sp!log

After 12 years at Corel, and over 6 of those working on the design of Painter, I am saddened to have to tell you all that I have chosen to leave the Painter team and Corel. 

It has been a great pleasure to chat with many of you over the years, working to make Painter the best it could be.

I am confident that Painter will continue to grow and innovate with great new tools and features that will help artists create amazing artworks, there is an amazing team behind Painter, and I'm sure they will do great things.    I know I'll be watching  ;)

If you are looking for someone to talk to at Corel, I am sure Andy would love to get an email with any feedback you would like to provide.

 

Keep well, and happy painting to all of you.

 

cheers

steve

The following issues were addressed in Service Pack 1:

 

Performance:

• A new option was added to the Performance Preferences to control Multi-core usage.
• Application launch speed was improved.
• PSD files with long layer names will open correctly.
• Real Watercolor speed was improved.
• The application launches correctly on Mac 10.7 (Hot Fix 1).

 

Workflow:

• Cubic Interpolation setting is maintained when switching brushes.
• Documents will now display maximized on second monitors (Mac only).
• Double-clicking the Grabber Icon zooms to fit the screen.
• Tool cursors in the Mixer Panel are updated to reflect the selected tool.
• Paper settings can be adjusted when the Apply Surface Texture dialog box is open.
• Right-clicking to change a brush no longer results in random strokes and the preview is now updating correctly.
• The corners of the Color Triangle now report correct values.
• The Temporal Color palette is maintained when using a PC-created workspace on Mac (and vice versa).
• The Ruler tool arrow position now corresponds with the inputed value.
• The current color no longer shifts when switching between the Brush and the Eraser tools.
• Dropping layers by clicking the Layer Commands button or from the Layers options menu produces the same result.

 

UI Issues:

• Changing your OS font size no longer hides palettes (PC only).
• Layouts are maintained when importing a PC-created workspace on Mac (and vice versa).
• When dragging panels to the center of the workspace, they will no longer automatically snap to the upper-left corner .
• The Property Bar is maintained after closing the Toolbox and re-launching the application.
• The Single Pixel Cursor can be used in conjunction with the Brush Ghost.
• Workspace customizations are maintained on dual monitors (PC only).
• The Layout Grid Panel no longer obscures the Enable Layout Grid control.

 

Crashes:

• Creating drop shadows on collapsed layers no longer crashes the application (Mac only).
• Restored File Recovery functionality to the crash report feature (Vista and Windows 7 only).
• Launching as User on Mac no longer crashes the application (Hot Fix 1).
• Painting on a layer that contains a floating object using a Real Wet Oil brush no longer crashes the application.
• Playing back a script that contains text no longer crashes the application.
• Dropping layers while Real Wet Oil strokes are not fully dry no longer crashes the application.
• Adding and or switching layers while Real Wet Oil strokes are flowing no longer crashes the application.
• Applying an effect or drop shadow to Real Wet Oil strokes while they are flowing no longer crashes the application.
• Zooming in on a large-sized brush no longer crashes the application (Mac only).
• Applying the “underpainting” effect no longer crashes the application.
• Saving a resized Clone no longer crashes the application

 

Help:

• The online help includes updates to the following chapters: Preferences, Workspace Tour, and Selecting, Managing, and Creating Brushes.

 

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So Painter 12 has been out for a little bit, so I thought it's about time to post a little Painter 12 FAQ...

 

 

1. When I migrate from Painter 11 to Painter 12, will all my custom brushes, workspaces, papers , textures, nozzles migration properly?
   1. Content will carry forward - brushes, papers, patterns, nozzles will all upgrade
   2. Workspace customizations i.e. customized keyboard shortcuts, application settings will be lost
   3. Custom Palettes and Customized content (i.e. renamed brushes will revert back to default names) may be affected, and some may be lost depending on a feature-by-feature basis
      
      
2. Brush performance improved 3 to 5 times over Painter 11. Can you offer some specific examples that speak to the improvements?
   1. Thick Acrylic 6x faster than Painter 11
   2. Clumpy Brush 7x faster than Painter 11
   3. Coarse Oily Blender 4x faster than Painter 11
   4. Broad Water 5x faster than Painter 11
   5. Drops of Ink 11x faster than Painter 11
   6. One can see a comparative benchmark performance test at http://corel.com/painterdemogallery 
      
      
3. Where are the 700 brushes that are referenced in the collateral?
   1. Painter 12 looked to streamline the interface and not overwhelm new users. Consequently, users can import additional brushes from their install DVD or download from the Painter 12 resources page on Corel.com.
      
