You can use the Blender brushes in Corel® Painter™ IX in a variety of ways. For example, you can create a painting effect, smooth image areas, and retouch small details. Blender brushes do not apply color—rather, they move and mix color from the underlying image. They can also reproduce the effects of applying water or oil to blend paint.

Let's take a look at a basic technique for applying Blender brushes to a photo image.

Cloning your photo
Open a photo image in Corel Painter, and clone it so that you can work on a copy without affecting the original photo. From the menu bar, choose File > Clone. If the original file name is tulip, the file name for the clone is Clone of tulip.

Using Blender brushes
Now that you you've cloned your image, you're ready to start experimenting with Blender brushes. From the Brush selector bar, select a Blender brush by choosing Blenders from the Brush category list and selecting a Blender brush variant from the Brush variant list.

You can experiment with different variants to achieve different effects.

I used the Coarse smear brush variant on the right half of the image.

I used the Round Blender brush to apply subtle brush strokes to the tulip on the right. The brush strokes smooth away some of the noise in this cropped and resampled image.

• You can undo a stroke easily by pressing Command + Z (Mac) or Ctrl + Z (Windows).
• You can use Cloner brush variants to reintroduce areas of the original image. The Cloner brush variants always use color from the clone source. You can set your clone source by choosing File > Clone source, and choosing the file name of your original image.
• A stylus can help you create natural-looking, pressure-sensitive brush strokes. Remember to update your brush tracking regularly by choosing Edit > Preferences > Brush tracking and following the instructions in the Preferences dialog box.