Trialing Painter 8

[Bee]

http://becca.atomkinder.net/paintings/painterdicks.jpg

now that's just not right...

[Bee]

Question> how come painter gets a forum of it's own and not photoshop too?

Maybe cos there is less wierd stuff in PS?

Umm.... my brief 20min swaure in the Painter 8.... 4hrs of download only to find it not worth spending too much time working there, cos anything I put time into will evitabley (with my luck) be lost two minutes before finish.

Corel smarm..


http://becca.atomkinder.net/paintings/lady.jpg

no offense to anyone who uses it :p there's alot of amazing work being produced out there........ one of these days I'll have money and buy all these programmes and not winge about not being given the oppurtunity to have a decent play in the trial :D

[Paulo]

Wow.

Too much information! The new interface is uncluttered and very unPainter-ly. I don't know if I like it as much as I thought I would.

[A] BRUSHES
The new brushes (acrylics, oils, etc) aren't exactly new (the brush technology seems to be the same found in Painter 7) but they're extremely well-organized and well-designed. And [mostly] everything seems faster.

The BLENDERS are specially good. Think Just Add Water meets the Goodbrush© on steroids. The effect is amazing.

The WATERCOLORS seem faster. They seem a little bit different too, I can't describe how. It's probably true they still build to black, but in a more real-life way. More on that later.

The DIGITAL WATERCOLORS don't behave exactly as Painter 6 Watercolors. The Wet Edge effect is less effective (way more unnatural) in Painter 8. Just load the Simple Water Brush and make some overlapping strokes while increasing the Wet Edge slider settings. Ugh.

LIQUID INK is slower than ever. Quite useless. It was faster in Painter 7.

[B]MIX PALETTE

I know I will never use it. Ever. Works pretty much as shown in the Interactive Tour.

[C] DOCKING PALETTES

Very Photoshop-like. Yummy.

[D] BRUSH DESIGNER

Yes, you have to load the new Brush Designer window to make new brushes. The BD window takes forever to load in my slow system, and the "Now Evaluating Brush Directions" Progress window shows several times before I can get to real editing. I think the program is building stroke variants previews, and it isn't a fast process.

Every time I change the smallest setting, it happens again.

Very cumbersome. Major bummer.

[E] OLD BRUSHES

My old painter 7 brushes load without problems, and behave as they're supposed to - as far as I can tell.

[F] OVERALL FIRST IMPRESSION

Mixed. The cheer organization of the interface is very appealing, but I'm not comfortable with the slowness of the Brush Designer thingie.

More impressions later.

-------------------------

Do I need to tell I'm running Painter 8 on Windows 98 SE ?

Cheers,

Paulo

[biotron]

I thought the digital water colors worked pretty damn near close to the old Painter 6 ones. The new simple water was the one I liked.

[ArtJunky]

First of all, I love the new interface. I have always gone back to paint in Photoshop because Painter was such a stretch. Never liked its paradygm. Never understood it completely.

This new version 8, for me, has bridged the gap between Photoshop and the old painter style. I can now go naturally between Photoshop...actually, now, I can stay within Painter without leaving...Layers is great with multiply and all the other layer enhancements. The effects doesn't quite work as well but that's now the reason I go to painter.
Painter, for me has been about the natural brushs. Being able to have a loaded brush or watercolor or,.... you know.

The menu is cleaner and less cluttered which was a huge problem with the last version. I especially like having some of the papers and looks in a smaller area...It always seemed a waste of space to have them layed out in a box. Eventually, once more and more people have duel/larger monitors, having separate storage boxes for different tools will work better but for now the real estate is very important.

The vector tools are great and again, they have taken up the standard format that works.


I don't really use nozzles but it seems kind of annoying that when you go to load nozzles, it is looking for a .rif file. This is not the nozzle extension so when you go to the Image Hose folder, it doesn't find a rif file.

This was the same with painter 7.

I have not worked on large files with Painter 8 yet as I don't yet own the real version but I hope they have fixed the crashing problems. For me, and a number of other people that I know, this was a huge problem. You just can't have the program crash while working on an illustration. There'e a tendency to loose valuable time and worse, beautiful art.

I know Photoshop inside an out but I was never a Painter power-user so some of the finer details that others here may have loved are lost on me. However, now that I feel comfortable with Painter, I'll probably spend more time using it.

That's my first impression.

[Jin]

Originally posted by ArtJunky
[B]First of all, I love the new interface. I have always gone back to paint in Photoshop because Painter was such a stretch. Never liked its paradygm. Never understood it completely.

This new version 8, for me, has bridged the gap between Photoshop and the old painter style. I can now go naturally between Photoshop...actually, now, I can stay within Painter without leaving...Layers is great with multiply and all the other layer enhancements. The effects doesn't quite work as well but that's now the reason I go to painter.
Painter, for me has been about the natural brushs. Being able to have a loaded brush or watercolor or,.... you know.

Painter has had Layers since Painter 6 and if, by "multiply", you mean Composite Method Multiply, that's been there too, for a few versions at least.

The vector tools are great and again, they have taken up the standard format that works.

