Corel Painter 11 paint software

When a program reaches version 11 it’s sometimes hard to come up with exciting new features that take the program into completely new territory.

Strictly speaking this should really be Painter 12, as there was a strange experiment with Roman numerals along the way that resulted in the bizarrely named Painter IX.5 (9.5), released a few years ago.

Painter 11 doesn’t introduce any radical new innovations. However, it does build upon the program’s existing range of ‘natural media’ tools, which simulate the appearance of traditional paints and brushes with even greater realism than before.

The biggest addition to Painter 11 is a set of 40 new ‘hard media’ tools. These concentrate on tools that can be used for drawing and sketching, such as chalk, coloured pencils and felt-tip marker pens.

Just as you can adjust properties, such as the thickness of the bristles for the various paint brushes, you can also alter the properties of these hard media tools. For instance, if you’re using a graphics tablet, you can adjust the pencil tools so that stroking with the point of the pencil produces a thin line, while tilting the pencil nib to the side will produce a broader stroke. The felt-tip pens work in a similar fashion.

However, simulating these realistic brush strokes on a computer screen requires plenty of processor power, and if your PC isn’t fast enough you may find that the on-screen brush strokes don’t always keep up with your hand movements. Corel has therefore fine-tuned the program’s graphics engine and claims that it is now 30 per cent faster than before.

Painter 11 certainly feels faster than previous versions, especially when using a graphics tablet to make quick, small brush strokes. The improved performance is also noticeable when using the ‘velocity’ control with the new pen tools, to adjust the thickness of strokes depending on the speed of your hand movement.

As always, Painter allows you to customise the new hard media tools to create your own personalised brushes and pens. You can alter the sharpness or bluntness of a pencil nib, or alter the speed at which paint dries on the page so that you can mix colours more easily while they’re still wet.

This brings us to Painter’s one real weakness ­ – the ability to extensively customise brush, paper and paint settings gives artists extremely fine control over their artwork, but it also means that the program’s interface is complicated.

There’s a baffling range of menus, palettes and dialogue boxes, often crammed with complex settings and controls. Painter 11 has fine-tuned some of its palettes to make it easier to select and mix colours, but many of the other palettes and menus will be intimidating for new users.

Even features such as the ‘quick-clone’ option, which is designed to help you make photographs resemble hand-painted artwork, are confusing. Having reached version 11, Painter is very much due for an interface overhaul, and this upgrade doesn’t deal with that issue.

This means that Painter 11 remains a tool for the professional user ­ or perhaps the more accomplished hobbyist ­ who has the time and training required to master this complex software. It’s also fairly expensive, so beginners and hobbyists might be better off considering the less expensive Painter Essentials (£38) or Painter Sketch Pad (£78). More experienced artists, though, will find that Painter 11 is still unmatched in its ability to create artwork that looks as though it was painted by hand rather than by computer.