      
4. What happened to the Randomizer and Transporter feature? in the brush creator?
   1. The brush creator has been removed from Painter 12 as it was prohibitive to update it to the new UI framework... all of the functionality of the brush creator is accessible from the brush control panels except for the Transposer / Randomizer which saw very infrequent use by users.
      
      
5. Why did Corel decide to only come out with 64-bit for Windows at launch? When will the Mac 64-bit version be available? 
   1. A separate stream of code was required to support Mac 64-bit architectures. Corel was able to get a Windows 64-bit product with compelling new features to market faster than it could build a 64-bit version with the same content.
   2. Corel is expected to release the 64-bit version of the Mac within the release 12 life-cycle.
      
      
6. Why introduce New Real Watercolor when Painter already has watercolors? What’s the difference?
   1. Real Watercolor and Real Wet Oil are major innovations Corel is bringing to the digital art world . The integration of fluid properties (viscosity , evaporation rate), pigment properties, textures, wind and force is what delivers a truly compelling experience. Look for the visual demonstration at http://corel.com/painterdemogallery.
   2. The legacy watercolor technology will live on in the product, but we expect our professional painters to take full advantage of this innovative new technology. It is a compelling new experience our users value.
      
      
7. The brush panel/library is different - why did Corel decide to change it? Where the changes made based on customer requests?
   1. Countless people offered great suggestions to make the brush panel/library more intuitive. We listened to our users.
      
      
8. The new workspaces look great - will you be updating them throughout the life-cycle? Also, I had issues with stability working in previous workspaces - has this been resolved in the workspaces included in 12?
   1. We expect to see Painter users sharing workspaces in places such as Painterfactory.com
   2. As we obtain permission to share these workspaces, we will explore innovative ways to share them directly with our customers.
      
      
9. When will Painter offer tablet integration? Will it also plug into the Photoshop API?
   1. Corel is currently exploring options that our customers value, including nomadic sketching or painting.
   2. Most of our professional customers use pen a tablet and keyboards to create digital art. If they value having a 3rd device to be used to Paint or interact with the Corel Painter interface, we will certainly take that requirement into consideration.
      
      
10. The colour wheel can be made larger but you can’t make it smaller in Painter 12 to save screen real estate. You used to be able to make it tiny in Painter 11 which was very useful, why has that changed?
    1. The temporal color palette (command option 1 for Mac or control option 1 for Windows) will bring up the temporal color palette, which can be re-sized to one’s preferences.
    2. This new feature will save even more real estate on the screen, since it need no longer be left as a visible panel.
       
       
11. What happened to the Brush Creator? It’s dead Jim!
    1. Each and every brush can be changed, edited and saved as a new variant. The brush creator is effectively built into each and every brush.
    2. Users can get a preview of the brush dab and stroke at the bottom of the brush list in the brush selector, which previews as the user navigates through the brush library.
    3. When customizing their brushes with the brush controls the user gets a preview of the updated stroke in the Dab Profile panel of the brush controls.
       
       
12. What are the details of the Enhanced Photoshop Support
    1. Painter 12 can now accommodate Photoshop files with more layers when they are opened in Painter.
    2. Painter 12 also has well over 50 Photoshop keyboard shortcuts that behave the same way in Painter, for example in the toolbox, tools that are similar in Photoshop have the same keyboard shortcuts, i.e. B for the brush tool, L for the lasso, C for the crop tool and W for magic wand selection tool. An exhaustive list of keyboard shortcuts is available directly within Corel Painter.
    3. Painter 12 has greater support for customized workspaces - these are palettes, controls, commands and shortcuts that people can create, save, export, share and import. The Photoshop workspace offers a familiar looking workspace that will be comfortable to Photoshop users; including a set of keyboard shortcuts that behave consistently with those of Photoshop.
       
       
13. Is a native supporting 64bit OS with Painter 12?
    1. Yes, Painter 12 for Windows supports both 32- and 64-bit natively. Setup will install the 64-bit version of Painter on 64-bit Win and the 32-bit version on a Windows 32-bit machine. Painter is compiled natively for both 64 and 32 bit and takes advantage of extra memory and resources available for 64 bit applications.
       
