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Painter IX also offers you the ability to completely customize your shortcut keys, and to even print out a “cheat sheet” shortcut reference. They’ve expanded the compatibility of Painter IX on networked systems that use both Mac and Windows platforms, and they promise that individual users can retain their own settings and preferences, or revert to the default settings without having to reinstall the application. Since my Windows machine won’t play with Painter at all, I have no way of testing this (although this is more of a Windows issue than a Painter problem).

The feature that I’ve used the most is, by far, the Artist’s Oils digital painting system. It includes an Artist’s Oils palette that matches real world oil paint colors (quite literally, as you can go into a store and buy the exact same shades); a multicolor eyedropper tool for the mixer palette that, when used in conjunction with Artist’s Oils brushes allows you to paint with a blend of colors instead of just a single flat color; and additional brush variants like viscosity, blending, number of bristles, and more. The effects produced by the Artist’s Oils system are phenomenal, replicating the look and feel of oil painting to an impressive degree. This is definitely my favorite Painter IX feature. They’ve also enhanced the Digital Watercolor system to give more control over the Wet Fringe of the brushes, and allowing you to save, close the program, and reopen your file later and the paint will still be “wet” and workable-try doing that in real life!

Photographers will want to try the “Quick Clone” tool, which allows you to transform any photograph into a painting; as well as the new KPT plug-in filters that have been added to Painter, making it into a more powerful tool for photo editing and manipulation. And with the new .5 upgrade, you’ll find even more photo support.

Color Management, Wacom Support, and Adobe Photoshop compatibility has also been enhanced, although I’ve noticed some color profile problems (specifically with CYMK profiles) when importing a Painter image into Photoshop. It’s easily adjusted, but annoying. Painter does, however, allow layers to export into Photoshop, maintaining the same settings.

Layers, however, are one of the few problems that I have with Corel Painter. Although they’ve tried to allow true transparency between layers, they haven’t yet achieved it to the same degree as Adobe. Depending on your settings, paint on new layers either picks up colors from the background and smears it, or it produces a halo effect when blending or erasing. I’m a firm believer in intuitive use-I don’t want to have to refer to the manual every time something doesn’t work the way I expect it to-and there is no intuitive solution for the layer problem.

The best thing about Painter IX, however, is the amount of control that it allows you. You can customize just about everything. You can make your own custom brushes, and put them into a custom brush palette that you can then save for future use. You can manually mix paint colors and then apply them to your canvas as any number of different media. You can control the lighting, the grain of the paper, how wet your paint is, the number of bristles in your brush, how dirty your brush is, even the direction that the wind is blowing over your watercolor painting. There are very few things that it doesn’t allow you to change the settings on. It’s enough to make a control freak’s heart palpitate with joy.

All of this leaves you more time for the important things like asking yourself “Wouldn’t it be neat if I could paint watercolors on top of oils?” And with Corel Painter IX, you can finally answer that question. I highly recommend this program for anyone who does artwork for a living. If you’re thinking of switching from your current software, or of adding it to your current tools, now is definitely the time to go with Corel Painter.

Corel Painter IX.5 - Full Version
Visit Melissa Findley’s web site - http://www.wickedeyedesigns.com