PainterFactory.com

 Gosh, what you guys want is a total revamping of the program!  How about a name change too? LOL  I admit Painter is a bit buggy, but we all seem to have our own workarounds and a challenge can be good for the soul, if not the blood pressure...

Ann 

Mmm, some valid points but let's not forget what Painer is for. It's for simulating natural media. If you want a Photoshop interface, buy Photoshop. If you want to create videos, buy specialist video software. IMO the next version needs to focus more on Painter's core functions and not try to be a jack of all trades.

I think many of the issues will be addressed anyway, because they're fairly obvious.

Let's have an option for the colour-set blocks to resize with the window. And for the colour set palette to remember your settings.

Simple workflow for creation of brushes and saving to icons and toolbars. Whilst that's possible now it's very unintutive, e.g. having to create a new brush category if you want a different icon.

User-defined preview sizes for effects - at the moment they are only usable by guesswork; setting the sliders and OK'ing, then pressing CTRL-Z and starting again if it doesn't work.

One-click custom brush creation. Define your parameters then a single click on an image creates a brush that you can then customise or use immediately. Again, whilst custom brush creation is possible I rarely do it because it's so time-consuming.

More flexibility with toolbars. The option to shrink the toolbar contents with the toolbar, and grow them too (particularly useful for the tiny colour wheel.

Iron out a few bugs, like the Brush Selector Bar disappearing whenever the main window size altered then re-maximised.

I'd like to see existing brushes retain the same effects in future versions and any improvements come by way of new additions or options. This is probably the way it works anyway.

 I guess what I would like to see most of all is the ability to "see" other images than rif before we open them...I work between Photoshop and Painter and love this feature of Photoshop.   Each program has it's own place and work well together...I also wish Photoshop would read rif files.

Ann 

REkzkaRZ:

I'd like to save my custom palettes with names, like "my standard kit" and "all oils". 

We can do that already. Use Window > Custom Palettes > Organizer, highlight the Custom Palette name, hit the Rename button, and type the name you want.

Speaking of which, I'd like to be able to show a lot more info in the Palette listings.  Stroke OR title?  C'mon...  Give me any / all rather than limiting it.

By "Palette listings", do you mean something related to Custom Palettes, or do you mean something related to the Brush Selector's brush category list and brush variant list? If the latter, we do have:

• Two options for the brush category list: List and Thumbnails
  
• Three options for the brush variiant list: List (name), Thumbnail, or Stroke

The little colored buttons under the tools toolbar are ... really badly done.  Sorry.  They should have a graphical interface, just like we expect w/most apps nowadays.  Either give them their own graphic tool icons, give them a special toolbar, or make them REALLY intuitive!

I don't know if this will help you at all, but if you mean the Selector icons at the bottom of the Tools palette, all but two of them are available as regular palettes that can be opened via the Window menu. The two that can't be opened as regular palettes are the Looks Selector and the Nozzles Selector and they're at the very  bottom of the Tools palette, Looks on the left, Nozzles on the right.

Speaking of which, the 'look' save control is hella unintuitive.  I can't seem to save the 'look' precisely, which sucks.

Post a message in the Corel Painter X forum and maybe we can help you.

Um, observation -- Painter X sure doesn't work like Photoshop...  But why not?  Why not use similar shortcuts?  Confusing...

Many of the default keyboard shortcuts are the same as those found in Photoshop. In addition, you can use Preferences > Customize Keys to set up your keyboard shortcuts any way you like.

How about showing us what xml Painter is generating?  Can we re-do paintings manually by re-running XML from a painting, and perhaps removing a few lines here & there?

Not sure what you mean. It'll help the developers if you can be more specific.

Navigation Window = Why?

 A far more elegant solution is the one used in Lightroom. Click anywhere on the image, and you zoom into it at the ratio you've chosen 1:2, 1:3, 1:4, etc. Click again and you see the entire image. This could be used fast and effeciently using a Keyboard key, that you could map to your Wacom tablet buttons, an area on your tablet, or one of the stylus buttons. Or an even simpler approach without too much work would be a "snap back" trick, whereby you could set an area to zoom back to. Click=full image -- Click again returns you to the zoom factor and area you were working on.

 The RIF problem must be solved by Corel, simply by adding an OS standard JPG thumbnail preview to the save data. Sorry, but you"ll have a VERY long wait expecting Adobe to support opening a RIF file, since the only reason it was ever created was to save the "wetness" of watercolor layers, and later Impasto editability. PSD format does everything else required to save layer info.

 Adding an automatically generated JPG thumbnail when saving in RIFF format would be helpful.

As to Photoshop supporting "... everything else required to save Layer info.". that's not quite true. There's a much longer list of Painter-specific info RIFF format supports that PSD does not support.

 RIFF format is an old format and hasn't had support from other software vendors for years. Now that CorelDRAW has larger thumbnailpreviews associated with the .cdr file (a form of RIFF) there is hope Painter 11 will have a more modern preview also.

 Helpful? How about mandatory, considering it's the standard in almost every graphic program on the planet(!). Second, so where's the list?... don't bother, because it's moot anyway if you can't open it in Photoshop... and as I said, that will almost surely never happen. Whether you want to accept it or not, you must be able to round-trip your Painter documents to your image editing program of choice, be it PS or PSPro, or whatever. The finetuning of color, selections, adjustment layers, masks, etc. is just not in Painter. I sort of doubt it ever will...  or should be. I plan on adding a post what Corel COULD do to battle Adobe.

