Can anyone help a PS convert?

[matthewthirteen]

Hi, I was hoping maybe some painter master could help me out a bit with my conversion over to painter.

I was just wondering if there's a way to color using cmyk values instead of the little mixer on the side? I do alot of stuff with print and always need my stuff broken down into channels, I played around with painter a bit and found that I liked my brush strokes a lot more in that program and would prefer to start inking my stuff in painter and then bringing it over to PS to refine it and make it print ready, it helps when i do this if i can say, make all my linework 100% black and then all my shading 100% cyan for RIPS. Any ideas?

Also, I was just curious if the eraser tool will truly erase (leaving background transparent) or only color the color of the background (this is what currently seems to be happening).

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Matt

[Jin]

Hi Matt, and welcome to Corel Painter!

Hi, I was hoping maybe some painter master could help me out a bit with my conversion over to painter.

I was just wondering if there's a way to color using cmyk values instead of the little mixer on the side?

There are a few other ways to pick colors besides the Mixer palette, among them:

• Colors palette
• Color Sets palette
• Color Info palette (specify RGB or HSV values)
• Use the Dropper tool to pick from the same image or another image open on the screen

I do alot of stuff with print and always need my stuff broken down into channels,

Corel Painter doesn't provide the option to break the image into RGB Channels.

I played around with painter a bit and found that I liked my brush strokes a lot more in that program and would prefer to start inking my stuff in painter and then bringing it over to PS to refine it and make it print ready, it helps when i do this if i can say, make all my linework 100% black and then all my shading 100% cyan for RIPS. Any ideas?

Corel Painter only works in RGB color space, though a Painter image can be saved in CMYK color space using either of two file formats:

• PSD
• TIFF

Do your work in Corel Painter, and after saving the image in Painter's native RIFF format to retain Painter-specific information, save in either TIFF or PSD format using CMYK color space, and see if that works for you.

If that doesn't work for you, do your work in Corel Painter, and after saving the image in Painter's native RIFF format to retain Painter-specific information, save the file in PSD format, then open the image in Photoshop and convert it to CMYK.


The following won't entirely solve your problem, but you might want to download illustrator Tim Jessell's CMYK Compatible Color Set from David Gell's site as it may cut down on the color differences and make your final work in Photoshop easier:

Brush Port... a Digital Oasis for Corel Painter Users

To find Tim's Color Set:

1. Click Old Site at the top of the page.
2. Click Guest Resources.
3. Scroll down to the bottom of the page to Tim's CMYK Compatible Color Set.

Also read John Derry's tutorials on Consistent Color and Hot-rodding Your Brushes in Corel Painter:

Consistent Color - PDF

Hot-rodding Your Brushes in Corel Painter

And...

Read my Sticky thread at the top of this forum (also be sure to read the note at the top of the thread, about The PainterFactory for technical issues and suggestions for enhancements to Corel Painter):

Keeping Painter 6 through Painter X.1 Running Smoothly, Updated February 6, 2008

Also, I was just curious if the eraser tool will truly erase (leaving background transparent) or only color the color of the background (this is what currently seems to be happening).

Any help would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Matt

If by "background" you mean the Painter Canvas, no. Neither the Eraser tool, other Erasers variants, nor any other means can be used to make the Painter Canvas transparent.

Read my tutorial at PixelAlley to learn more:

The Painter Canvas, What Can be Done with it, and How to Lift it to a Layer


Cheers!


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[tomt]

I've had the experience of trying to work with cmyk for some printing stuff I had to do. I found no way to do it in Painter unfortunately I had to bring it into Photoshop to do the separations. For example for "K" in cmyk, I could never get a 100% value, same for all cmy values too. There was always some other value mixed in with the file exported from Painter.

[J Wilson]

I've had the experience of trying to work with cmyk for some printing stuff I had to do. I found no way to do it in Painter unfortunately I had to bring it into Photoshop to do the separations. For example for "K" in cmyk, I could never get a 100% value, same for all cmy values too. There was always some other value mixed in with the file exported from Painter.

Well 100% black in CMYK isn't as dark as a black with the other colors mixed in over it. For a full color image I'd say the rich black in better. On line work though, where a slight misalignment on registration could look really bad, convert the black to 100% K. Keeping the line work on another layer will make that easiest.

[Fredbt]

Every Painter illustration I ever did was printed on a lithography or rotogravure printing press. Painter has no provision for making CMYK files for 4 color process separations used for printing plates. Photoshop has been the forerunner and the pioneer in this area and that's why every pro has a copy of Photoshop.

It has always been a hassle to prepare a Painter illustration for the printing press. Painter RGB files require a tweaking in Photoshop when converting to CMYK if you expect anything similar to what you painted. If they are simply changed to CMYK without tweaking the colors, they will look pretty dismal on press. (Believe me. This is the voice of many years of experience in using Painter in the graphic art and illustration field.)

I would like to see Corel begin to move Painter in the direction of professional graphics use. It is a great program, as we will all agree, but as a stand-alone product, it is not quite ready for "prime time." I'm sure this would require a major re-write of the program and perhaps Corel doesn't see the need to go to that extreme with Painter. After all, it is a great program, as it is, and I'm sure it is selling well to both amateurs and professionals.