Painter 12 nearly here? Now here since May 11(10th) 2011

[D0ming0]

Reading through the new ImagineFX (issue 69) and saw this...

Next month...Andrew Jones puts Painter 12 through it's paces

and

Inside Painter 12: The new tools and features that'll make your art pop.

Issue 70 goes on sale 4th May, so by my (normally wrong) reasoning, we should be seeing Painter 12 any time now :-)

[ikken]

Corel had a discount campaign for p. 11 spanning until end of April (can't see it on corel.com now though), so I assume it's coming either late in this month or early in May

a few week early would be nice though. New tools and features, like, omg, totally - I hope 2000 % increased perfomance is on that list too.

[Chipsterology]

Corel has been trying to off Painter 11 at discount prices since 4 months after it's official release, nothing new there. They already knew they were wrong for asking retail for what should have been a Painter X patch instead. I look forward to Painter 12 though, I cannot express enough how I would love to see a version worthy of my dime. Please pleeeease PUHLEEEEZ give us what we need. On the other hand, I'm hoping the next version of Photoshop will have an evolved natural media engine that can compete also just in case Corel drops the ball. My budget for software upgrades this year will be $5K across all programs, I need every last investment to hit home.

[curtmantle]

Reading through the new ImagineFX (issue 69) and saw this...

Next month...Andrew Jones puts Painter 12 through it's paces

and

Inside Painter 12: The new tools and features that'll make your art pop.

Issue 70 goes on sale 4th May, so by my (normally wrong) reasoning, we should be seeing Painter 12 any time now :-)

I wouldn't get too excited. A similar thing happened when ArtRage 3 was in development. ImagineFX advertised that Nick Harris would be introducing ArtRage 3's new features 'Next Month' but neither the feature nor ArtRage 3 appeared for about another 6 months.

[ikken]

looks like the UK release date is May, 20th ( google cache)
the original topic on painterfactory and amazon page are currently deleted

[Portus]

Cool, can't wait to check out the new bugs!

[ikken]

They will be called smart image destroying and Natural Media® workflow fuck-upers™.

[PasiJH]

I truly hope Painter 12 is getting better at the overall flow of painting and drawing. The usability in the current and earlier versions have been so bad when compared to Photoshop. E.g. zooming in and out, and the fixed-size layer palette are so tiring when coming from using PS for a while. When I want to paint something I usually fire up Photoshop and use hard round brush with Wacom pen transparency. It's a bit sad that one brush wins they countless brushes of Painter in usability.

But it must be said that of course Painter's brushes beat PS in quality. And I'll probably buy Painter 12 at some point anyway

[ikken]

> the fixed-size layer palette
you can resize it since at least painter 9

[burning_chrome]

I truly hope Painter 12 is getting better at the overall flow of painting and drawing. The usability in the current and earlier versions have been so bad when compared to Photoshop.

Painter 12 just needs one new descriptor preceding its name to escape the troubled past: Adobe.

But alas, unlike Flash which was a growing and insurmountable obstacle to Adobe's web aspirations, Painter doesn't eclipse Photoshop the same way Flash pwned whatever alternative Adobe was pushing before they bought out Macromedia.

[ikken]

adobe painter, ambientdesign painter or even autodesk painter indeed sound better than corel painter

[Spazzin]

You would think that they'd be already advertising it, if it was coming out this year...?

[ikken]

Nope, they don't do any sort of promo before launch dates are announced, at least with painter 11.
If you don't count Android's participation in beta work and imagine fx announce as advertising.

[dvillus]

adobe painter, ambientdesign painter or even autodesk painter indeed sound better than corel painter

My fear is if Adobe acquires painter it would mean the end of the program, they would absorb what they want and let the title die.

When Adobe acquired macromedia, Freehand was left to wither in favor of their vector program. Freehand's pen tool was superior to illustrator in many ways and a genuine joy to use.

Illustrator had far better rendering options and was easily the more often used program.

What Painter needs is dedicated development support. They would definitely get that from Adobe, if they committed to keeping the program.

[Arshes Nei]

I truly hope Painter 12 is getting better at the overall flow of painting and drawing. The usability in the current and earlier versions have been so bad when compared to Photoshop. E.g. zooming in and out, and the fixed-size layer palette are so tiring when coming from using PS for a while. When I want to paint something I usually fire up Photoshop and use hard round brush with Wacom pen transparency. It's a bit sad that one brush wins they countless brushes of Painter in usability.

But it must be said that of course Painter's brushes beat PS in quality. And I'll probably buy Painter 12 at some point anyway

Indeed, and also counter intuitive. Let's hope they fix the past bugs and bring more improved stability.

It's funny how digitally that's the "default" opacity/pen with many programs. Some ways it works against I how work traditionally. Don't get me wrong I do like using that pen too in digital paintings, but sometimes I find certain brushes in Painter faster with certain ways I work.

[George Abraham]

Someone mentioned recoding it from the ground up. Yes please, the app still reeks of Windows 3.1 type user interfacing.

[D0ming0]

20th May sounds good. It just so happens I have a birthday coming up on 5th June.

The sad thing is, I'm pretty happy with v11. It's a bit clunky and certainly not lacking in the bug department, but I spend many blissful hours in front of it and I'm still very much the weakest link. But I'm a sucker for new toys...

My wish..fix the bugs and crashes. Giving the UI a polish wouldn't hurt, but I don't see it.

