Corel Painter X delivers improved performance, new composition tools, and the RealBristle Painting System that provides an organic painting and illustration experience right down to the individual bristles on the brush.
"Throughout the development of Corel Painter X, we turned to our customers, including some of the industry's top artists, designers, and photographers to ensure that we were delivering the ultimate art studio for creating their masterpieces. We asked them to give us their perspectives on the essence of Corel Painter and what it meant to them and their work. 'Art and Passion' was the resounding response. These inspirational themes guided us throughout our development and set the tone for the entire application. As a result, Corel Painter X is the most natural, organic and powerful version yet," says Rick Champagne, product manager for Corel Painter.
The RealBristle Painting System heightens the responsiveness of the brush for the artist and faithfully replicates traditional art media with individual bristles that blend and splay, as in the traditional world. Artists can experience the sensation of the interaction between the paint, canvas, and brush.
Corel Painter X adds new Composition Tools, enabling artists, designers, and photographers to quickly and easily compose images. The new Divine Proportion composition tool provides guidelines that follow the Divine Proportion (also known as the Golden Ratio) to enable artists to compose their images like the Masters. The new Layout Grid composition tool provides guidelines that follow photography's Rule of Thirds, but can be customized to other desired grid patterns.
Artists can now match the color and intensity between two images. Open an image that features a desired color scheme and use the Match Palette effect to apply it to another image. The Match Palette effect includes controls for color, color variation, brightness, brightness variation, and intensity. This effect can be accessed on its own or found as part of the enhanced Photo-Painting Palettes.
Artists now have greater control over color selection when using any bristle brush. For multicolor selection, the new Universal Mixer palette gives artists better control over color blending between the Mixer palette and the canvas.
Corel Painter X delivers speed improvements in areas including brush performance, opening and saving RIFF files, and rendering effects. The most dramatic speed improvements will be experienced by customers running Intel-based Macintosh computers, although all customers will experience speed enhancements in various aspects of the application.
With support for Universal binary specifications, Corel Painter X is optimized for Intel-based Macintosh computers.
Now it's easy to backup, share or switch between customized workspaces. For example, artists can create easily accessible, customized environments for activities like sketching, photography, and painting. The Workspace Manager is also useful for educators who want to streamline Corel Painter X to suit curriculum and quickly add a customized workspace on every student's computer. In addition, custom brushes can now be quickly exported and shared with others in the community.
Dodge and burn capabilities have been improved with the addition of two new image enhancement tools to the toolbox. The Dodge tool enables artists to lighten specific areas of an image, while the Burn tool can be used to darken specific areas of an image. Dodging and burning are often used to prepare a photograph for painting.
The enhanced Color Management System ensures accurate color reproduction between devices and print jobs. Now, users only have to set up their Color Management options once and Corel Painter X retains those settings until further adjustments are made. With support for industry standard ICC4.0 color profiles, Corel Painter X enables artists to focus specifically on their work.
Corel Painter X is designed to run on Windows Vista.
Corel Painter X supports the latest operating system from Apple.
Layer behavior is very similar to Adobe Photoshop, making it simple to move files between the applications. Files saved to the Photoshop (PSD) file format open in Corel Painter, with layer masks, alpha channels, and layer sets (groups) maintained. Enhancements include easier layer grouping and combining, and improved support for layer merge modes. Corel Painter X also supports many Photoshop plug-ins for Mac OS X.
With Corel Painter X, artists can use the entire Wacom product line including the Cintiq 21 UX interactive pen display and the Intuos3 pen tablet. In addition, the new RealBristle Painting System and the Wacom 6D Art Pen work together to take digital painting to an unprecedented level of realism.
The English version of Corel Painter X, offered in a full version, upgrade version, education edition, and Limited Edition Painter Can, is available for pre-order through Corel and select partners. English version box product will be available through Corel and reseller partners in late February 2007. Japanese, French, Italian, and German versions of Corel Painter X will be available throughout the spring of 2007.
Suggested retail pricing for Corel Painter X in the US and Canada is $429 for full, $229 for upgrade, and $99 for the education edition. The Limited Edition Painter Can is available for $499.