[Lunatique]

Thanks to Jinny Brown's referral, I've managed to open up direct dialogue with Corel's Program Manager, and I've got her full attention. She wants to know what the most prolific professionals such as yourselves feel/think about Painter 8, or Painter in general. This is your chance to be heard, by the person that makes decisions. No red tape, no B.S. Step up, the mic is on.

[ceenda]

Firstly, the most important thing is to say thanks, the latest release is pretty awesome and the programmers have clearly put alot of work into it.

There are some issues, however, which are causing some problems to the general workflow.

1) Canvas Flip - You have no idea how useful it can be to flip the canvas (including all sublayers). Photoshop has both a Flip and a Canvas Flip. I already have a flip hotkey in painter, but it only does the layer that I am on. For those who wonder why you'd want to flip the entire canvas, it helps to refresh the mind and see any mistakes in proportion. Traditional artists use a mirror to get the same effect.

2) The Brush Editor - Is awesome, put simply. However, on my machine (an AthlonXP 1800+ which I hope isn't too outdated yet) the brush editor takes ages to load. It really breaks up the fluidity of the workflow. Often I just want to squeeze the brush a bit or make little adjustments.

3) Brush Resize - Now... I missed Painter 7. But apparently this is in there too. It used to be Ctrl-Alt to resize brushes. Now it is Ctrl-Alt-Shift AND clicking once on the canvas to get your brush back. When you're doing that every 15 seconds, it becomes very annoying. Why not have the brush back the moment you let go? Where else is the cursor going to go?

Otherwise, it's a good-un. Thanks to the Corel guys for making a good app better.

[Frog]

The brush editor breaks up workflow, sure keep it but can we have the option of just using sliders like before? When you're constantly tweaking on the fly it's much much quicker.
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[gekitsu]

the brush designer breaks up workflow.
paint paint paint, oh i need like 3px more spacing for that. *click brush designer load load load, brush designer here. whoa, image gone. blah. adjusting eyes to white canvas. hurting eyes. changing to 3px more spacing. close brush designer. try to paint further, eyes still adjusted to white canvas, fucking up color and stuff, i even may end up not knowing anymore why i wanted 3px more spacing having to redo all the stuff to get brushes back to state before changing (given the fact the previous setting wasn't brush default)...
i mean... that was like
paint paint paint, i need more spacing, click, plus three pix spacing, voila, brushstroke, brushstroke, brushstroke, okay, lets change back and i'm done.
in previous versions.
i see the value of that "thing" for photoshop converts but there are already painter users out there who wanted to buy painter 8 not painter vs. photoshop 1.

idea for solving: make all the brush controls available as you did with the papers menu. it is hidden by default, leaving the photoshoppes with the papers dialogue in their beloved vertical tool bar. we painter users can open it and dock it to whatever we like, which is good.

since the brush designer is nothing more than a new document and a new set of menus displayed, these menus could be available the way the papers dialogue is. so painter users have "true" painter features and photoshoppers can use painters features without having to worry about interface being cluttered.


also, the brush picking thing needs too many clicks for changing often used tools. in painter 6.1, i had five brush slots that i could fix to display a certain brush only or to display the brushes last used. it wasn't a hurry, it wasn't cluttering the work space and it was comfortable. so no need to change that. you don't have to adopt the issues from photoshop where photoshop is obviously weaker than painter.

custom palettes: why are they gone? is there any single reason for that? please explain.
they weren't clutering workspace because no one was forced to use them and those who used them knew why they did.

brush resize:
one: hitting three buttons inmidst being thinking about lights, value, shape and color is a hassle. then i have to dryhump my stylus on the wacom once just to tell painter i want to paint now. painter 6 wanted me to hold alt while changing brush size (ONLY alt) and when i left off it i was able to paint again.

the top menu bar:
whenever i dock both the brush properties bar and the brush picking tool to the top of the screen, they take their fixed positions. no way to switch places or let the brush picking tool have a bit more open space to the right (so that both popups would unfold to the same direction, for example).
instead of allowing me that, the brush properties bar becomes huge. it won't use that space it occupies at all, just displaying the far too few controls it houses when floating around freely.


it would also be neat to allow binding f-keys to different palette layout presets. so i could just hit say f3 when i am in a stage of painting that can be done with just keyboard shortcuts and switch off everything but the tool box and the brush picker. a hit on f4 e.g. will bring back all the menus in my favorite order for the painting periods when i need all information at hand.


otherwise, there really are a lot good things to painter 8. the idea of having brush variants of different sizes is not bad. if switching between brushes was quicker, i could set them to brush sizes used often and would not need to resize them everytime.
the new digital watercolors are sweet, as are lots of the pencils.

good work, just keep it painter, not photoshop. if we wanted to use photoshop, we would use it and not painter.

