All Things Painter Corel® Painter™ IX.5 Provides a Helping Hand by John Derry

A fear lurks in the shadows—the fear of drawing. Sufferers of this phobia reach adulthood never having experienced the thrill of visually expressing themselves. If you are among the afflicted, please read on.

Corel® Painter™ IX.5 comes to the aid of drawing-challenged users by allowing them to use photographs as a starting point for their artwork. By merging digital photography with its Natural-Media® tools, Corel Painter can help release an expressive genie from the digital bottle.

The addition of the Photo Painting Palettes in Corel Painter IX.5 makes it easier than ever to create expressive artwork, even for those with little or no drawing skill. Introduced in Corel® Painter™ Essentials 3, the Photo Painting Palettes organize three key ingredients for realistic simulation of handwrought imagery: Underpainting, Auto-Painting, and Restoration.

Simplified detail distinguishes photographs from painted images. In a photograph, all detail is captured equally within a scene, whereas in a painted image, the painter manipulates detail to lead the viewer's eye to the subject. By simplifying detail in unimportant areas of a composition, the artist can direct the eye to more important areas.

The Underpainting palette provides vignetting and Smart Blur features, as well as tools for global tonal corrections. A vignette softens the outer edge of an image so that the eye is directed toward the center of the image. Smart Blur is a highly useful tool for removing unnecessary photographic detail. Edge integrity is maintained while fine-grained features are suppressed. These features transform a photograph into the basis for a painted image. At this stage, the Auto-Painting palette can lend a helping hand.

Corel Painter has always included Natural-Media auto-cloning. With this technique, a brush variant is funneled through a source image (often a photograph), and the cloned image is reconstituted in a style resembling the media of the cloning brush. The primary limitation of this technique is that the entire surface of the resulting image is rendered with an overall mechanical sameness, so that it lacks the unique expressive energy of the human hand. Of course, this limitation can be overcome by hand-directed application of the cloning brush, but this is not an option for the drawing-challenged.

The Auto-Painting palette is auto-cloning on steroids. Rather than apply the singular elementary dabs used in auto-cloning, Auto-Painting reconstitutes an image through a user-definable library of expressive strokes (such as Hatch, Scribble, or Squiggle) combined with the extensive Corel Painter brush library. For added complexity, the pressure, length, rotation, and brush size of the built-up brush strokes can be randomly varied. An assortment of different strokes can be selectively applied over time, adding even more expressive variation to an image. Imagery is further enhanced by applying media-blending brush strokes.

Traditional painters often use the finest brushes for the key subject areas of an image. In portraiture, the face is the central focus. The artist renders the outer environmental areas of the image with larger brushes and reserves the finest detail for the subject's facial area. The Restoration palette lets you use soft- and hard-edged cloning brushes for selectively restoring some of the original photograph's detail. Combined with pressure-modulated brush opacity, these brushes let you subtly feather the fine detail of the subject back into the newly auto-painted image. The result mirrors the traditional artist's technique for directing the viewer's eye to the enhanced detail.

In addition to the stellar Photo Painting Palettes of Corel Painter IX.5, the toolbox now includes the Cloner, Rubber Stamp, and Eraser. The Cloner tool provides immediate access to the last-used Cloner brush. The Rubber Stamp tool makes it easy to perform point-to-point cloning to retouch areas within an image or to clone between separate documents. The Eraser tool erases any medium on the canvas, as well as visible areas of a layer. In addition, users of the Tracing Paper feature will appreciate being able to adjust the Tracing Paper opacity in increments of 10 percent.

Windows® users can now open Corel® Paint Shop Pro® file formats (versions X and 9), and they can send files directly to Corel® Photo Album™ 6. Additional training is also included with Corel Painter IX.5—more than 11 hours of lynda.com videos, featuring Tanya Staples and yours truly.

Corel Painter IX.5 is a windfall for the drawing-phobic. If you are a photographer, this update is squarely aimed at you. Transforming photographs into high-quality paintings has never been easier. You may find that after applying the Photo Painting tools to your photographs, you are eager and confident enough to experiment with manual brush strokes.

Corel Painter IX.5 is ready when you are!

John Derry
Somewhere in Kansas

John Derry is a pioneer of digital painting and one of the original authors of Corel® Painter™. Since 1985, he has leveraged his background in drawing and painting to advance the look and experience of traditional art-making tools on the computer. John has a bachelor's degree and a master's degree in Fine Art and is a practicing artist and photographer. He teaches Corel Painter workshops around the country and is currently serving as Corel's Painter Ambassador-at-Large. John's Web site is at www.pixlart.com.