Painter 2015 applies the effect to the full image, letting you see exactly what you’re going to get and modify effect settings as needed. While previous versions included image-wide effects, they limited preview to a small thumbnail in the effect dialog. This is where effects come in, and Painter 2015 makes those easier to use, too. While brushes are at the heart of Painter, sometimes you may want to tweak (or radically change) the look of your entire image. Another included layout highlights just the brushes new to Painter 2015 for when you want to try out just the latest and the greatest. So when you start up Painter, you can now opt for a Simple interface with just a handful of large buttons or for the Illustrator or Photo Artist one. Painter 2015 helps by introducing new palette arrangements.Īn illustrator doesn’t use the same tools as a photo artist, and a novice user would find either one of these layouts intimidating. With dozens of tool panes filled to the brim with sliders, checkboxes, and tabs, finding what you need can be confusing. You can use any tool your heart desires… if you can just find it. If Painter is like an unlimited artist’s toolbox, that can be both a blessing and a curse. Painter 2015 ships with five layouts, but you can also make your own. Newly-introduced jitter smoothing allows finer control over jitter, so you can tune your brush strokes to look just like you want them to. While jitter, or introducing some randomness into the strokes, isn’t new to Painter 2015, it has been improved. A computer’s digital uniformity is a dead giveaway when you’re trying to emulate natural media. This technical-sounding name hides a simple reality: When we draw by hand, no two strokes are exactly the same. Next up in the improved features department, jitter smoothing. Once the paint finished drying, Painter was back to its usual zippy self. I was still able to slow Painter 2015 to a crawl on a powerful computer by quickly drawing many strokes with a Real Watercolor brush. It draws 15 watts from its power brick, about the equivalent of a couple of night lights. There are two Ethernet interfaces, one 10 and one 10/100 fast Ethernet port. It comes with 32 or 64MB of RAM and a 2, 4 or 6GB disk. Even so, some of the brushes are processor-hungry-especially the aforementioned Real Watercolor. The NetWinder is based on a 275MHz StrongARM SA-110 RISC processor which delivers 250 MIPS. If you want a hyper-realistic beard for your fantasy dwarf, these are the brushes to use.Īnother area that’s been improved is speed: Corel says Painter 2015 is about 40 percent faster than its predecessor, Painter X3. But for artists who enjoy melding old with new, they open up new possibilities. In other words, if you’re a purist and you love your paintings to look as if they were drawn by hand, you may struggle to find uses for some of the new Particle Brushes. Instead, they give you quick ways to draw wisps of smoke or realistic fur and hair and add swirls of color to your creations. Unlike Painter’s usual fare, Particle Brushes do not emulate analog tools. You’ll find the new particle brushes in a number of categories.