       
14. Does Painter12 support 64 bit of both of Win and Mac?
    1. Windows 64-bit is available now. Macintosh native 64-bit is coming later in the Painter 12 release cycle
       
       
15. At times, brush performance drops when I click on the multi-core mode. Why is this?
    1. The multi-core checkbox enables distribution of the processing of operations across all of the processor cores available on your hardware. If you are running other processor intensive background tasks, Painter brushes may experience a lag. Shutting down these background tasks, or turning off the multi-core checkbox in the General Brush Controls panel, may alleviate some of the lag.
       
       
16. I am experiencing some trouble in creating custom palettes from the brushes I use. When you dragged a brush onto the workspace in version11, a custom palette was instantly created. But this does not seem to be the case in Painter 12. Instead, the brush does not "take" on the workspace and all I see is a little red circle with a line through it, somehow indicating that this action is not allowed. Could this be a possible glitch or is there something I can do to remedy this?
    1. To alleviate the accidental creation of custom palettes, pressing the shift key while dragging an item (brush or other media) into the workspace will create the custom palette
    2. If you find that you are dragging an item and you get the red circle with a line through it, simply pressing the shift key will allow you to make the custom palette, or drag it to an existing custom palette
       
       
17. How many brushes does Painter 12 include?
    1. There are 712 brushes shipped with Painter 12
       
       
18. Why are there less brushes?
    1. In the past, there were different brushes optimized for different sizes. New technology was built to support brush size scaling. Hence 200 brushes became redundant and no longer necessary. There is ZERO regression in brush functionality.
       
       
19. What happened to Photoshop Plug-in Support?
    1. In Painter 10 and 11, select Photoshop plug-ins were supported. Since the underlying plug-in engine changed and the majority of our customers do not leverage these plug-ins, Corel elected to no longer support Adobe plug-ins in Painter 12.

 

And candidates have been selected.

Successful candidates will be notified shortly.

Thanks to all that applied.

 

cheers

steve

 

Hello all...

 

As the question has been posed both here and on other forums "When is the next version of Painter coming?" 

 

And as you may have seen elsewhere, Painter 11 is in the works, and we are now ready to open up the call for Beta Testers for this new version.

 

So if you would like to get in on testing the new version of Painter before it hits the streets, this is your chance to apply to the beta program and have your chance to have a kick at the tires and help us make the best version of Painter yet.

 

 

Who are we looking for?

 

Really we are looking for all types of users of Painter, everyone from casual users that use it for fun to full-on pros that are in there all day, from sketchers and painters, to designers and illustrators, to photo manipulators and everything in between. We are looking for folks that would be comfortable installing pre-release software on their system, being able to spend some time playing with it, and if they find issues with it, reporting those issues to us through a web portal, reviewing issues logged by other users to verify the issues.

 

 

So if you think this sounds like you, you can apply to be a beta tester of Painter 11.

 

The on-line application is located here: http://tinyurl.com/5fkhg2. 

 

Here are some quick instructions to guide you through it, if needed.

     1 - Read the “Pre-Release Evaluation Testing Agreement”, located on the “Licensing Agreement” tab.

     2 - Select the “I accept..” radio button, located at the bottom of this page in order to continue with the application process.

     3 - Answer questions contained on the remaining three tabs:

                  Part 1: About You

                  Part 2: Computer Information

                  Part 3: Contact Information

Note that mandatory questions contain red text.

     4 - Save your application by clicking on the “Save” button located on the upper left hand side.  If you receive an “Error” when saving, please return to your application to ensure all mandatory fields have been completed.

 

The Beta application will be live until December 5th 2008, and only successful candidates will be notified shortly thereafter.

 

 

Cheers

 

steve

Corel Art Expo at //ADAPT2008


Once again our friends at //ADAPT invited us to host an Art Expo at their annual conference in Montreal. How could we refuse?!

With a call out to a number of artists in the Painter Community we gathered a number of amazing pieces to display in the Art Expo and we presented artwork from 25 artists, exhibiting some amazing artwork for Concept Design, Character Design, Environments, Storyboards, Comic Books, Creatures or Fantasy Concepts, and Vehicles.

If you would like more info on the ADAPT Conference [adaptconference.com ], to see better shots of all of the artwork in the Art Expo [adapt2008_art_expo ] and for a play by play of the event, chech out Renee's blog on CG Society [ cgsociety.org/adapt08 ].

It was great to meet folks from both industry as well as folks from the Painter Communities, and we look forward to next year, and hope to see y'all there.

