Corel® Painter™ IX.5 features support for the Wacom® Intuos®3 and the entire Wacom tablet product line. The Wacom Intuos3 has touch strips that can be configured to control brush size, zooming, and many other functions, eliminating the need for a keyboard while painting. In addition, tablet keys can be used as modifier keys, such as Command, Option, Shift, or Spacebar on a Mac; or Ctrl, Alt, Shift, or Spacebar on a PC.

Every artist uses a different pressure when drawing on an Intuos tablet. The Corel Painter Brush Tracking preferences help you customize your Intuos tablet to meet your pressure-sensitivity needs.

When you draw with traditional media, the amount of pressure you use with a tool determines how dense and how wide your strokes are. Using a pressure-sensitive Wacom pen—or "stylus"—with Corel Painter gives you the same kind of control. Each artist has a different strength or pressure level in a stroke. Brush Tracking lets you adjust Corel Painter to match your stroke strength, which is particularly useful for artists with a light touch. If a light stroke leaves no color on the canvas, you can use Brush Tracking to increase sensitivity.

• (Mac OS) Choose Corel Painter IX menu > Preferences > Brush Tracking.
• (Windows) Choose Edit menu > Preferences > Brush Tracking.

Corel Painter produces realistic brush strokes that fade in and out or change width, tilt, and angle with stylus input. Some brush variants, such as Fine Spray and Finer Spray 50 in the Airbrushes category, are particularly sensitive to stylus tilt (how close to vertical the stylus is held) and bearing (the compass direction in which the stylus is pointing). The Corel Painter airbrushes also respond to the fingerwheel on the Wacom Intuos airbrush, simulating a needle control that adjusts how much ink is sprayed.

Tilt can significantly affect some brush strokes.

Many Corel Painter brushes also respond to stylus pressure (how hard you press with the stylus). Depending on variant settings, greater stylus pressure can increase the width of a brush stroke, the penetration of color, or the degree of other effects.

Changes in stylus pressure can affect the width of the stroke.

You can tie brush features like Opacity, Grain, Angle, Size, Jitter, Resaturation, Bleed, Flow, and Depth to stylus input data, such as Velocity, Direction, Pressure, Wheel, Tilt, and Bearing. You can control and customize these settings in the Expression areas of the Brush Creator.

Expression settings are linked to the individual controls on the Stroke Designer page: General, Size, Angle, Well, Random, Impasto, Airbrush, and Liquid Ink.

1. Choose Windows menu > Show Brush Creator, and click the Stroke Designer page.
2. Click a control that contains Expression settings.

• None applies no adjustment to the brush feature.
• Velocity adjusts the brush feature based on the dragging speed. By dragging quickly, you can minimize the setting; by dragging more slowly, you can increase it.
• Direction adjusts the selected brush feature based on the direction of the stroke.
• Pressure adjusts the brush feature based on stylus pressure. Greater pressure increases the setting for that brush feature.
• Wheel adjusts the brush feature based on the wheel setting on an airbrush stylus, specifically the Intuos Airbrush stylus. The maximum value is set when the wheel is pushed all the way forward. The minimum is set when the wheel is pushed all the way back.
• Tilt adjusts the brush feature based on the angle of the stylus from the tablet. For example, when the stylus is perpendicular to the tablet, Tilt is at zero.
• Bearing adjusts the brush feature according to the direction in which the stylus points.
• Source adjusts the brush feature according to the luminance of the clone source. Higher luminance (closer to white) increases the setting for that component, producing, for example, a wider stroke.
• Random adjusts the brush feature on a random basis.
• Sequential applies only to Rank settings for Image Hose brushes. When enabled, this feature picks out nozzles from the index, in order.
• The check box beside the Expression pop-up menu inverts the effect of the Expression setting.

All of these Color Expression options are also available in the Color Expression palette. To display the Color Expression palette, choose Window menu > Brush Controls > Show Color Expression.