This post is about how to work around issues with pressure sensitivity, drawing broken lines, and various UI defects in Corel Painter 2022/2023 when running on a Microsoft Surface Pro 8 and using the Slim Pen 2. I managed to restore nearly full painting functionality to Painter 2022/2023 by installing the latest Intel XE drivers and tuning the pen sensitivity in both the Surface app supplied with my machine and the Corel Painter brush tracking preference.
Problem
Recent Surface devices (after the Surface Book 2) seem to exhibit problems with lack of pen pressure sensitivity, the pen skipping while trying to make a continuous brush stroke leading to broken/dashed lines, and UI defects such as tool bar icons, the color wheel, mixer and other parts not updating. These problems seem to affect Surface Pro 8 and Surface Laptop Studio and are not fixed in Corel Painter 2023. I also posted a suggestion summarizing the problems in detail and the various tests I tried a few weeks ago.
Hardware/Software
This work around was created and tested on:
Solution
Caveats and Support
It's entirely possible that we're not getting the full range of pressure sensitivity with such extreme adjustments, but it's better than nothing and so far it seems to meet my needs as a secondary painting/drawing device. If you're thinking of using Surface with Corel Painter as your primary device I'd think carefully as support seems fragile.
Surface owners, please reply to this post with your machine specs if you got this fix to work (and even if it did not work for you) so that other Surface artists can benefit. Spread this on your socials. Let folks know. Enjoy!
For the price of this software, we need a real fix Corel! Surface users are spending a premium for these great machines and are an audience that can probably afford your software - if they can actually use it.
I have already uninstalled painter so I can’t try this. However what may be happening is that there is a numerical overflow or type mismatch, signed vs unsigned, 16 vs. 32 bit numbers in the software and by scaling the ranges, you are avoiding the overflow at the cost of perhaps reducing the number of pressure levels. I emphasize may and perhaps because this is a code issue that only Corel can fix. It does offer a clue that hopefully they will look at and fix it. For now, I have stop wasting my money on painter because Corel told me explicitly a while ago, painter 2021, that they were not fixing this problem.
All other programs that I have work fine with pressure and tilt with my surface computers (surface 7pro & surface laptop studio). Rebelle 5 Pro is IMHO quite nice. Artrage, Photoshop are also fine.
Does this bug still exist in 2023? I'm considering surface pro 8 or 9
Hi Mark,
Painter 2023 states that it only works with wintab devices which is (from the painter specs):“** Corel Painter supports pen and display tablets from Wacom, Xencelabs, Huion and other Wintab-compatible tablets.”https://www.painterartist.com/en/product/painter/#tech-specs
the last Painter that I tested was 2022 and it did not work.
I have a Surface pro 7. A surface studio laptop and surface studio 28*.
I have switched to Rebelle 5 pro. Which does work with the computers that I have.
Rebelle also works on my M2 Airbook which does need a wacom tablet.
https://www.escapemotions.com/
ok thanks. I do have Rebelle 5 Pro as I got it for $10 in the recent sales. The way layers and masks are done are kinda strange and the major reason I don't use it much. I also don't use watercolor much at all.
It would be nice if corel fixed the isue