the Fatal Painter Crash

[Android]

ok,

i need to know if its just me or not, but throughout the 6 years i have been using painter there has been a dark side.
the dreaded "save crash"
for those of you infarmiliar, painter has the ability to crash while saving, and whats worse it that it corrupts the file you are saving when it crashes, and reduces the file to ZERO k

this the the nastiest most evil bug i could imagiane,

it dosent happen all the time, but it has occoured with every version of painter i use, on any platform.

it usually happens on higher rez files, or when im under tight deadlines.

i was under the impression that it was my hardware that was causing the problem. lack of ram, whatever.

well i just got a brand new G5 dual processors, 2 gig of ram.
im running painter 8.1 with the newest patch,

AND IT STILL CRASHES !!!

does anyone else experience this, and does anyone have any anwsers or solutions to this problem,

when i call Corel they respond like they have never heard of this , but i know there are others out there that have experienced this.

i dont like griping, but this appears to be a fundamental software defect and i want anwsers.

thanks

[JoshuaTheJames]

Are you familiar with the "Zoom in Ridiculously too Much Crash"? You can very easily zoom in waay too much with the key commands and the program dies...

Have you tried saving "as" so you have two documents to go through. At least the earlier version will be ok.

-Joshua

[Jason Manley]

ive had the same problem...though ive not had it with painter7 and windows xp/ gforce4 card.

perhaps its a hardware issue.


j

[Blackhawk]

So far Painter 7 has been rock solid for me. I never experienced this, although on my older machine it used to Crash to the desktop randomly on me. As soon as I upgraded hardware it went away. Maybe it is a hardware issue.

[Rockhead]

Android, I know exactly what you are talking about, the same thing has happened to me before. I had a large, high resolution piece that I had been working on for some time. I had saved it several times without problem and then on my last save, the night before it was due, it crashed in the middle of saving. The file was corrupted down to zero k, so it didn't even exist anymore, it erased the previous saves and everything. It was terrible. After that I got in the habit of saving the piece under different names as I went so if it happened again (which it has) I can just go back to the previous version. I also called corel and they acted as if they had never heard of it before, but obviously it has happened to other people. Some kind of conspiracy...

[Android]

im so gald that im not alone, but that still dosent solve our problem. one solution i have found around it is to record your script as you work then stop and save the script before saving, but thats a hassle. save as works ok, but on hi rez images that can quickely take up alot of disk space.

The crash seems to be associated with larger images,
the last one i has was with an image 2550x3300 pixles psd file, it was about 31 megs. nothing too unreasonable.

josh, the zoom in one sucks too, its really easy to make that mistake,

that almost falls under user error, but crashing while saving is unforgivable defect.

i have kept quiet about this crash for a long time, but its time to break the silence, and let the world know about this, corel can ignore us one by one, but perhaps together we can make more of an impression.

painter is still my favorite painting program ever, and it hurts to start up a negative thread about them, but somethings gota give. corel needs to fess up to this and tell us exactealy how to aviod it, or they need to fix it!

thanks guys.

[davi]

Andrew, i had this problem awhile ago on my old computer, and oddly it's gone now.

I figured out the problem only happens when you try to save over an original file...well that's how the problem started for me.

so if you have the space you have to save it as a new file every single time.

[Deth Jester]

Android write up a letter to corel, and we all can email it to them.. :) ConceptArt.ORG stands as 1!!!!!!!!!!!!!! :)

yeah I have had that happen in Painter 6 and 7.. but it hasnt happend recently... I think it was my old video card... and the drviers.. but I could be wrong.. *shrug*

let us know what we can do to help....

peace
-mike

[Android]

Davi i have been dealing with this problem for years, save as works sometimes but its not a solid work around.

[Sammy]

Yep, the save crash... I'm all too familiar with the beast

The thing has forced me to save #'s of variations on paints, sometimes it's hard since you're working so intensly and you don't wanna stop and save.
There's been plenty of times where I've gotten the save-crash, and had to just resort to a smaller 150 or 300 dpi of my work : \ .....

I'm sure if we send this thread to them they'd get on the ball.

[Android]

break the silence people, if this has hapened to you too, lets hear about it. the more people speak up about it the closer we will come to geting it fixed.

