A long-time, ongoing Painter wish list

Of all digital draw/paint programs, Corel Painter is my first love. As a Painter user since Painter4, I will always be a devout Painter user.

BUT!!! I’m noting new Painter releases as focusing solely on funky new brushes and little else? While audio brushes,particle brushes, flame brushes, and brushes that crank out instant fur, seaweed, dreadlocks, etcetera, are all just fine for those who want them, WHAT ABOUT CORE FUNCTIONALITY???

If I’ve caught the attention of any of  you Corel folks in development, and you can get through this rant, thank you in advance for acknowledging this wish list. What I’m getting at is:

I. Layer Functionality - Despite Painter 2020 layer improvements, there are still a few things that I understand are missing (I’ve yet to upgrade from 2019):

A. Layer position locking - PhotoShop and ArtStudio Pro (an iPad app) have a layer lock feature that allows you to paint on a layer, but lock it into position. Working with many brushes that use paper textures, it sucks when I inadvertently nudge a layer, and my paper grains get out of whack. When you continue to draw/paint before noticing these layer position shifts, things get sloppy and hard to repair. Layer locking and alpha locking have been a feature since the get-go, so why not layer position locking? 

B. Shortcomings with layer masking and channel selections:

1. Why can’t you link/unlink a layer from it’s layer mask as you can in PhotoShop?

2. Why do you have to commit or delete a layer mask before implementing a transformation?

3. Often times when I try to fill a layer mask from a channel selection, the fill doesn’t register with the marching ants that denote the designated fill area. I suspect that this has something to do with layer pixels that extend beyond the canvas/image size area, but I still get this sometimes screwy behavior even when I crop the image

4. In previous versions of Painter, you were able to save and load channel selections from one open .rif file to another open .rif file (like you’re able to do in PhotoShop). I’d imagine that not many knew or cared about this feature, but I loved it. Just wondering why it was omitted from later releases?

5. In legacy versions, there was an icon that allowed you to paint within a marching ant selection, or outside of that selection. Why has this been way buried in the ‘Navigate’ panel? Couldn’t this (once prominent) option be added to the contextual menu of related lasso and marquee selection tools? 

II. Painter once had amazing vector-based compatibility features (Paths from Illustrator, and shape layers from PhotoShop) - You can still EXPORT paths to .ai, but why can you no longer IMPORT vector-based shaped from a BASIC, stripped down .ai file? 

Most Painter users probably do not care about the program’s limited vector-based capabilities, but some of us do! With Painter’s limited bezier/Boolean capabilities, it’d be nice to do be able to still be able to import Beziers as you once were able to do. I well understand that Adobe has gotten way too crazy with their bells and whistles. But aren’t core Postcript beziers still pretty boilerplate?

And in legacy versions of Painter, PhotoShop shape layers would import into Painter as shape layers. Now, they’re unsupported, and import as raster-based layers. 

III. Painter Webinars and Other Instructional Resources - Love the ongoing series of webinars. Having been a Painter lover since the very first release, I feel as though Tanya, Cher Pendarvis (still love her Painter5 Wow! Book), Skip Allen, Aaron Rutten, and the other regular Painter Masters are a virtual family. But looking back at older webinars, I note that newer webinars seem to merely focus on brushes.

Skip Allen has done extensive, cohesive webinars on flowmaps and particle brushes, but there are long-forgotten, amazing features that I wish would be resurrected. Case in point:

• There is little instruction on how to use the FX distortion brushes. In other programs like Procreate, liquify and bulge are pretty intuitive and easy to understand; not so in Corel Painter.

• The ‘Real’ brush settings are pretty hard to absorb (and I’m a Painter geek), it’d be great if Cher did a remake on this technology

• The information in Cher’s Wow! books are gems. Why not leverage some of that long-forgotten information (glass distortion, image mapping, etc.).

Thanks so much to any of you who have been interested enough to have gotten to this last line!

Tom