Painter has dominated the market for artistic bitmap editing for the past 20 years. This long history has led to huge creative power, but also a working environment that was old-fashioned, idiosyncratic and horrendously overly technical. Since Corel took over development, things have slowly improved and this latest release sees a further interface overhaul with a more modern look and feel.
Perhaps the most obvious sign that Painter has been dragged into the 21st century is the revamped New Image dialog. Previously, this automatically defaulted to an image size of just 810 x 500 pixels at 72dpi; now it’s full screen and 150dpi. You can also now create and load your own presets as well as specify the image name, background colour and paper texture.
When dealing with larger images, you need to be able to manage your current view. Here Painter 12 adds the ability to boost either speed or quality when zooming, and a new Navigator panel that shows a small version of the full image with a box indicating the current display.
As well as providing feedback, the Navigator panel lets you pan, zoom and rotate your image and manage settings such as the grid display, tracing opacity and drawing mode. It’s not as simple as it could be – you can’t just drag over an area to set the view – but it’s a major improvement.
The biggest interface advance is the redesigned Brush Selector panel. Painter provides hundreds of natural media brushes, and choosing the right one used to be a nightmare. Now the revamped panel lets you choose a category – chalks, pastels, oils and so on – on the left and then presents a list of named brush variants to select from on the right.
The panel also provides quick access to your most recently used brushes and gives you a preview of the variants as you roll over them. Again, it’s an improvement, but it’s disappointing that you can’t pin the panel open.
In terms of the range of brushes on offer, Painter 12 adds three new categories: Gels, Real Watercolor and Real Wet Oils. In each case, the depth of the simulation is extraordinary. The Real Watercolor brushes mimic effects such as the viscosity of water, diffusion of pigment and wind direction. The results can certainly be impressive, but then they were already with Painter’s existing oils and watercolours.
Painter also improves the various Brush Control panels, adding dedicated panels for managing the new brushes and the ability to calibrate each brush variant’s pressure and velocity responsiveness individually.
It also adds two important general parameters to control blend-mode merging and enable multicore CPU support. The latter promises better performance, but processing all these brush variables is hugely demanding, so even with a fast, modern system Painter 12 doesn’t exactly feel snappy.
It isn’t just advanced features that have been spruced up, though. Core settings such as brush size, opacity, angle and shape are now easier than ever to apply. There’s also a new colour wheel you can call up, on-canvas, to define your paint colour where you plan to apply it.
Painter also lets you automatically pick up colours from a source image in a process known as “cloning”, and makes it easier to use multiple source images, imported and selected using the new Clone Source panel. These sources are also now embedded with the image, making file management and refinement simple.
The big new feature in this release, however, is the Mirror Painting Mode (see screenshot above). This lets you create striking symmetrical and kaleidoscopic artworks by repeating your strokes around vertical, horizontal or radial axes.
This might not sound all that impressive – after all, there are plenty of simple filters for adding such effects – but Painter 12’s capability is very different as the effect is live, interactive and seamless with each stroke independently interacting with the paint below. The results can be truly creative and beautiful – in fact, it’s rare for them not to be. It’s also a lot of fun.
Mirror painting is undoubtedly a superb addition, but again it’s an occasionally useful one rather than a game changer. Ultimately, Painter 12 stands or falls by its existing strengths, and for the widest range of control over the widest range of artistic tools, it still leads the pack.
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