[Macworld]

Post your comments for Pumped about Painter here

[fergy]

One of my Grandsons is attending University of Cincinnati while working for Hasbro. He just upgraded from the 9 x 12 Wacom to a 21" cintiq. Obviously uses Painter as does my youngest daughter. she is a Graphic Artist and Illustrator but only with a 9 x 12:)

[Billion003]

I'm under the impression that Paint Shop Pro, another Corel product, is still not offered for the Mac. I had the PC version before making the wise switch to a mac a few years ago. I've missed it every since.

[Napper]

I've switched to Mac 3 years ago with the first intel iMac which still puts my brand new office Vista machine to shame. There are only one thing I realy miss: The Corel Suite. Shame that they decided to skip on the Mac market. Illustrator could use some competition, again!

[Photonerd]

Still not Intel native AFAICT. WTH is wrong with Corel...

[kevphil]

Until Painter allows users to Save/Import true Photoshop Paths, and select/reuse them (without having them disappear once they are turned into a selection!), the program will remain a niche player.
Corel, at least as far as Painter goes, is completely unresponsive to the needs of professional illustrators.

[MrPlywood]

I have never been able to get Painter to work without some degree of lag, so the whole "painting" process never felt intuitive. I kept upgrading in the hopes that things would improve, but finally stopped at version 8. Maybe I'll try again now that I've got a MacPro 8-core.

[Grapho]

Some features never worked on Intel Macs. Like Liquid Metal. No patch was released. I never liked Corel as a company. They add a lot of features but usually they are very badly implemented. Corel Draw's color pallets are a perfect example of this. Very confusing. I have never, and I mean never have gotten a spot color file in Corel that would generate separations correctly with out having to fix some issue. It's easy to blame the users, but in the end, if the implementation is not clear and easy to use, mistakes will be made. That is my point.

[Cloudmover]

Don't bother.
All those mighty Mac CPUs will go to waste, unused.
When I found out that Painter X was NOT multi-core aware in the article from Bare Feats.com, Painter's terrible performance made sense.

Reading their website it appears that for Panter 11, Corel has finally discovered that a computer may have more than one processor! Unfortunately, this Corel pdf says that it will only be supported during transformations.

Unbelievable.

Photoshop is not only using multi-core CPUs to increase performance, it's now using the graphics card to speed the app up. Why is Corel lagging so far behind?

I love this program, and use it everyday for my illustration work but, it seems like Corel is forever playing catch up. I'm going to pass on this new version and wait until the Corel developers spend some time with Snow Leopards' "Grand Central." Maybe then it will be "The Ultimate Digital Art Studio."

[Grapho]

With Grand Central just around the corner, it might actually be easer to implement this multithreading thing. But I fear that Corel has never been a good Mac developer. I knew that Painter's days as an excellent painting tool where over when Corel got involved. I am very disappointed with the last version. Sure it has a lot more bells and whistles, but it's core functionality has not been updated for todays hardware. I have an 8 core Mac Pro, what good is this thing if it only can see one processor while painting. At this point it not only should be fully multithreaded, but also 64 bit savvy.

[whambar]

Painter is a great idea and has been from the beginning... but it has always been WAY behind the advancement of the computers and processors it uses. I downloaded the free trial and it even looks the same as it did 5 years ago. What the heck has Corel been doing with it all this time? Klugey barely describes it. Once again it looks like the original program. It still looks like Mac OS 9!!!!! SO I guess its a no buy for me again... This offering is barely an upgrade. They need to drastically lower the price or make it what we all would like to see. And as a side note... why would you have someone evaluate it who "can't even put down a straight line..." ????? Don't get me started on their (corel) Web site with the "quackey" interviews with 5 different sound levels in each one. It just doesn't seem like Corel has a clue what to do with it.

[Grapho]

I think you nailed, Painter was a fantastic tool back when Fractal was the developer, Metacreations seemed to want to advance it with new useful features, but once Corel got involved I new that it was down hill after that. If I want to use all the feature of my current version, I need to run it in Rossetta, what the hay.

[tallscot]

>I think you nailed, Painter was a fantastic tool back when Fractal was the developer, Metacreations seemed to want to advance it with new useful features, but once Corel got involved I new that it was down hill after that.
Blame Canada! Blame Canada! When Canada is gone, there'll be no Celine Dion.
:)

[whambar]

Wow.. I spent some time with the free trial version tonight... So far the bug and/or glitch count is at SEVEN and going strong! I can't believe they would let this out into the wild without a gigantic BETA stamped over the "About Painter" window. I sure feel sorry for the names of the endorsers of this.... ahem... release. It's very disheartening... because this could be such a great program. I'm sure they've fixed something in it... just can't find it right off. For Corel users this is probably SOP... but for users of Adobe products this would be unacceptable. I can only imagine how I would feel if I paid for this???