[otis]

I'm usually a P.S. guy, but I never had this problem with Painter. I use P.C's mostly, so could this be a Mac OS issue??

[negativespace]

Do you think Jin might have a solution to the problem? She is very helpful when it comes to Painter.

[ploboyko]

Yeah, this has happened to me, too, but not since I upgrade to Painter 8 on a G4. The worst time was years ago with version 6 when I was working on a painting for a tabletop game screen. The image was pretty big (124 megs), but after the crash was reduced to a not at all reasonable ZERO k!!!!!!! Empty!!!! I had to take a lo-res in progress version, blow it up, and sharpen all the details by hand just to get back to my progress point! I stayed up 36 hours straight with only coffee, cigarettes, and hate to fuel me! Argghhhh! Again, things seem okay with the program now in my experience with version 8, but if others are still having this happen and if it's at all possible this crash could still occur, it must be addressed, investigated, and corrected!

PAT LOBOYKO

[Android]

otis, this is definately a cross platform problem, i had been experiencing the crash frequently on a pc, and i upgraded to a g5 in the hopes that it would be resolved to no avail.

[Nimrod]

I am using Painter 6.1, and I do not have a save crash, but it seems as if anything interrupts the active window (i.e. an Instant message or outside error dialog box, anything that pops up, etc.), while the wacom pen is touching the pad , then Painter crashes. If Painter is just sitting there and I am not using the wacom to interact with it nothing happens. I know it is not a Wacom issue because it does not happen in photoshop or opencanvas. Usually I just put up an away message when I work because talking distracts from my 'flow', but it can be annoying, and if any other running program or process pops up a message it destroys what I am working on.

Also, perhaps more on-topic, the other day I was working on an 'exceptionally large' (for me - probably 3000-5000 px wide, can't remember) file for some freelance print work, and once when I saved, it saved with strange errors and artifacts all over the canvas. Like purple and green vertical streaks and odd saturation changes placed randomly over the canvas. They looked like compression artifacts or scan lines on video.... but they were also right on the canvas, as though I had painted them there... I had to literally paint them out!

Very odd. Maybe I should have taken a screenshot, but I was busy cursing at the top of my lungs and pounding the desk.

[Feng]

Hey Android,

yes, i get this crash from time to time....but it's rare (knock on wood, in painter right now..haha) It's very random...i haven't noticed any pattern or why it does it. Maybe it's a high-res thing...but it's happend to my "thumbnail" files....something at 1200x1200....so not big.

I haven't found a solution either. I use Painter 6 w/ the patch. I also work on 3 different PCs at my home studio (and 1 laptop), and one here at work....they've all had this crash before.

I hope Corel fixes this soon in Painter 9.

Now i just work w/ Photoshop opened in the background. Whenever i save, i just use the "update" feature in PS...and get the image stored into memory. So if Painter does crash, i'll have it opened in PS...which rarely crashes on me (never now that i think about it.....knock on wood again). So i just do a save and put the file back....

i feel your pain tho....

-feng

[Red_Rook]

happend to me twice, but not on huge terribly important pieces. it just sorta happend. I dont really think its hardware problem, im also running it on relativly new stuff.

also another thing i noticed, may just be me though, is painter has some issues with resizing or zooming in and out, when using multiple layers; white chunks sort of just apear, were i was painting, and there virtually impossible to get rid of.

[lyon]

I have had this problem, but not with Painter 8.1. Looks like they also fixed the brush resize crash when you are using the bracket keys. I feel for you. This is the most evil and pernicious of bugs. In fact, at one point I tried to get rid of Painter because of it and just use Photoshop, but I was kidding myself. Someone that you might want to message is Don Seegmiller. He has some great contacts there as he demos for them. PM him the bug and see if he has talked to them about it. I know he has had the crash too at some point.

I have started saving as PSD's on my large files because I used to get the weird color corruption thing. Maybe the crash happens with .rif files? I also save iterations. Every few saves, I save a file with a new name: xxx_001.psd, xxx_002.psd and so on.

I did report the bug to Corel when it was happening to me, but that was with 7. Good luck and talk to Don.

Howard

[lyon]

Andrew,
Are you saving compressed RIFs? That definately caused problems in the past.