Views of the Art Expo from around the venue:
   
(OK so they are out of focus and crappy, but with limited light and point and shoot camera it was a tough place to shoot)

 

The Art Expo Panels:
                                                 

 

Some of the Corel Painter team with friends and a Special Guest....

Left to right: Melanie Becker, Stephen Allen, Caroline Sauve, Adrian Garcia, Pascal Becheiraz, Steve Szoczei, Robert MacDonald, Andrew (Android) Jones, Dan Jette, Heather Anderson, Kelly Manuel, Rina Fougere, Vladimir Makarov, Tina Barton, Wendy Cook, David Toeg, Chris Trembley, Sandra Inglis, Tanya Lux

So after we introduced the Quick Look plugin for viewing Painter files in the Finder in Mac OS, many folks asked why we can't do the same for Windows.

So the development team here is always up for a challenge, and between projects they built a little utility that will display the preview of the image as the Icon for RIF files.

Simply download the utility from here [4.1 mB file].

Install it and you should be ready to go.

Once installed all of your Painter RIF files should now have an image preview with a small application icon badge.


Enjoy!

For all the Mac folks out there, we have created a Quick Look plugin for viewing Painter files in the finder.

Simply download the plugin from here [450kB file]. (Link updated Feb 14.08)

Install it and you should be ready to go.

To use it - navigate to a Painter '.rif' file and press the spacebar and you should see a nice preview of your Painter file. This will also allow you to see your Painter files with a nicer preview in Cover Flow mode in Finder Windows.

For more info on Quick Look visit the Quick Look page at Apple.com.

Enjoy!

steve

So getting to know this system, this is gonna be a test entry to try and get things working....

So here is an image...

To insert the image I used the standard HTML img tag formated like this:
<img src="link to image wherever it may live" width="size in pixels" height="size in pixels" />

Overall the formatting can be done using standard HTML tags...
i.e.: <b> for bold </b> , <i> for italic </i> etc...

If there are other formatting controls you are looking for, drop me a line, or respond here and I can update this to help y'all out...

This posting initially appeared in the February 2007 Painter Canvas and reappears here as my initial posting to give y'all a little background on who I am, what I do, and processes used to come up with the design for Painter

It all started with a conversation - many in fact - on the phone, in person, via email, and in online forums.

These conversations happened with Artists, Designers, Photographers, Concept Artists, Game Designers, Illustrators and many other types of creative folks.

Over about the past couple of years we've had countless conversations with hundreds of Painter users, just like you (maybe it was you). We asked you questions and went out and watched many of you so we could understand - what you love, what you hate, what you miss, what you need and so much more.

We heard things that helped us focus on what is important to folks that use Painter, as well as understand many of the various workflows that folks have within Painter.

Once we had a bunch of conversations we compiled all of the comments and observations together to identify which issues are being experienced by more users, and looked to see which could be grouped together within different workflows. We combined these issues and observations with the many enhancements that folks would like to see within Painter that would make working with Painter easier.

All of these things were prioritized as to your needs, impact, marketability and overall desirability. These items were combined into a rather complex matrix of features and functionality that if fully realized would make for one heck of a new product. So, with factoring in time and budget constraints we had to be selective in what items from the list we included in the product.

How did we determine what stays and what waits?

We selected a number of people to act as advisors, representing the different types of folks that use Painter, and we consulted with them once we had a list of proposed features and ideas that we were looking at for Painter X. Once we had the list compiled from our research with our users, we worked with the groups within Corel to determine the ideal list that we all agreed would meet your needs, be manageable to develop, and make a marketable product for both existing and new users.

Working with a cross-functional group here at Corel we brainstormed on the issues that were confounding you folks to come up with solutions that would not only meet your expectations of Painter, but go beyond all your expectations.

We continued to work with the advisors throughout the design and development process, evaluating the initial design, reviewing the functionality as we built the features, and listening to their feedback, redirecting and refining the design 'til both these folks and us were happy with the design and interaction of the features.

Once the development got to a certain point we opened up our Beta program. By selecting a larger group of folks to test the product prior to release we ensure that we are catching as many issues and correcting them before the product goes out for wider distribution. This Beta period allows us to get wider feedback on Painter, from folks doing many different things, allowing us to hear as many issues as possible.

Finally, we get to the magic moment, when we get the product to a point where we feel that it is ready for release.

And that's where we are now. We give you Corel Painter X.

We are always open for a conversation, so if you have issues that you would like to bring to our attention please feel free to contact us at painterteam@corel.com, or me directly at steve.szoczei@corel.com.