[PasiJH]

> the fixed-size layer palette
you can resize it since at least painter 9

Hey, you are absolutely right! I've actually known this but I've used Painter so little lately that somehow the old bad feelings about it came to my mind first

Nevertheless the Painter usability could be better. I would love to have the same fluidity in painting workflow and in the overall workflow like there is in the Photoshop, but of course Painter is still a very usable piece of software. It just seems that it changes so very slow. Maybe it's a bit unfair to compare it to PS which probably has a much bigger coder work force behind it, but well, one can always hope

[ikken]

One thing I really hate about painter development is when they throw stuff out in favor of fancy, but less usable new features and than it takes years to get old but working ones back.

I wonder if custom brush controls will make it back to painter 12 lolz orz
(note that there're "minimum size" and "spacing/min spacing" values - and all those are on per-brush basis, so you can make varying controls for different brushes.
And there're a lot of custom controls to add there, not just grain/bleed/resat/opacity like in recent versions.)

[jason_maranto]

They still have all those controls... I don't see anything on there that isn't available in 11.

Best,
Jason.

[ikken]

you can't pull them into a single separate palette, that is now replaced by a horizontal strip with opacity/grain/well values only (with exception of artists oils, where you have viscosity, etc.)

[JohnMalcolm1970]

They still have all those controls... I don't see anything on there that isn't available in 11.

Best,
Jason.

Yup... I'm not sure what the point is. All of those controls can be tweaked on a brush by brush basis in Painter 11. It's just that they are many many more brush controls than can fit in a bar a the top.

[ikken]

http://i.imgur.com/2XAMd.jpg
http://imgur.com/rqQ2F.jpg
http://i.imgur.com/uJOzo.jpg
does it make more sense?...

I'm planning to get a 2560х1440 screen as my next hardware upgrade, and it means I'm going to have 2000x50 pixels of wasted space in painter X.
It's not a big deal on one hand, but it's a stupid thing on the other.

[Portus]

Yeah I use the Custom Controls too, everything in the UI is much better thought out in Painter 6, just compare the width of the scroll bars of Painter 6 to 11! There's so much wasted space on the modern interface.

My Painter 6.1 workspace, it's compact to the max! If you're feeling fancy you can even change the palette's color or even drop in a color pattern or texture.

[JohnMalcolm1970]

Yeah I use the Custom Controls too, everything in the UI is much better thought out in Painter 6, just compare the width of the scroll bars of Painter 6 to 11! There's so much wasted space on the modern interface.

My Painter 6.1 workspace, it's compact to the max! If you're feeling fancy you can even change the palette's color or even drop in a color pattern or texture.

I fail to see the problem then... let's all just stick with Painter 6 (and Photoshop 5.5 or something) "Never mind the quality... feel the width!"

[Arshes Nei]

You know it's something of a tangent, but if you ever look at Japanese Comikers or such a lot of the artists were many versions behind the latest software. If it works for you I think it's fine to stick with it.

[JohnMalcolm1970]

You know it's something of a tangent, but if you ever look at Japanese Comikers or such a lot of the artists were many versions behind the latest software. If it works for you I think it's fine to stick with it.

That's a valid point. It is fine to stick with older software if it works. What I don't understand is why people who have found the holy grail of digital painting software feel the need to slam later versions. Surely they're too busy painting?

[Portus]

I fail to see the problem then... let's all just stick with Painter 6 (and Photoshop 5.5 or something) "Never mind the quality... feel the width!"

Whatever works, by that logic they should have never reintroduced the Digital Watercolors after they removed the engine in Painter 7 because they thought their new Watercolor engine was so much better, which wasn't and still isn't. I prefer Painter 6 User Interface to v8-v11, I don't see much merit in Corel's UI work on Painter. You can't even compare PS CS 5 interface to Painter, CS 5 interface is very cleverly designed, very configurable and doesn't get in the way of working, only complain I have are those shortcuts that require the user to hover the pen, so awful.
On the other hand just resizing Corel Painter 11 palettes was troublesome, in the end I had to reset the workspace so I could resize the color wheel again. So, yes I would prefer if they had continued updating Painter on top of the old Painter 6/7 UI instead of the Photoshop 7 copycat they came up with in v8. Until I can run v6.1 on modern hardware I will, unless Corel comes up with a new version so good that I actually have to upgrade and spend $$$ on it.

Could v12 be the version where they actually do some work instead of rushing in 3 months before release? Hope so but I just can't envision it, I'm sure they'll just hide the trash under a new fancy UI with drop shadows and icandy buttons but the engine will stay the same, in this day and age Painter is just not as relevant as it once was, I doubt Corel of today would drop tons of money in rewriting Painter's code to 64bit multicore support but I would love to be proven wrong.

[ikken]

I fail to see the problem then... let's all just stick with Painter 6 (and Photoshop 5.5 or something) "Never mind the quality... feel the width!"

You'd be surprised that there're people who actually keep using photoshop 5.5 - it's a great tool for any digital inker, for example. Works lightning fast on modern hardware too.

What I don't understand is why people who have found the holy grail of digital painting software feel the need to slam later versions. Surely they're too busy painting?

I suppose it's more of a rhetoric question?

[AndyCarolan]

Regarding the original title of this post, I'm wondering whether to buy Painter 11 or wait for the possible release of 12... Wish Corel would give at least a hint of what is going on lol