[Android]

th emost recent crash was a psd file, i have had it crash on jpg. i would be currious if there was a file type that had more stability. The crash would appear to occour while it writes the image.

[deschamps]

The saving crash used to happen to me more often when I was using psd files in painter 7. I had to get used saving a new version out when ever I did something significant. I reinstalled painter 7 and that help for awhile.
(Did you ever notice how if you hit save as a psd then hit cancel it sometimes still saves?....weird.)

[Kynes]

Originally posted by lyon
Andrew,
Are you saving compressed RIFs? That definately caused problems in the past.

My thoughts exactly.

Ever since I started saving everything in Photoshop PSD format I haven't had any of the crap associated with saving in RIFF format.

[Avetice]

yeah i've had this problem as well, even though my computer is starting to get outdated its still VERY capable of running painter and photoshop.
athlon 1700, 120gb hd, ati aiw 8500 64mb vid card
768mb ram(yeah need more but proggies run fine with it)
i had it happen to me just a couple of days ago right.
Now I'm trying to save in different folders as well as seperate files for each save.

[gekitsu]

i had this occur several times on my old machine with painter 6.1 - more rarely since new pc with painter 6.1, and the save bug is almost gone for me with painter 8.1.
it does still crash on me from time to time just while working, but for me, it became more stable.

i found a soft spot of painter to be running entech powerstrip.
with powerstrip in the memory, painter would inevitable crash whenever i make significant changes to a brush in the brush creator.
since i deactivate pstrip while painting, i can work quite conveniently.

[nacho]

this has happened to me a couple of times with painter 7.
file size and file type were different each time. it crashed on .psd, .jpg and.rif and i couldn't do anything to get my work back. suck.

[dfacto]

Save a backuo to everything. Then leapfrog from one save to the other when you work, so that you have two works saved, not just one. I use it all the time, and I don't have any problems with it.

[zef]

I have also this problem few time ago on big files (any extension).
My personnal solution is : save your work on an other partition (or HDD) than painter and windows are installing...
It's work for me ... hope can help you.

[jook]

yes, I have had this problem as well. In both versions 7 and 8 I have had Painter crash and loose my file... I hate that...

[Fozzybar]

I never had this problem, but i think Feng's method is quite good to avoid a loss of your works...(updating image in ps)

[malicious]

Originally posted by Android
...well i just got a brand new G5 dual processors, 2 gig of ram...

yea, well ya know. if its giving you that much trouble, i'd be glad to take it off your hands for you :D

seriously though, i've never had a problem with painter crashing. i'd think i'd have more performance issues with only 512 ram, but the only thorn in my side is how slow some of the bigger/more complex brushes work on my shit-stack. i mean computer.

[Imp Head]

I had it happen with one file over and over again (but not consitently), but that's the only instance it's ever occurred on my system.

The piece in question however was 2400x3000 pixels. I ended up working around the problem by saving two versions of the file and then doing a ping-pong "save as" overwrite so if I did lose the file it was only as far back as my previous save.


I've not encountered the problem since. I work on a dual 800 mghz G4 Mac. My files tend to be about 1800x2400 pixels, one layer and I save the images as PSD RGB files.

Brian

[Rockhead]

Hey Nimrod!! I've had that weird vertical stripe color defect happen to me too! It happened to three different pieces I was working on and I also had to take the time to go back and paint out all of the stupid lines. These were very large pieces, 16x24 at 300dpi. I asked Don Seegmiller about both of these problems over the past summer, the save-crash and the color-stripe defect. He said he has had them happen to him too but it didn't really seem like he knew how to fix them, something about the large file size. It was quite a while ago when I asked him, so someone might want to ask him again to get a more firm response and to pass it on to corel. I haven't had the save-crash since I upgraded to Painter 8.1, but I have still run into the color-stripe defect.

[softdrawer]

painter 6 = save crash
painter 7 = save crash / vertical pixel bug
painter 8 = good times

go now and see...

[RefrigeratorCo]

Every time you save do a save as and make a new file name. Like the first save would be "pic1" and then when you save it again make a new file called "pic2".

So if you crash on the pic8 save you can recall back to the pic7.

