Corel Painter's heritage is deeply rooted in the foundations of art theory and technique. Over the years, Painter developers have worked closely with artists from around the world to create the next-generation art studio. Providing an experience that is unmatched by any other software, Corel Painter has grown to become the world's most powerful painting & illustration application.

Artists, designers and photographers continue to enjoy many features that have been the cornerstones of this ground-breaking application for years. The following features let creative professionals leverage their natural talents and techniques to create original works of art, distinguishing Corel Painter from other applications.

Brushes

Brushes have always been the heart and soul of Corel Painter. There are more than 30 brush categories, ranging from Crayons, Chalk, and Charcoal to Acrylics, Watercolor, Liquid Ink, Artists' Oils, and the new RealBristle. While most brush categories mirror the look and feel of traditional brushes, others offer users a one-of-a-kind creative tool.

Brushes are organized into distinct categories, each featuring a multitude of variants. The following brush categories are just a sample of those available to Corel Painter X customers.

Artists' Oils Painting System: The Artists' Oils Painting System enables users to apply paint blends created in the Mixer palette directly onto images in the document window. Each brush dab loads the brush variant with a finite amount of oil. As the oil runs out, the brush stroke becomes fainter. Brush strokes interact with any paint already on the canvas just as they would with natural media.

Artists' Oils brush stroke

Watercolor: Watercolor brush variants produce natural-looking watercolor effects. Almost all brush variants in the Watercolor category interact with the canvas texture. For most of these variants, stylus pressure affects the width of the brush stroke. As with traditional-media watercolor brushes, greater pressure on the brush widens a stroke and less pressure narrows a stroke.

Watercolor brush stroke

Chalk: Chalk brush variants produce the thick, rich texture of natural chalk sticks and cover with strokes that interact with the paper grain. The opacity is linked to stylus pressure.

Chalk brush stroke

Image Hose: The Image Hose behaves like a brush, but it sprays images instead of applying paint. Users can also load their own image or select from the library included in the application.

Image Hose brush stroke

Cloners: Painting with a cloner brush is similar to painting with any Corel Painter brush, except that cloner brush variants take their color information from a clone source, such as a pattern or another image, instead of from the Colors palette. Some cloner brush variants reproduce a source image directly.

Other cloner brush variants reproduce a source image with low opacity and soft edges, or use paper grain and specialized dabs, for particular media effects.

Cloner brush

Brush Controls
Brush Control palettes provide quick, easy access to all brush settings and controls. Making on-the-fly changes to brush settings and variables is as simple as dragging a slider—without any disruption to workflow. For example, the Boost slider, found in the General palette of the Brush Controls, instantly enhances brush speed. Just drag the slider and see brush performance accelerate.

Brush Control palettes enable on-the-fly changes.

Textures
In the traditional art world, an artist's brush or drawing tool produces different results when applied to surfaces with different textures. Corel Painter allows users to control the texture of the canvas to achieve the results they would expect from conventional art media on a given surface. Brushes interact with paper grain, just as natural tools react with the texture of the surfaces beneath them. Textures can also be used to create special effects, such as rusted metal on an intergalactic spaceship or bark on a tree.

Many brush variants allow the paper texture to be seen through the brush stroke.

Paper texture can help create special effects.
Artwork by Andrew Jones.

Animation
Corel Painter has an impressive array of animation features. The Onion Skinning feature enables users to view previous and future frames while working on the current frame. The Rotoscoping feature enables users to paint and modify a single frame of an existing movie. Animated movies can be saved as animated GIFs, QuickTime® movies, or AVI movies.

Gitanjali Rao's "Printed Rainbow" animated film.
Winner of three "Best Short Film" awards at Cannes 2006, including the Kodak Discovery Award—Best Short Film; the Young Critics Award—Best Short Film; and the Rail d'Or—Best Short Film. www.printedrainbow.com

Support for Industry-Standard File Formats
Corel Painter lets users open and save a variety of file formats, including Adobe Photoshop (PSD), Corel® Paint Shop Pro® (PSP), TIFF (CMYK & RGB), Windows Bitmap (BMP), PC Paintbrush (PCX), TARGA® (TGA), GIF, JPEG, Mac PICT, QuickTime (MOV), and Video for Windows (AVI) files. Users can also save files in encapsulated PostScript® (EPS) format.