Tips and Tricks for Corel Painter

(Updated for version IX)

For those of you that are new to Painter, and are having a lot of trouble getting a handle on it, here's a quick crash course on how to make your life easier in Painter (should apply to earlier versions as well).

When I first started using Painter back in Janurary of 2002, I was totally unhappy. I wanted to drop it altogether, but I decided to give it one last shot. I emailed Pat Duke and he gave me some awesome advice, which helped kickstart a better life in Painter for me. Of course, Jinny Brown's patience and wonderful tips also helped too. I am now a Forum Leader for the Corel Painter Forum at cgtalk (Jinny is there almost everyday too, and I don't know what I'd do without her).

The first painting I did with Painter was this one.

Doing hair like this would've been a nightmare for me in Photoshop. But with Painter's much smoother brushes and with the Feature/Bleed settings, I was able to paint hair like this much faster/easier.

After that painting, I could never go back to using just Photoshop ever again. Painting in Painter is really a joy compared to Photoshop. This is especially true for people that have worked with traditional tools and missed them when painting in Photoshop.

On to the tips:

Painter's can be cluttered and confusing if you don't know which ones to keep opened. So, go in there and clean it up. Here's my UI setup:

As you can see, I keep my UI very clean and sparse. I hate UI clutters as they are messy and confusing to look at, and slow you down when you are working. I have the Color Sets set to the way I like it, and you should play around with the settings and various Color Sets to get what you want. What works for me might not work for you. I have the Mixer up because it gets used a lot. I have Colors open because, well, I can't paint without it. I have Layers open because I use it a lot. I keep the Tracker around for quick access to previously used brushes. I have the Custom brush palette open because it lets me jump to my most used brush categories. The spot where I circled for "Clicking here" is a part of the brush control palette showing through. If I click on it, it'll bring the whole thing to the front, but I can still see the layers palette at the bottom in the back, so if I need it again, I only have to click on it to bring it back(same with the other palettes on top). My Photoshop UI setup is very similar to this, with the differences being that the top is the Navigation, the middle is History, and the bottom is Layers.

An important tip a lot of new users of Painter don’t know is this:

The Feature setting (for the brushes that use it) is crucial to smooth painting in Painter. If you have it set too low for your current brush size, it’ll make your brush stroke become very S-L-O-W. Lower the feature, denser your bristles are, and the harder it is for Painter to calculate the effect of all those bristles. The best way is to have the Feature setting proportional to your brush size. For example, at around brush size 12, a feature setting of 2 is just perfect. At size 50, it looks good at feature setting of 4, but is a bit slow (this probably depends on how fast your computer is). At feature of 6, it’s fast, but the bristles are a bit sparse for my taste. It’s a choice you’ll have to make—to have a better looking, but slower brush, or a faster one but more sparse than you’d like.

Another trick many new Painter users don’t know is the perfect blending tool: the Bleed/Resaturation trick. (The latest versions of Painter have includes some blending brushes that might make this trick not as necessary as the old days.)

If you set Resaturation (the amount of paint carried on your brush) to 0, and turn the Bleed (how much force is exerted by your brush to pick up and blend the paint already on the canvas) up to anywhere other than 0, you’ll basically get a clean brush without paint, and you can just blend with it.

The best brushes to use the Resaturation/Bleed trick on are probably the ones in the Oils category (or some of the wet-type brushes in the Gouache and Acrylic category).

Of course, nothing can substitute for a good dose of RTFM (Read the Fucking Manual). If you are still stuck after reading the manual/help files, then visit the Corel Painter Forum at cgtalk. But please, do your homework before posting a question at the forum, or else you'll appear to be a lazy bum. ^_^