[nikia]

I haven't seen these problems here with painter 8.1. I get pixels all over the screen when using the palette knife or any thick paint. I've also had so much trouble with a fading effect using the oil paints, that I had to give up on my painting. It virtually faded to nothing, from good sharp detail and bright colors. Never did figure out why on either of the problems. And on the advice of others here on CA, I saved on every format we could think of. Nothing worked. I've not as of yet had any crashes on it though. But I rarely do layers in painter. I just paint like I do traditionally, so maybe the crashes have something to do with the layers? I hope these problems get solved, I like the program otherwise.

[Sakievich]

Just a couple thoughts, because I've had this same problem in the past with the neon color weird thing too and files that are corrupted and wouldn't open anymore.

I save my files as psd's or tif's now and when I do my first "save as" (and later too as the image moves along) I make sure the file is uncompressed (look at the little check mark in the save as screen). It hasn't happened too often, but it has happened at ...uhmmm.. inconvenient mornents in a pictures development.

It hasn't happened since I started doing the above, but who knows...it could be lurking just around the next save!

[I.was.ink]

So saving it as a psd seems to work? Do you guys think its the size of the document or the amount of dpi?

I have an assignment for school I have to work on for the next 3 weeks, which I'll be working digitally and I dont want this happening to me.

What do you guys think of 300 dpi and lets say...ummm....8x10. I plan on printing it at around 11x17 or so. What size do you guys recommend?

btw, is it necessary for me to have the file size be @ 11x17 or would it be fine smaller?

thx!

iwasink

[CKWorth]

Yep it's happened to me a few times too in both Painter 8 and the 8.1 patch. For me it was a large file that took some time to save. Now, saving normally, just Ctrl-S and telling it to save in PSD didn't cause a crash I don't recall (though I'm sure that's just luck). What happens is, if I hit Ctrl-S on accident and then push CANCEL instead of save. It still tries to save if I hit cancel, and usually locks up the program and destroys the file. I know other people have had the problem of it saving when they cancel the command. Also, I've had problems with Painter creating errors in the document if I'm saving RIFF, so I never use that extension anymore.

I'm running this crashing Painter on a PC with a 256gb Raid-0 hd, 2gb RAM, 3.2ghz Pentium 4. I was thinking it was just a PC thing, like Painter was favoring Macs. Glad to know otherwise.

[Jin]

Hi guys,

I just happened to find this thread. In fact, someone over at Sijun provided the link.

Wish I'd known you were discussing Painter problems here. I've just been reading the Painter 7/8 Feedback & Help and Questions, Tricks & Tips forums up 'til now.

What I'm getting around to saying is that you have your own very good direct contact with Corel and don't need to rely on Don Seegmiller or anyone else.

Write directly to:

Rick Champagne
Corel Painter Program Manager [email protected]

Provide him with your complete system specifications, steps leading up to the problem, and any other details you can think of that might possibly help his QA people replicate the problem.

He's happy to receive your input and I believe he usually does his best to respond. If he doesn't, don't despair. I know they're interested and they do try to fix things.

Painter 9 is in Beta testing now so it's still a good time to let them know everything you can about crashes.

I don't have an answer but can tell you that I've had my share of crashes and even more often, Painter 8 just vanishes without so much as a goodbye warning.

One thing I hadn't heard of in all my travels is that thing about having your stylus on the tablet when some other program pops something up. That's an interesting one, so thanks.

A list of things that seem to help:

Save often.

Save in a numbered series of files.

Close other programs.

Delete the Pre-built Brush File after each Painter session (more frequently than every hour or so if you're using complex brushes like Impasto and others). A new Pre-built Brush File will be automatically generated the next time Painter is opened. The Pre-built Brush File is located in the:

Painter 6 main application folder

Painter 7 > Brushes folder

Corel > Corel Painter 8 > Brushes folder

It's not present in versions earlier than Painter 6.

Use the Script Mover to create a custom Scripts library and keep all your special scripts there, then delete the Painter Script Data file (Mac) or Painter.ssd file (Windows) and a new file will be regenerated the next time Painter's opened.

In Edit > Preferences > Undo, lower the number if it's at the maximum 32 (uses memory).

Do regular system maintenance.

