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The handbook is impressive. The people at Corel have finally shown me a user manual that is both:
a. useful
b. doesn’t put me to sleep.
Unlike most software manuals (which I use to prop up table legs occasionally), I actually read and used the Painter IX handbook. The choice to include artwork by half a dozen Painter Master artists in full color definitely brightens up the book. You get a good history of the software, and a list of what was new with each previous version. Then they really push the new features for Painter IX, of course. It’s the back of the book that’s handy: an in-depth workspace tour that explains the different palettes and toolbars, and nine different tutorials written by Corel Painter Masters, whose careers cover a wide range of fields from animators to conceptual artists to illustrators. No matter what you plan to use Painter IX to do, there is at least one tutorial included that will help you get the most out of this product. I’ve tried out several of them and found something useful in each one.

Another thing that Corel has gotten right: the role of the welcome screen. Most welcome screens are obnoxious little pop-ups that feed the egos of the programmers, and maybe give you a “tip of the day” but otherwise serve as nothing more than a speed bump to productivity. Not so for the new Painter IX welcome screen. Divided into four different tabs, like a notebook, it starts you off with a random sample of Painter created artwork from one of their Nine Masters (and a link to the artist’s website), and your standard “Create a new document” menu. The other tabs include a “Featured Artist” section, with more information on one of the Masters; an “extra content” tab with links to online tutorials and videos to help you get started; and a “Setting up Painter” tab that allows you to set your brush tracking, configure color management, etc. as well as links to the licensing agreement, and the “Thanks to” list. You can turn off the welcome screen here, too-although I opted not to, since it’s actually useful.

The Create a New Document menu is also more useful than most. You can, of course, set your page dimensions and resolution here, but you can also choose to set your background color. They even give you several different paper color palettes. Some are useful (like the web-safe color palette) and some are just for fun (like the crayon box color palette that actually looks like a crayon box).

For those of you who have used previous versions of Painter, you’ll find it to be reassuringly familiar in many aspects with a few beefy new features. For one thing, it’s faster. I only found noticeable lags with the brushes when working on very large images (over 2000 pixels in width/height at a resolution of 300 dpi or higher) with large brushes (over 100 pts in size). The manual claims that most brushes are now twice as fast as in previous versions, with some up to ten times faster.

Another new feature is the intricate “Brush Control” palette, which allows you to alter a wide range of brush effects from a series of drop down menus and sliders. You can change everything from your brush shape, to the amount of paint that trails off the end, and all from your regular workspace. This palette is similar to the Brush palette in Adobe Photoshop, with a wider range of options, and thus, greater control. That also means it’s less clear what each of those sliders, do. I’ve spent a lot of time trying to configure certain brushes, sometimes with no luck.

Animators will enjoy the Frame Rate Controls, which allow frame rate testing directly from Painter. And all artists will be happy to know that you can now flip and rotate your images in Painter, although the rotate option doesn’t work freehand, you have to guess how many degrees you’d like to rotate, and the preview isn’t always helpful.

The Brush Tracker is a neat new feature, although it will probably be more practical for animators and graphic artists than for illustrators. I did find the Iterative Save feature quite useful. Instead of saving over your file each time you hit save, you can keep track of your changes by using Iterative Save. This automatically creates a new file, with a numbered file name (zaphod, zaphod_001, zaphod_002), and saves it to the same location as the original. Then, when you’ve screwed up… er… altered a picture several times and decided you liked part of it better several saves ago, you can open up the saved file and clone the desired bits to your current image. If you’re limited on disk space (although why you would be I can’t imagine in this day of cheap, large hard drives), then you might not want to use this feature too often on larger images.