Corel Painter IX: Corel updates Painter with speed, stability, and creative control.(PAINTING)(Product/Service Evaluation)

As digital artists and content creators, we're longtime users of Painter, Corel's painting and illustration software solution. Like no other program we've used, it provides us with digital materials--paints, brushes, inks, pencils, papers, and more--that closely mimic those used in the traditional creative process. Corel refers to these digital tools of the trade as "Natural Media."

We installed Painter IX on an Apple Power Mac G5 equipped with dual PowerPC G5 processors, Mac OS X, and a Studio display. We also set up a Wacom Intuos3 pen tablet and 6D Art Pen, as well as Corel's Art Pen Brush Pack, a collection of six brushes designed to take advantage of Wacom's six-dimensional pen stylus.

Painter IX greets the user with a new, clean, and organized welcome screen on start-up that provides quick access to saved files, brush and color-management settings, and tutorials. Like previous versions of Painter, the software ships replete with resources, including libraries of nozzles, brushes, paper textures, stock photos, patterns, and gradients. Provided in electronic format are the User Guide (PDF), Help files (HTML), and tutorial videos. The tutorials, devised by creative professionals, are tremendous assets that impart a wealth of tips we wouldn't get from the user's guide or online help. And the Help system proved faster than in previous versions.

Corel worked with Apple, Intel, and AMD to improve the stability, speed, and performance of Painter. It responds more quickly to brush strokes and key commands. When using previous versions, we often would make a brush stroke and wait, not only for the system to display the stroke, but also for the paint to "dry" or stop running--this was especially true when working with large-size brushes and runny paints. We want to see our strokes in real time, and now that's possible. In general, the brushes are at least twice as fast, but we would like the very large brushes to be more efficient, as a delay is noticeable.

Painter IX's enhanced productivity was evident, especially working with Digital Watercolor. In fact, we seldom opted to use watercolor in previous versions of Painter because it was slow and unresponsive. That system has sped up, and we envision using watercolor far more often now. Painter's newfound stability ...