Oh, and a WARNING:

Never use Impasto settings with Water Colors or Liquid Ink. It will immediately and permanently corrupt the image.

That's all I can think of for the moment.


Good luck!

[.cfb]

Oh. Just to "...pipe up..." as Andrew asked:

I have the same problem. Any file size, any resolution.

[imglue]

this has happened to me several times on painter 8 on my pc, even though my images arent isanely huge, i was working on a digital painting around 1200x3000 then it crashed. lowered it down to 800x2600 and still it crashed so the size of the image doesnt have a great effect in this, Android which is weird that a G5 MAC WITH 2GIGDUALPROCESSORS would crash in the first place.

we should all send angry letters to Corel so they can get a patch and fix this problem if it isnt human error.

[God-Of-Zilla]

Maybe this thread could be moved to the Feedback Painter section (Painter7/8 Feedback & Help), easier to find it then and better to have things gathered at one place.

Jin, thanks for posting, maybe u could post the same info over at Sijun cause it would be great to have the same info posted there.

Matthew

[Jin]

Matthew,

I'm fairly sure all of it's been posted at Sijun more than once.

I'll try to take a look and if I can't find it there, I'll post my message again at Sijun.

[feeb]

I just moved the thread.

PS: I've had the same problem too. I had a poster I did for dragon magazine become corrupt - where the colors go absolutely bonkers in areas. It seems to be related to file size for me, also I've never had corrupted files if I save in PSD format.

I also had the same problem Andrew had with the save/delete thing. I think what happened was painter was crashing, asked if I wanted to save, I chose yes, and it corrupted the file and made it 0 kb. That was another panicked loss from a job I did for dragon. I remember being on the verge of passing out, myself, from the onset of realizing what I'd lost. I always save psd format if I'm working with large images, which is kind of a bummer because many PSD layers behave differently from RIF files, so I have to change the layer properties each time I reopen them.

[koro]

Andy,

I have been having the same thing on two intense sketches I've done in the last 2 wks. I'm not sure what the problem is, but I also being on a New G5 (1.6 single w/1GB ram), don't think it's a hardware problem. however, it does occur more when running my Painter 6 under classic more than the others. As for P 7 & 8 they run like champs with only two exceptions, and that's typical ghosting when hand tooling around the illo, and the inherent rough display when zooming out. Dunno why but painter 6 seems to at least display line art and sketches better.

At any rate,
yes, I too share your ills on the save crash.
-to OSX's credit, the only sollution to this being to take a scrn shot before you have to force quit (which saves as a PDF of course). Which tends to be the only way I can save at least the originally drawn material.

Bummer though, happened just last night before saving any of the data. :rant:

[Sheff]

Hi gang,

I have a PC AMD 3200 with 1 gig memory. 4 partition system for operating system, applications, temp/scratch drive and data.

Whenever I try to save, hit Ctrl-S, Painter just closes. I have been experiencing wicked lock ups with this machine as well. The PBF has been deleted several times.

Lock ups occur when working on the same file in Photoshop as well.

I'm working on an multi layer file 12 x 18 at 600dpi and it is killing me. I've lost days of work on crashes during a save. I have multiple versions of the same file with different names.

It's gotten so I can only work on the image in sections and then cut and paste the section back into the master file.

I'm so tired of this. It's killing me. I am going have to ask a client for more time because of this problem.

I was going to buy a G5, but knowing that it's a software problem I guess will save me some money.

I am still experiencing lockups which I have to attribute to file size if nothing else.

I guess I'm done using painter for now.

[Jin]

Sheff,

Don't use Save!

Instead use Save As.

Save in a series of numbered files.

Delete your Painter Script Data file and Painter will generate a new, empty Scripts library the next time it's launched. Scripts take up memory.

Lower the number of Undo's if you have it set to the maximum of 32. That takes up memory.

After working for an hour or so, save your file, close Painter, and delete the Pre-built Brush File. If it's growing fast, do this more frequently. Some brush variants will make it grow large extremely quickly. Impasto variants are an example.

Why are you working at 600 ppi when 300 ppi should be plenty even if you want to print the final image?

600 ppi

12 x 18 inches at 600 ppi = a total of 77,760,000 pixels and even with only a blank white Canvas, it takes 297 MB just to open that Canvas and the file is about 3.5 MB.

