Customer Reviews

Corel Painter 11 Education Edition [OLD VERSION]

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Corel Painter is in a category all its own. While photo manipulation software comes in all sorts and layout programs abound for every skill set, Painter is a unique program that allows real art to be made directly in a digital format.

This could easily be quite a cheesy goal and a sub-par result meant more for play than serious work. Could be, but Painter does the task so well it is really astounding.

I could have said the exact same words, and have, about Painter IX, a program I have owned since it was released.

I've found that program unsurpassed in all kinds of creative goals for both web and print use, for both serious work and for creative exploration.

I was familiar with Painter IX, and yet I'm still a bit blown away by Painter 11.

It's an easy transition. Everything looks the same and so there's no major transition from the older to the newer. The main difference is in feel. Painter 11 just feels more natural. It has better response, better control, better overall simulation of the various media. Even on the Intuos3, I could always feel a strong bit of distance, and artificiality, on Painter IX. In Painter 11 I just feel so much more connected to the canvas on the screen.

Some have noted some issues with their graphics pad. I've not seen any problems at all. Perfect and easy use, even better than Painter IX in every respect.

Often, new programs try to add so much they become slower, or more complicated, or otherwise a step down in performance for the steps up in function. Painter 11 adds a whole list of new brushes and capabilities, all functioning perfect as I try them out. It does this while speeding up all the various interactions. Everything just seem so smooth. So not only are the brushes and pens feeling so much more natural, the whole experience is sharpened and quick.

The integration with the Adobe products is likewise quite good. One thing I've appreciated about the various Corel products is their ability to 'play well with others'. Instead of trying to mark out its territory by ignoring the major players, Corel enables functions that takes seriously the probable software use of real designers and artists.

Painter has always been a program in its own class, and that sometimes means a company doesn't continue to innovate with it. Corel keeps pushing the edge, making a five star product much better, by making better what it already did great and adding quite useful capabilities on top of this.

Extremely pleased with Painter 11. Well worth the cost, and if you have an older version it is indeed worth an upgrade.

Some reviewers have noted this version seems slower. I just can't see what they mean. Indeed, not only does this program feel quite a bit faster it also seems to work well on a variety of systems. My main computer is a XPS710 with a quad core processor, a nice video card. Of course Painter flies on that one. But, surprisingly, it also works quite smoothly on my laptop, a Dell e1405, that has no separate video processor, is one of earliest dual-core, and only has 1gb of memory. If I do particularly processor intensive tasks it does lag a bit, but significantly less than my Adobe programs. It works better than Painter IX did on the same computer.

As far as operating systems, I've run this on Vista premium (my main computer), XP media edition (my laptop), and Vista home (my wife's laptop). Runs great on each.

As far as the difference between academic and regular editions. There isn't any. Just the price. Like with a lot of software, Corel offers a discount for those who can verify they are in school or work at an academic institution. One great education benefit of this software is a great, and cheap way, to learn art skills. All the paint and art supplies are free! Not exactly the same as physically doing art, but a really, really great way to learn the basics and explore techniques.

If you're worried about how well it works, Corel has a full-featured 30 day demo you can download.

So no worries. Try it then buy it. It's an amazing product!

I upgraded to Corel Painter 11 from Corel Painter X.

Here are a few quick specs on my system: I'm running Painter 11 on Windows XP (2.5 GHz processor with 2.5 Gigs of memory). The tablet I use is a Wacom Graphire "Steel-Blue" Tablet.

There are a couple of major improvements in Painter 11 over its predecessors.

- Tilt Recognition
If you have a tablet with pen-tilt detection, Painter 11 makes use of the tilt feature to broaden or narrow brush strokes with the tilt of the pen - narrower strokes with the pen perpendicular to the tablet and broader strokes with the pen at an angle to the tablet. (Alas, my Graphire series tablet is not tilt-aware and thus I'm unable to take advantage this feature.)