[Sumaleth]

I've been putting off downloading the P8 demo because I didnt think I could deal with another "Painter interface", but maybe I should give it a look now.
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[Drunken Monkey]

I wish it would stop crashing every 1-2 minutes (i am not joking).
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[chuster]

Overall I like the new interface and I like very much the new look of the layers and the fact that they are more in tune with the layers in photoshop.

I find the brush tracker pretty useless.

I like a lot of Gekitsus suggestions and I would like to see the brush controls more up front, such as Buildup and Cover in the bar at the top so you don't have to go into the Brush Creator and practially create a new brush to toggle a particular brush into cover or build up mode.

There are obviously some bugs to iron out in the brush creator that freeze my old G3 andforces me to force quit the prog but you probably know about these issues.

[Kortez]

It takes such a long time to switch between brushes... or am I just missing something here?
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[tilokani]

Kortez definately right here. What I would like to see is the abilty to assign hotkeys to most or all of the brushes, or if they were provided. Sure, it may seem inane, but it could surely save time and increase efficiency.
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[Jin]

[Anthony]

I haven't tried Painter8, but from 7 here's my list.

-Better lasso and selection tools(how about a straight angle lasso??)

-More simple PS style brushes(a real hard and a real soft edge airbrush, that doesn't blend color and all that)

-No more soft edges on the Square Chalk tool(around the border of the image)! Let me scale the paper texture by however many times I want it to repeat over the course of the canvas. When painting textures now I have to take it into photoshop, and I have to rubber stamp the edges after a 50% verticle and horizontal offset in order to get detail at the edges. I make my paper textures out of tilable images anyway, so it'll loop, just kill the blurred edges!

I honestly don't use Painter for anything but texturing and pencil sketching anymore, because I rely so much on lasso and selections, fast brushes, and minimal interface. I want to, but can't justify the extra time spent fiddling and messing.
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[Capt.FlushGarden]

I really miss the polygonal Lasso tool as Photoshop has, what is important for me is to be able to hold ALT and get the polygonal lasso tool and when I let go it switches back to normal lasso tool, when I want to make an edged selection in Painter I have to draw with the pen tool and save curve as selection, that takes alot more time than just using the polygonal tool in PS, also when painting with a brush I really miss the function that is in PS, when I hold shift a straight stroke is created between two dots that I make with the brush tool. I just saw that anthony wishes for the same lasso thing!

I would also like to have Full screen mode when everything that surrounds the image is black, or a selected color.

I don't know if it's already possible in Painter 8, but I could kill for a window with the brushes that I can move around wherever I want.


When I make a selection and paint inside it, the brush "steals" color outside the selectiuon and smudges it at the edge, I would like it to keep the color outside the selection and only work with the colors inside it


I might be complaining or wishing for stuff that already exist in painter, but that's just because I haven't found them yet, If painter was a little faster and had more of PS functions I would probably change to Painter because it's a program with great functions, but lacks some of the most simple functions that Photoshop already has and have had for years!

Thank you!!!


John Wallin

[ZippZopp]

Painter 8 still doesn't work properly on systems with dual monitors. with photoshop you can drag your tools and boxes over to the second monitor, painter 8 still doesn't allow this. the only way to do it is to drag the whole painter window across both monitors.

[K Harsha]

I upgraded from Painter 7 to Painter 8 about 2 weeks ago...
The Good: channels,mixer, digital (painter 6-esque) watercolor brushes, Brush editor, new brushes, collapsable layers.
The Bad: The digital Painter 6-esque watercolor brushes... leave uneraseable edge artifacts (very bad) especially when used with diffused edges... they can be made invisible by erasing, but when you try to paint over the artifacted area they return. No SIMPLE tool for moving brushes within the program. Also the giant floating brush control pallete takes up a lot of screen realestate and is limited in it's dockbility.

The Ugly: What is this? No custom brush pallette? No (always open) controls for modifing brush variants? No entire image flopping?
Having 400 brushes to choose from is great! I use about 6 custom brushes when I am painting, 4 custom pencil variants when sketching, and about a dozen other brushes (airbrush, eraser, etc.) that I have slapped on a custom brushes pallete (in painter 7).
I customize (tweek) these brushes AS I WORK (in painter 7). By removing the custom brush option and the option to have the brush controls menu open Painter 8 has slowed my productivity.

I would really, really, like to see these features returned. Unil then, it's Painter 7 and Photoshop for work,
and Painter 8 for play.