With the Canvas and one Layer filled with solid color, the file grows to about 7 MB.

With that same Layer filled with the Painter 8 Double Helix pattern, the file grows again to about 79 MB.

Depending on how much color is in the image, and how many Layers there are, the file could easily grow a whole lot larger.

300 ppi

A 12 x 18 inches at 300 ppi = a total of 19,440,000 pixels and with only a blank white Canvas, it takes 75 MB to open and the file is 928 kb.

With the Canvas and one Layer filled with solid color, the file grows to about 1.8 MB.

With that same Layer filled with the Painter 8 Double Helix pattern, the file grows again to about 19 MB.


Everything works much faster, too, working at 300 ppi: Opening and Saving (Save As), Filling, etc.

[Dished]

Has anyone tried doing a virus scan of some sort?
Im not sure if this will work,but maybe you could do the piece on painter,then open up another program, copy the piece and paste it on the other program, and save there.
I havent really heard of this bug, but its just a suggestion. Hope it helps.

[Sheff]

Hi Jin,

I will try that after this job is done. The piece is going to be blown up quite a bit onto a large canvas. How much I don't know, but that's the resolution the client/designer asked for.

I agree that it's a memory issue and yes my undos are set to 32. I will lower it to 8 after I reinstall again. Where is this script file I need to delete?

I have switched to using OpenCanvas and I have had no problems working at this resolution. I really like openCanvas now. When I'm done I will save as a psd and finish it by combining the layers in photoshop. I'm tired of seeing days of work vanish with painter.

I have been saving in a series of numbered files. I was on version 12 when I decided to stop using painter.

Yesterday I was getting xml errors on brushes, so this morning, I decided to reinstall painter. It ran briefly before it crashed. Now painter.set will not open and the app will not load.

I don't use painter much, but I don't think I can rely on it until I know all these workarounds cold.

This has been a disturbing thread to read. The fact that Painter is known to crash on save is absolutely frightening.

Hopefully that will be resolved in the beta.

dished- I did run Adware and Spybot and cleaned everything.

[Jin]

Sheff,

Another thing I forgot to mention that your last post reminded me about:

Save your files Uncompressed. The default is compressed, so you'll need to check the Uncompressed box when saving (using Save As). This has been found to also help prevent corrupted RIFF files.

And another thing:

NEVER use Impasto settings with either Water Colors or Liquid Ink. Likewise, if you're using Impasto variants, don't change the Method to Wet. In other words, Impasto and Water Color or Impasto and Liquid Ink variant settings don't mix! If you do this, it can immediately and permanently corrupt or image, or make Painter vanish off the screen.. or both.




Yesterday I was getting xml errors on brushes, so this morning, I decided to reinstall painter. It ran briefly before it crashed. Now painter.set will not open and the app will not load.


Painter 8 has a nice addition. That is, if one of the default files becomes corrupted, which is what's probably happened to your Painter.set file (Windows) or Painter Settings file (Mac), you can run a repair instead of uninstalling and reinstalling the program. To do this:

Painter 8:

We can't directly access the Painter 8 default files on the CD as we could with Painter 7, or install them separately from the main Painter installation as we could with Painter 6.

Instead, try the following:

1. Close Painter 8 and other programs.

2. Move any files you created into a new backup folder outside of the Painter 8 folders.

3. Insert Painter 8 CD 1.

4. When AutoRun window appears, click Install Corel(R) Painter(TM) 8.

5. After the installation preparation is completed, you'll see a new window that says:
____________________



Program Maintenance
Repair or remove the program.

[•] Repair
Repair installation errors in the program. This option fixes missing or corrupt files, shortcuts, and registry entries.

[ ] Remove
Remove Corel Painter 8 from your computer.
With the Repair radio button checked, click the Next button and follow the prompts.

6. Reboot and see if Painter will launch this time.

If not, you can try Uninstalling and reinstalling (and I'd suggest also installing the 8.1 patch):

1. Close Painter 8 and other programs.

2. Move any files you created into a new backup folder outside of the Painter 8 folders.

3. Uninstall Painter 8.

4. Manually delete any remaining Painter 8 folders and files.

5. Reboot.

6. Install Painter 8 and if you're going to install the Painter 8.1 patch do not open Painter 8 even one time.

7. Install the Painter 8.1 patch

8. Reboot.

9. Launch Painter 8 (or Painter 8.1 if you installed the patch).


The default Painter Scripts library on Mac's is called Painter Script Data.