 Painters need for a more comprehensive preview a known problem. i'm not sure but i think the problem arises with the RIFF file itself. there is a utility that can be installed in Mac OsX that enables Quicklook to display a large thumbnail, but unfortunately it is very very slow. the only easy way to round trip is to always use .psd files in Painter. Photoshop is not that forgiving of a program, even Fireworks PNG files are flattened on opening in Photoshop, even though PNG supports bitmap, vectors and layers with all attributes.

 I can only comment, that I sincerely hope that Corel does not base ANYTHING on the piece of C***! While I realize this is not a CorelDraw forum, I just wanna add that after almost 30 years in the print/design industry, there is probably no other more hated format than CDR to bring into a professional workflow environment.

 Jinny,

Thanks for that articulate response.  I appreciate it.

How about showing us what xml Painter is generating?  Can we re-do paintings manually by re-running XML from a painting, and perhaps removing a few lines here & there?

Not sure what you mean. It'll help the developers if you can be more specific.

 

I mean ... Painter seems to use XML to do everything, including remembering 'scripting' (ie brush strokes, etc).  But it hides all this info, rather than allow users to see what's going on.  It could be useful to see what's being recorded.

I didn't even dive into the 'movie' issues on my wishlist.  Those could probably be summarized as: a) an undo feature when you change frames, and more intuitive and easy saving of movie files. 

I was in a Berkeley City College Painter X class, and the teacher knew so many of the bugs in the program.  She told us, restart Painter 'clean', then "record your script", then paint your picture, then save the script.  Then exit Painter X and restart, then load the script, then re-run it to save your painting as a movie file.  This was the only way to get Painter X to accurately save our Paintings as movies.

Here's my suggestion on this -- maybe you could have a button (like 'Print Screen') that would define 'time units' for playback of scripts?  I really like watching 'speed painting' videos on Youtube, but find it strange that Painter X requires  a person to install another 'recording' software on their computer to record them painting still images in Painter!!

I mean, Painter already has movie support, it's already recording every stroke, and it's supposed to be fairly simple & user friendly.

I can help you build this -- why not hire me as a consultant?   :)

HA HA

rekzkarz.com

PS:  Thanks again for addressing all the issues I posted. 

OK. Here's 2 simple ideas to gain some space and functionality. Both of them combine existing pallets, and add a nice little feature.

 1. Color Wheel and Color Selectors Plus

Below is a quick idea as Before and After.... and taking care of the #1 user complaint about Painter X: "The wheel is too small!" The after also includes the ability to see CMYK equivalents, which would also be able to show HSB, RGB, LAB, whatever... by choosing it from the option drop down arrow on the right, where you can now only choose Standard Colors, Small colors or show as RGB/HSB... which if truth be known... is worthless as it's now implemented. Who cares what percentage of HSB is, when the standard is using absolute numbers as in the Color Info pallet. Also, the bottom 8 colors, or possibly 10, could be a fast Favorites list, or Last 10 picked... Option-clicking on it to lock it or change it. Also notice the quick Black & White selector, similar to Photoshop's. You'll notice that After takes up the same amount of space as 2 Pallets and a drop down bar (color sets) as before.... AND adds more functionality... and it's BIGGER!

2. Basic Brush Controls

So many pallets and bars doing the same thing, or show the same thing. Here's just 2 pallets that could be integrated, Size and Angle... possibly even Spacing. Also the General pallette could and should be broken up and either added to the top bar, where the majority is already, and Method and Method subcategory could easily be added as a second context menu using Shift+Cmd (Mac) Shift+Ctl (Windows). One more pallette out of the way, and 25% more space for other pallettes. I also added a "Hardness" slider below "Minimum Size". This could be used to fine tune a nib. Better would be to save nibs so that you could easily reuse them with other tools. I will admit though, just as is, it's a heck of alot better than Photshops choices. I do realize you can use captured dabs, but again... this idea is more elegant and easier.

3. This just covered more than 50% of the complaints about Painter X.1. Now just add Live previews for adjustments, and fix the broken Blending Modes when using layers (mutiply, gel artifacts, etc.) and you have X.2 ... NOT XI (eleven)! These things could have been, and should have been changed LONG AGO.. or at lest added!

 4. A note about the Brush Creator: why on earth did you go to the trouble of designing something that COULD be useful, but then basically made it a resource hog by quasi opening a complete second running Painter! Why doesn't it just plain open as a temporary document window, or similar... leaving your current Workspace as the controling interface. Or was this truthfully the beginning of making a Photoshop plug-in, or the Baby birth of Essentials? Just curious.... because the idea of a Photoshop layer plug-in is a VERY good one!... and you blew it when creating Essentials, regardless of how many awards it's received... it's WORTHLESS! Dump it, or make it useful for those people that have stated here that the would like a Painter Classic, where they can create their "Clone-RealBristle-Wedding-Portaits". No layer blending modes? Even FREE progs have that today! Sheesh!

OK... so all I wanna know is... where and when will X.2 be ready?! Consider this free consultation if you send the link to at least a Beta!

So everything above looks fine when creating the post... and then breaks funny after it's posted. Ideas?

 Last but not least... one last suggestion

 Water Color

Look here and no further:

http://visgraph.cs.ust.hk/MoXi/

License it, or buy 'em! AWESOME!

 MoXi, the website states, is licensed to Adobe. it is a 3D program and relies on nVidia graphics cards as it's main rendering system. PS CS4 is being described as leveraging more of the GPU in it's processing and will feature more 3D.... maybe this is it.