[spline]

I have been making computergraphics since the days of the Amiga and
there is one very important thing that has been forgotten by booth Photoshop and Painter and that is the palette!

I really need a better palette handler. These functions was in the old 8bit programs for Amiga and Atari, but I still need them, because they are very good and speeds up painting alot!

What I want to be able to do is to select one color in the palette, klick a button called "ramp to" then klick another color which is 2 or more steps from the first and the program then creates a gradient of the value of the colors between these colors.

Like I have One read color in the palette x nr of colors away I have a yellow color, now I select the red color and then click "ramp to" button and then click on the yellow color. Now what happens is that the x nr of colors between the read and the yellow becomes a gradient from red to yellow.

Then I would like to be able to copy/swap one or more colors at the same time in the palett to another place in the palette. And mirror colors.

Also I would like to be able to change the hue/saturn/brightness/contrast on any number of colors in the palette or the whole palette.

Then what you need is 2 assignable shortcuts to the palette. The first shortcut jumps one step forward in the palette and the second jumps one step backwards.

This speeds upp painting alot! because then you could make some gradients in the palette and then quickly jump back and forth between the colors in the palette while painting. Then you almost never have to remove your mouse during painting.

I have been wanting this function since years back. But it seems that nobody at Corel or Adobe knows about this.

If you want to test how this works and why it is so nice try Promotion then in preferences set the shortcuts for jumping stepping back and forth in the palette. But that is only a 8bit program...

There was one 24bit program that called Artgem that implemented this, but that program is no more.

This function is something that you would use everytime you paint! And therefore should be of great priority for paintprogram to have!

Please Corel!

[Jin]

[Tzan]

I did reread the previous posts (quickly) and didnt spot this.

Zoom in/out - I expected the place were I click to be moved to the center of the window, but it doesnt and forces me to use the sliders every time. I hadnt noticed this before because I was just fiddling with small images.

The way it works now is when you click that spot stays were it is in the window, but portions of what you want may end up going out of frame.

So having a new check box at the top panel that says: Center on Click or something like that. So it will zoom in/out and recenter the image on the click location. This is how Photoshop works.

[einam]

1.The whole idea of the brush tracker to speed workflow works, but it is a bad approach. The user should be able to change the brush or switch brushes quickly so that a "brush tracker" would be useless. Changing brushes should have nothing to do with "history" is should just be quick and easy.
more specifically: Lose the brush tracker and instead make the brush editor pop up faster with some smarter coding, or make it more approachable in some other way. *hint-hint* Maya's "hotbox" is a great idea.

2.The Dodge and Burn tools aren't too great. They should be precise as in photoshop and a brightness-spectrum-range dropdown would be nice (like photoshop's "highlights, midtones, shadows").

3.charcoal behaves unrealistically. The whole idea of charcoal art is finger smudging. Whoever worked with charcoal on paper immediately notices the mistake in painter. The smudge is "oily" and doesn't preserve the original lines. It is also grainy. Charcoal smudges are the softest of all mediums, the "gradient" is perfect even on coarse paper. Not so in Painter.

4.the program has many small bugs like imperfections in screen refresh (deleted color stays in pixels until you scroll out and back to that point).
Sometimes brushes render weird-colored pixels around the painting area which "aren't really there" - meaning that a scroll will make them disappear. But they are obviously very annoying because they block the view of the newly made stroke.

[ewiser]

[HardCoil]

One thing that's a bit weird is the way painter stores HDD paths. It seems only to store the last used location on the disk, and then use it for everything.
When I want to load a colour set, instead of defaulting to the folder where I store the sets, it defaults to the place where I last got ANY file from the disk (which is usually the folder where I stored the pic I'm working on).

A far better solution would be to remember the path for each function.
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[amichaels]

I haven't used Painter 8, but one thing I wish Painter 7 had that Photoshop has is the navigator window. I really don't like the magnifying glass zoom in/out interface. I find that it's easier and faster in photoshop because of it's cool navigator window. That's my only painter wish.

[Chthonic Divinity]

text tools!
what i really miss is the ability to change characteristics in the same line of text. for instance: this is an example of what i'm talking about.
in painter the whole string has to be bold, or normal. not individual words. really aggravating.
i also wish i could open multiple files at once, like photoshop. sometimes i like to open a few things im working on, and opening them one by one is tedious.
thats all for now

[Jin]

[Jin]

[balistic]

If anyone from Corel is reading this and happens to know the disillusioned guy in the basement who probably programs Photo-Paint, please let him know that some of us do use it and love it, despite its utter lack of promotion and availablity.
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[amichaels]

Cool. I didn't know that was there. Thanks for the tip.