In Windows, it's the Painter.ssd file.

It's located in the following folders for Painter 8, Painter 7, and Painter 6 where all of the default Painter files are located, the files needed to launch Painter:

Corel > Corel Painter 8 (main application folder)

Painter 7 (main application folder)

Painter 6 (main application folder)

[LyleM]

Most people don't know this but Corel has a fix for this on the web page and in updates painter to "8.1".

It is hard to find this area on the Corel web page!

Go to:

http://www.corel.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=Corel2%2FDownloads%2FSupportDow nloads&pname=Corel+Painter+8

HOW TO INSTALL

you have to install the patch a certain way.

This is a brief description. Read what Corel has on the web page!


1. Backup files and uninstall painter 8
2. Install painter 8 ( DO NOT START THE PROGRAM IN ANY WAY AFTER INSALLING.
3. run the patch
4. good to go :blue:

[Rick Champagne]

Hi Folks,

I just wanted to come in and let you all know that I have indeed heard mixed reports about the "fatal crash" and the Painter Team is absolutely committed to tracking it down and getting rid of it!
The tough part is finding out what causes it. As you can see from this thread, none of us have a set of consistent steps to reproduce it, which the team desparately needs to solve this puzzle. I'm committed to fixing this, but I need your help! One thing that may be useful, is sending me your corrupted file along with a description of what was in the file (layers, layer types, layer masks, impasto, is compression on, text, shapes, etc.), and the last things you did between a successful save, and the unsuccessful one.
On a positive note, we did fix a crash in Painter 8.1 that may have been "it". Also, we've been making significant improvements to the code in Painter 9, so it's possible that it no longer exists here either.
Anyhow, please keep me in the loop on any new information regarding this. I want to make sure it's gone once and for all! As Android said, "break the silence!".
I'm in Painter IX crunch right now and may not have time to answer you right away, but I can promise you that I will read every single message sent to me. Jin posted my email address somewhere in this thread...

Kind Regards,

Rick Champagne
Program Manager, Painter
Corel Corporation

[Jin]

Painter Developer Rick Champagne's E-mail Address:

[email protected]

Take him up on the offer, folks. It's the only way this problem will be solved, if we can give the developers enough information.

(Thanks, Rick!) :)

[liam.c]

not only wehn saveign but at times when printing from painter ... it crashes ... although the file will still be there it will be permantly courpted
it will have lines or some such in it that are more and less visable wehn zooming in and out

most of the time its when i print
and off the top of my head it happens when its a large file and its a riff ... now alot of times ill use an uncompressed tiff format <as i personaly dont ever leave layers hanging out >much less problums with files other then riff

painter 8 also and classic did it too to a much greater extent <now i normly print from photo shop and never have any problum >

[BashCowboy]

Alright, so far I've yet to meet a person who hasn't had this problem. Myself included. We know the crash is cross platform, and we know it tends to occur when users are saving or printing a file. Although from what I can tell, saving is the most common problem. This leads me to a couple of questions.

So far a lot of people have covered things it probably isn't, based on other users generating the same error without similar settings/scenarios. So I'm going to try and make a list of things that haven't been implicitly test yet. Just a brainstorms of things we might go over to try and recreate this error. If you successfully recreate it, post the circumstances under which you did with a system specifications readout, and the rest of use can try to recreate it as well. Once we've done this we have a relatively useful bit of information to hit the painter team with.

#1 Has anyone tried variating CKMY and RGB settings? Could be that the crash is linked to the conversion of files to the CKMY standard. Which would explain the printing crash. Although I'm not sure exactly how that would cause .riff or .psd files. Unless they are saving a CKMY profile.

#2 What are the average dpi's of the files being saved? Not exactly sure on how this could be relevent but it hasn't been checked yet. Enough said.

#3 Has anyone successfully recreated the error with the patch installed correctly? No use trying to RE-solve the problem.

