Hi all,
Let me start by saying I'm not a painter, and that I'm dabbling in Painter 11 watercolors.
As I was trying to paint I discovered whenever I tried to paint in what I'm calling the FACE layer, I am unable to paint in the white square. The marks you see were just me trying to find the limits of the area.
Can anyone tell me what's going on here? I'm stumped.
Thanks in advance for any help you might be able to provide.
And to show I'm not just making things up, I went back and looked at the email I sent to Corel back in 2016, where I submitted three different bug reports for the watercolors with very detailed steps on how to reproduce three separate issues, one of which could cause you to lose data in your paniting if you saved it. As far as I know they didn't fix any of them, but here's a video capture I just made of Painter 2018 doing the exact same reproducible thing with the white squares:
https://youtu.be/nI4z_xlJEtw
And here are the exact steps I emailed them in 2016 about it:
"1. Make a new document. 2. Select Grainy Wash Bristle from the "Watercolor" category (Painter 2016 brush library). 3. Make a mark with the brush. 4. After it has diffused, open the Advanced Brush Controls. Set Wetness to 0% on the "Water" palette. 5. Go to Layers > select "Wet Entire Watercolor Layer". 6. Now select Real Wet Brush 2 from the "Real Watercolor" category. 7. Mark a mark that goes over the top of the other mark. 8. You will then see white, blocky graphics glitches in the diffusion cells after making this mark. 9. If you now undo the mark (ctrl+z), everything disappears.
This bug is triggered when you select "Wet Entire Watercolor Layer" with the brush's wetness at 0%. It's the 0% wetness specifically that starts the glitch. It then manifests in the diffusion interaction between a regular "Watercolor" brush and a "Real Watercolor" brush. These are very specific conditions, but I've somehow gotten similar errors to happen when just painting normally with these two brush categories."
corel are always in a silent denial about brush functionality/other painter components getting broken with time.
I actually get surprised when they patch up some of the myriad of issues painter's brush engine has accumulated, but alas.
Yeah, and as we've all complained here numerous times, they add new features while rarely fixing the longstanding bugs with old ones.I am not a negative person, and I really appreciate Painter for the many things it does well, but I can't help but feel a good deal of negativity towards Corel for a number of reasons. (1) So many bugs in Painter's old codebase that they probably aren't even capable of fixing. It's like a house on top of a crumbling foundation that you keep adding more floors to. (2) Their completely unacceptable advertising practices. I simply could not believe it when I first saw an advertising pop-up appear by my system tray for a Corel product, when I wasn't even running Painter, and had paid too much money already to them. When people are paying for your program, IT IS NOT OK TO INLCUDE ADWARE. Then when they were called out on it by their users, they made it sound like oops, that wasn't supposed to happen, it was a glitch. Then the next version came out a year later, and guess what? Oops, same mistake, pop-up ads by default. This alone made me never want to give them another cent. (3) Their awful, terrible customer support. Ever tried submitting a simple bug report? I have all but given up, because they farm out their tech support to people that don't seem to know the software well, and also seem to be going off of a pre-made list of solutions, where they avoid sending anything up to the engineering level at all costs. I had one of their tech support people try to set up a remote desktop session to my computer for 2 bugs I was reporting recently, when I made it *extremely* clear that they were bugs and were easily reproducible, not anything to do with my system. (4) Their total lack of communication/outreach with their users. When I was forced to get really mean with the tech support person in the case I just described to get them to understand what a bug report was, I finally got the issue sent to a person at Corel who I'm really tempted to name here but will not. I asked them how we were supposed to submit simple bug reports to them in the future to help improve their product, and the answer was that if I didn't want to open a support ticket again (and get sent around in circles once more), that I should post it here in this forum. He went on to claim that their software engineers watch these forums 'like a hawk,' yet never post. I pointed out how bad the morale was in general here, and at many other places where I read about Painter being discussed and often not recommended, and asked if someone from their team could just drop in once in a while and say "hey, we're here, we're listening." He said he would ask them, and as we've seen so far... no difference.I think the thing that really makes it most frustrating is that literally every other digital art package I have has support where you can contact the developers or a team close to them, and if you submit a bug report they make it apparent that they actually care. Whereas with Corel, it feels like a big detached robot that knows people will continue to pay their inflated prices for their software -- software that continues to get less competitive with other packages which cost less and are programmed by smaller teams who have a much greater degree of concern for their customers and a passion to make their product as good as it can be. Corel is a classic case of a detached corporate enterprise that has lost touch with what makes people happy and passionate about a product, and Painter is a perfect example of this--a product that has so much potential, and so much greatness within, but is hobbled by a lack of vision and a focus only on how to increase its profits (zillions of brush packs anyone?!) with very little focus on how to actually improve it in ways users care about. To close this rant, I've noticed how lots of the people who used to really support Painter and did amazing work with it no longer seem to offer their brushes for free like they used to. How much you wanna bet Corel told them to stop because that was no longer going to be free?//rant
tbh with corel it never mattered if their team (back when it was a canadian one) ever went out of their way to communicate with users.