Painter's vector based Shapes have also been in Painter for ages.

I don't really use nozzles but it seems kind of annoying that when you go to load nozzles, it is looking for a .rif file. This is not the nozzle extension so when you go to the Image Hose folder, it doesn't find a rif file.

In the context of your comment above, when Painter looks for a RIFF file, it's looking for an individual Nozzle and that happens when you choose Load Nozzle from the Brushes palette (in Painter 7, as I can't talk about Painter 8). The .NZL extension is for Nozzle Libraries, or collections of individual Nozzles. Those are accessed from the Nozzles section and other Nozzle Libraries are accessed by using the Load Library command in the Nozzles section.

This was the same with painter 7.

You're right, it's the way it works in several Painter versions, at the very least back to Painter 5 and probably earlier.

[ArtJunky]

Yes, you are right. and I guess that it's my conclusion that I think I have been carrying too much baggage with me through the different versions. I've been buying painter ever since version 2.5. and it just never took hold of me.

It's been a while since I last used painter 7. Looking back, my biggest complaint was that Painter 7 crashed too much and perhaps there was too much clutter caused by the pallets.

With this new version 8, most of the tools, somehow, seem very familiar to me. None of the other versions felt this way to me. In one word, "simpler."

I've been testing with the trial and ordered it yesterday. :chug:

Once again, I hope not to be dissapointed.

If you really loved the traditional Painter paradygm, you may be disappointed but for me...and I say this with guarded caution and pleasure,

IT'S ABOUT TIME.

I just hope you painter power users aren't dissapointed. If you are, then perhaps we have lost something here.

[dbclemons]

I just started playing around with the trial version yesterday.

My observations:
I approve of the changed interface; although, I don't like the idea of relearning where everything is. Photoshop users will feel that it's very familiar.

It still forces you to work within the workspace area, so a dual monitor setup would be a pain.

The usenet group has been angry about the removal of the Custom Palette feature. I never took advantage of that much, myself.

Thank God that the magic wand tool now actually works like it's supposed to.

From what I hear, TGA files will still not offer Alpha Channel support.

You can regroup your tool palettes, i.e. put the colors in with art materials, etc.

Looks like they got rid of that ugly orange/black border for shapes. It's now a sub-pixel selection which makes it more accurate to resize.

Brightness/Contrast still doesn't offer number values like PS does.

-David

[Dan Milligan]

Running in OSX

-the lasso tool in Painter 7 never worked right... and it still doesn't!
-rotating a layer in Painter 7 used to cause it to blur ... Painter 8 same problem!

anyone else find these bugs

[Wetterschneider]

One immediate question - is there a way to list the brushes by name, and not by a *completely* useless graphic sample swatch? The named list in 7 was a lot more descriptive.

[sandman]

Originally posted by Wetterschneider
One immediate question - is there a way to list the brushes by name, and not by a *completely* useless graphic sample swatch? The named list in 7 was a lot more descriptive.

Yep, from the brush variants dropdown (displayed when you click the second icon in the P8 brush selector bar), click the small triangle at top right of drop down menu and select 'list'.

The same goes for the brush tracker palette. just click the small triangle at top right and select 'list' again.

There are other things you can do to make brush selection more fluid as well;

The first thing is that both the brush selector bar and the property bar can be dragged around the screen and positioned where ever you want them.

Secondly, if you click the first icon in the brush selector bar, and then click the small triangle top right of drop down menu, then select 'thumbnails', the category dropdown will resemble Painter 7's.

Thirdly, you can create your own custom brush category and place all your most commonly used variants in it, so you don't have to keep changing brush categories.

It is also useful to access the brush variants in the selected category via a contextual menu. This means that if you first set one of the Wacom stylus side switch positions to perform a right click (set up in the Wacom controls pannel), when the curser is positioned over the canvas and right clicked (or even control>clicked on the Mac), a selectable list of currently available variants with a few other options are available on the fly.

David

[Leviron]

I haven't used Painter 7 or 6 before. I've only used painter 8.

I find it very annoying when I want a certain colour. I can't just type in the RBG value.

What I love about the program is that is has lots of brushes.

The way it lets you zoom in...to me it looks bad.

The only good thing I can say about it, is that it's user friendly.

[sandman]

Originally posted by Leviron
I find it very annoying when I want a certain colour. I can't just type in the RBG value.

You can manually input the RGB values. In Painter 8, select window menu>show color info. A small palette will open with individual RGB value sliders. Alternatively, if you click on each numeric value box (to the right of the sliders, you can also key in the required values.

You can't do this for HSV values though. To display numerical RGB values instead of HSV in the standard colours or small colours palette, either click once on the numerical values window at bottom right of palette, or click the small triangle in the colours palette menu and choose 'Display as RGB'.

David

[Leviron]

I figured how to get the RBG input. Just double click on the colour when it's secondary or primary.

The mixing thing is good, mix a few colours and then tell the colour set to display all of those lovely/horrible colours as a set.... nice feature.

[Forge]

one really good thing into painter 8 is the digital water color... now as in painter 5 u can return back to white when u paint with water color... not realistic but useful...