#4 Has anyone had this error at a LOW image resolution/ size.. I've yet to see that anyone has had the same error on anything lower than 1000x1000 pixel size. Could be coincidence, but if its happened, lets hear it.

Thats all I've come up with, anyone with a moderate programming background could probably help me come up with a few more settings to check, unless of course the patch really does take care of it.

For now I'm going to go through some test runs with a little more science in mind. I've only got 2 machines here, but I've got a couple friends who would LOVE some lab style testing. I'll keep you updated with my personal findings, and whether or not I was able to recreate them on other machines. As long as you promise to let me know if anyone has had the error after patching. I'd really prefer NOT to waste all this time.

Good luck mates, we've got a chance at getting this thing solved. We've even got direct contact with the painter team. Lets do it, and get back to art.

P.S Whoa was this only my second post?.. heh...I've been reading here for a very long time, glad to be an active member now. Can't wait to start interacting.

:bash:

[Jin]

Hi,

Thanks, BashCowboy, for your willingness to do some work to help Corel get to the bottom of this problem.

Let's try to make a distinction between "normal" crashes and those times when Painter simply vanishes without a warning. It feels like there's a different root cause, though that's merely my intuition (often it's more reliable than anything else!).

Though I have experienced them with Painter 7 and Painter 8, I seldom have Painter crashes with a warning message or error message preceding the crash.

What I do have more frequently is Painter 8 or Painter 8.1 vanishing off the screen without any kind of warning, not even peculiar behavior. It also happens with Painter 7.1.357 and recently even with Painter 6.1.

It's gotten so bad lately, with multiple Painter 8.1 vanishings in a single day, that I've had to completely Uninstall Painter 8, reinstall Painter 8, then install the Painter 8.1 patch, two times in the past week and a half.

And still Painter 8.1 is vanishing off my screen quite often. Most of the time it's when I have the Brush Creator open and touch some part of it.. then poof! I've not been able to pin down what part of the Brush Creator has to be touched or what the sequence of events is just prior to this happening, though if I can find some time to concentrate on it, I'll be careful to take notes. For now, I recall having touched at least four or five different parts of the Stroke Designer tab just before Painter 8 or Painter 8.1 vanished.

It's not always the case that I've had the Brush Creator open, however, when Painter 8 or Painter 8.1 vanishes off my screen.

One thing I do know that I've done incorrectly is to have my virus scanner running while going through the Uninstall, reinstall, and install Painter 8.1 patch routine. (Just forgot about that until I read about closing the virus scanner somewhere, probably in the ReadMe.htm.)

I'll go through that routine again with as many programs shut down as possible, offline, and with my virus scanner disabled. Then let you know if that makes a difference.

Anyone else install their Painter software with other programs running and with their virus scanner also running?

[DuckDodgers]

My first post here, hello everybody. I found you all by searching for "corrupt file" and here I am! I am new to Painter, I'm running version 8, without the patch, machine is Athlon XP2800+, 1Meg RAM. I just encountered this problem for the first time tonight. Note-takers, here are the important facts: this is the first time I have attempted to work on a very large file (5000x3000 pixels at 300ppi). I was saving as, using unique filenames, BUT I was accepting the Compressed default (silly me) and saving as RIFF. I now have multiple copies of a piece in various stages, and every one of them looks psychedelic. Not the effect I was after. ONE MORE SIGNIFICANT POINT: I did zoom in pretty closely just before I noticed the problem. However, this may be a red herring, as the previous save-as's were already created by this point. I doubt Painter goes back and messes up previously saved files....right? :$

Thanks for helping me feel not alone. Now it's off to repaint land!

[mcarp]

I had this problem frequently with Painter back around version 3 or 4 under Windows.

I didn't have it again for a long time, but started encountering it again with 8.1 on OS X using a dual G5.

What I have noticed in the most recent crashes is that I am usually working with large files (3000 x 3000 px or larger) with a lot of layers.

Using a product called iPulse, I am able to see that prior to these crashes, Painter is using an immense amount of virtual memory -- maybe 3 GB on a computer with 1.5 GB of physical memory.

On a couple of occasions, where I 'sensed' that one of these 'save crashes' was imminent, I left the computer completely alone for maybe three minutes, and eventually the file was successfully saved.