- Velocity Recognition
Painter 11 recognizes the velocity of a brush stroke and renders the stroke accordingly.

For a complete comparison of Painter 11 with previous versions, G00g1e for "Painter_11_Family_Product_Matrix" and follow the first link to view the PDF file.

I found Painter 11 very buggy and quirky. For example, I would get the following problems sporadically:

- Brush size lever refuses to budge
After I change the brush size beyond a certain threshold, I have a problem reducing it back down in size.

- Pasted layer shows up blank
After I copy and paste a layer, the pasted layer shows up blank.

- Custom Paper Library does not save
I'm unable to save a paper library that I've created and for the life of me, I can't figure out a way to make it save.

- Bush strokes don't show up
Periodically, brush strokes fail to show up. The only way I've found to fix this is to quit the application and start it back up.

These are just a few of the problems I can name off-hand. I doubt these are problems that are specific to my computer system because Painter support newsgroups are rife with accounts of people having similar problems. Some of these are a mild annoyance, but others are absolutely exasperating!

Painter requires lots of memory to run. The minimum requirement for memory on specs is 1 GB. I'd say 2GB or more would be ideal. Of course, it goes without say the faster processor you have, the better. Painter is VERY CPU-intensive.

As of now, I really wouldn't recommend Painter 11 until they've ironed out the bugs and quirks. If you already have Painter X or an earlier version of Painter, you might want to wait for the next release of Painter, which should hopefully be coming soon (Painter 11 was released in February, 2009). If you really can't wait to try out the aforementioned new features, I suppose Painter 11 is usable; just be aware that it is not quite ready for prime time. Overall, I would rate Painter 11 3.5 Stars.

Works good. Very stable so far (no crashes), and no software restrictions on the educational version. A lot of the fancier brushes lag my computer, as do large brush sizes. I would recommend Ryan Church's intro to Painter for a jump-start setting up and using Painter (though the final illustration isn't great).

Favorite things about Painter: The tools are much more responsive than Photoshop's. The brush ghosting gives feedback on the mark you are about to make, and the pressure and tilt seem much more sensitive and accurate. The brush engine is of course more sophisticated than Photoshop's, though I miss Painter's control of pressure and tilt effects more than it's natural media simulation when I go back to Photoshop.

The Painter educational edition is a good value, and a good chance to get a grip on Painter before deciding whether or not to buy a full license. One oversight though is that there is no upgrade path provided with the educational edition. You would still have to pay full price to buy a full license - leaving you out a hundred dollars. I'm sure there are illegal options available and, although it is close, this educational version doesn't offer much competition to the 'free' alternative.

A great product? Yes, in a way (still the best drawing and painting experience) -- but save every few strokes because they may be your last. I've had problems with virtually every project I've started. Inevitably the brush palette disappears first and you will need to restart the program and reopen your project to gain selection again. And if you are going for high resolution artwork? -- "forget about it" -- beyond 72dpi you are certain to reach the spinning rainbow of crash and burn. That's been my experience on the Mac side (with a new Mac and 2GB of memory).

I have Painter X, and I bought 11, thinking it would be an upgrade. What a mistake.

First of all, it does NOT run on Vista 64 machines. The information on the Corel site about it does not say this, but if you ask the company, they will acknowledge it. (I am not sure why, since Painter X does...not as well as it could, but it does). When I did get it to run, it simply would not display the brush selector, so there was no way to change what you were working with! (I tried every correction for this that others who use the programs had suggested, but to no avail.)

It does not have dual or quad core processor support either.

It also takes far longer to render brush strokes than Painter X; not sure why, but it almost seems like the program is hanging somewhere.

All in all, STAY AWAY from this product. Get Painter X if you can find it, it at least works.

Corel, you should be ashamed of yourself. Take this off the market, go back to the drawing board and release a real upgrade; one that uses multiple cores and x64 architecture. If you can't figure out how to do that, you should not be in the software business anymore.