distortion, erasers, felt pens, gouache, impasto, liquid ink, oil pastels, oils, palette knives, pastels, pattern pens, pencils, pens, photo, sponges, sumi-e, tinting and watercolor.

• Paper textures that interact with your brush strokes like traditional media.

• Artists' Oils which work like traditional oil paints. Artists' Oils let you pick up blended colors on your brush, blend paints on the canvas, and apply strokes with a finite amount of paint that runs out as you paint.

• Liquid Ink technology that mimics the viscosity and surface texture of a thick, gluey medium.

• Watercolor technology that closely simulates true watercolor painting and remains "wet" between sessions.

• Impasto brushes for thick dimensional paint that builds up texture.

• RealBristle brushes which behave more like real brushes against the canvas. 16 new RealBristle brush variants are included.

• Divine Proportion and Layout Grid composition tools to aid in visual arrangement of the composition.

• Cloning and tracing tools to create new artwork based on another image or photo. The Quick Clone feature sets up an image for cloning in one step.

• Image hoses and pattern pens that allow you to paint with photographic images and patterns.

• A Mixer Palette that allows you to mix paint colors interactively.

• The Match Palette effect for duplicating colors between two images.

• A Brush Creator tool for designing and customizing brushes interactively. Within the Brush Creator users can test their brush creations on a scratchpad area.

• A Brush Tracker palette which provides access to the last 24 brushes used while working on a painting.

• Snap-to-path painting lets users constrain a brush stroke to a path or shape.

• A text tool that supports curved text, text on a path, shadows, and other text effects.

• Perspective grids to aid in setting up and drawing three dimensional images.

• Dodge and Burn tools for lightening and darkening areas in a photo in preparation for painting.

• Effects filters and plugins for correcting color, retouching images, adding special effects. Dynamic plugins that can be modified on the fly without modifying the source image. Painter also supports most Photoshop-compatible plugins.

• KPT Effects Filters: Gel, Goo, LensFlare, Lightning, Pyramid Paint, Reaction, and ShapeShifter.

• A scripting engine that lets you record any series of operations and play them back with one click to automate your work or create movies. Scripts are automatically saved and can help you recover your work in the event of a system crash.

• Tools for creating and editing animations and video.

• Vector-based drawing tools and shapes.

• Customizable workspace layouts and custom keyboard shortcuts.

• Color management.

• Photoshop compatibility. Users can save and open layered PSD files, keeping layers intact and preserving layer masks, layer sets, alpha channels, and blend modes.

• 40 hard media variants in several categories for drawing and sketching.

• Hard media customization to fine-tune dab profiles, size, transition range, stroke width, and tilt.

• Rendering markers which utilize tablet tilt and build up color as additional strokes are applied.

• A redesigned color palette which is now resizable and with improved controls including keyboard color selection.

• Redesigned mixer palette which is resizable, shows more color swatches, and has a background designed for better color mixing.

• Velocity and tilt control for pen tablet users.

• Improved color management.

• Improved selections tools for more control over selections. Selections more closely mimic Photoshop behavior. There is also a new polygonal selection tool.

• New Transform tool which combines all transform modes and works more like Photoshop transformation.

• Support for the PNG file format.

• Immense variety of natural media tools to realistically simulate traditional media.
• PDF User Guide and downloadable video tutorials ease the learning curve.
• Continued improvement to speed, stability, and compatibility.
• Windows and Mac versions provided on one disc.

• Steep learning curve for artists unfamiliar with graphics software.
• Some interface elements are cumbersome (for example, small dialog boxes and tiny sliders).
• The user interface look and feel is outdated, cluttered, and not optimized for pen use.

Alone or as a companion to Photoshop, Painter brings the maximum in artistic possibilities to digital artists and creative professionals. Keep in mind that you'll need a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet to get the most satisfaction out of Painter.

Rather than try to explain all that you can do with Painter, it's easier if I can show you! Have a look through the gallery of Corel Painter digital art created by our members.

Corel Painter Digital Art Gallery

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