it didn't affect their weird decisions, or the molasses slow development, and the only people who seemed to see their suggestions materialize were on painter advisory board or w/e it's called.
this thread (featuring an appearance of Chris Pierce, painter product manager) is pure comedy gold in hindsight - https://painterfactory.com/painter_product_discussion/f/corel-painter-products/24967/painter-s-future-depends-on-corel-management
my own naive comment about painter's revenue generated by over-priced brush store products being re-invested into painter itself is hysterical - it gets even more hilarious considering corel, probably, already moved painter development to their Chinese office at the time to further cut production costs and rise profit margins.
(on a side-note, if you have a glassdoor account, corel reviews on that website are pretty interesting too.)
>I've noticed how lots of the people who used to really support Painter and did amazing work with it no longer seem to offer their brushes for free like they used to. How much you wanna bet Corel told them to stop because that was no longer going to be free?
I can't speculate it was done off a corel suggestion (however it's a credible theory, for sure) - a majority of artists I know who started with painter have long moved on, even when painter still had some of its integrity, but it was already evident the program was going to shambles.
I've been at the point where I'd be happy just to use an updated and re-released painter IX.5 edition, but nowadays I'm already content that the new features in paintstorm (it's getting its own watercolor engine in the next version) and artrage (next release already in the works) are going to be the ones I'm going to benefit from; not the ugly looking thick paint, not the insane music brushes, not the texture generators from hell.
the tech support part of your comment is upsetting - painter is the most expensive painting package on the market today, yet you practically have to elbow your way to getting its issues recognized.
Interesting rants from both Ipet and Qwerty. As a novice Painter user, I guess my question is this; Are there any painter programs out there to challenge Corel Painter? I plan on upgrading soon. Please let me know if I might reasonably spend my hard earned money elsewhere.
The two that ipetcats mentioned, Paintstorm Studio and ArtRage, are quite good and very reasonable in price. They have somewhat different approaches, where ArtRage is meant to be very easy to use even for someone with no real experience, where Paintstorm is much more similar to Painter in terms of interface. Both are quite capable, stable, and well-supported. ArtRage is now a mature product on its 5th version, while Paintstorm is a relative newcomer but still being actively developed. It has some really awesome features that I haven't seen in other packages before, and was written by someone who is a very excellent digital artist themselves.Other ones to look at are Clip Studio Paint, Krita (which is free), and also take a look at Rebelle,which is by far the most realistic watercolor program out there, also with a very easy-to-use interface. If you like Eastern watercolor, Expresii is also capable of very impressive results.It really depends on what your style and needs are. If you want to mimic real-world media, and prefer easy-to-use interfaces, ArtRage and Rebelle will probably be your favorites. If you like digital illustration that doesn't involve trying to look like real-world media as much, Paintstorm, Clip Studio Paint, and Krita are good and capable options (and they can indeed imitate real world media rather well too, just not in the same way that it feels like the main purpose of the program like Rebelle and ArtRage.)
Also, I wanted to apologize for answering your question with a rant. Honestly, when I see someone come in here just trying to make great artwork and they hit a road-block because of a known bug -- on that I personally reported years ago, no less -- it ignites my longstanding frustration with Corel. I keep complaining here in the hopes that it will finally strike a chord with them, but all I hear are echoes.
"... painter is the most expensive painting package on the market today, yet you practically have to elbow your way to getting its issues recognized"Exactly. When people are paying as much as 420 dollars on your software, a whole different class of stability and responsiveness to bugs is expected. However it actually seems with Corel and Adobe that the opposite of that is true. The cheaper the program, the smaller the team, the better they deal with their users.In fairness to Painter, it has made some significant improvements in the last few versions, but it's still full of longstanding bugs, outdated features, weird nuances that feel like programming work-arounds (like brushes requiring specialized layer types to work), and a frustratingly slow development that gives 1 patch per version, per year, meaning issues are all but guaranteed to be carried to the next year... and the next year... and the next year...