New Driver for my Wacom tablet

[sallybode]

And I finally have pressure sensitivity in the Custom Doodler. It isn't there in the other brushes, however it you fiddle with the brush palette, you get the equivalent of the preset brushes with pressure sensitivity, and you can get awesome textures.

This is a painting I did from some photography I did with my Canon camera, my digital Rebel XT. The image you see is 25% of the original file size so I'd get a really nice print.

[Grafixman]

Funny thing is that I also upgraded my graphire tablet driver some time ago. But that was because it wasn't working with Gimp. Now it works like a dream.
Pressure sensitivity in PP leaves a lot to be desired. The fact that you managed to get some beautiful painting in your pic says a lot about your ability... I stay away from PP when I feel like painting digitally. Painter Classic is good enough for me.
Another thing I don't like in Photopaint is that you can't smear paint as freely as you can in Photoshop or Gimp. You can paint in a transparent layer, smear the paint outwards, but not inwards.
One more thing... can Photopaint export transparent PNGs in version 12? I mean, smooth transparency, not index colored ones? I can do this easily in Photoimpact, but the Photopaint in my Draw Suite 11 does not have this option...

[sallybode]

As I said, since the Wacom upgraded driver and with using the brush palette, it has the ability to do that.

There are things PhotoPaint does that others can't, and yes, the interface is clumsy and the marching ants that reappear like in PhotoImpact, drives me nuts. But I have an idea in my head when I start where I am going, and then I figure which tools that I know of can get me there.

PhotoPaint crashed day before yesterday after I assigned drawing preference back in from my Wacom tablet, with its original software, I had to take out my added preference and still it was crashing any time I reached for the paint brush tool. So I got the updated driver for it. Didn't significantly help in PhotoImpact. But the pictures that my Canon camera takes are huge, anyway.

I have Painter 9.0 and found it more of a pain that a pleasure, but I did also find PhotoPaint a pain, and quite frankly still do.

What got me interested was the tutorials at Unleash.com about gold and other metals, both vector and raster for DRAW and PP. And then I began exploring the textures, well they are unlimited.

So Miss Chicken here is going to get over my cold feet and really learn Painter 9.0. I am not going to sell it. I hated CorelDRAW when I first got started with it too. I learned Illustrator first and it was like speaking Chinese to me to use DRAW at first, now it feels like that to use Illustrator, though not as badly, it still has the same feel to it since 8.0, which is when I learned, and I learned DRAW starting at 9.0, but didn't really know that much with 9.0 or 10.0, but with 12.0, I'd hold my own with anyone, or is that just my ego talking.

I have to laugh, my boss has a stack of applications for a part time person and hasn't interviewed one of them, none of them have CorelDRAW experience. There is a graphic studio in town that does nice designs and have gotten DRAW to do quite complicated stuff in RGB, not even on the artboard. So even if people know DRAW, they may not use it as we need. And when these RGB-ers send us a color separation, it is a nightmare. I'm going to have to remind her that when my sons come home from being overseas on the Nimitz, that I am taking a weeks vacation and that is going to really hurt if she doesn't have someone to handle those jobs, her daughter is a typesetter, and has limited graphic arts ability. Not getting somebody is going to be more costly than training someone who has ability.

I don't mind learning, if I am not learning something new and challenging myself to do more on a daily basis, I feel something is wrong.

Haven't seen any of your delightful creations lately. And miss that. Glad to hear you are still out there, you and Sark have been silent for a few days.

[Sark]

Hi sally

Sally said… you and Sark have been silent for a few days.

Did post again on the “Other effects with extrusion” topic, where I mentioned I had family visiting, so have been a bit busy the last few days. Had a bit of time last night and played around with “Vector Eye”, a standalone Raster to Vector app. Very impressive. The "orange" interface is odd, but it does a very efficient job of creating smooth traces whilst retaining detail. Most importantly, it creates considerably fewer nodes than Trace (or Inkscape for that matter). The Wizard settings are fine most of the time, but the Advanced settings are quite straightforward once you play with them a little. It's not freeware, but you really only need the basic version, which is very reasonably priced (less than Adobe Streamline sells for SH on ebay). Very nice artwork by the way. Still awaiting my tablet, which includes Painter Classic. Hopefully not as powerful as Painter 9.

http://www.siame.com/converter.html

Grafixman

In the past you've mentioned Draws tendency to create too many nodes. I hadn't had problems with this, but I use contours occasionally and they tend to move around and redraw very slowly. I now know why.

The top image below shows an object outline with 4 nodes. Next is the contour I have created from the outline. The bottom image shows one of the outlines after breaking apart the contour. There are over 120 nodes on an outline that needs no more than 4. The Status bar shows this contour has 36 objects (outlines), with a total of 2233 nodes. Fortunately, I tend to export contours as bitmaps before this becomes a serious issue, but it's still a crazy number of nodes, and Blends can't always achieve the same results as a contour.

Sark

[Grafixman]

After reinstalling Draw because of the missing ttf export option, I noticed that the outline to object conversion wasn't as messy as before. . Not really sure if it was because of a crappy installation or what. But I guess I can live with it for now.
Contour is notorious, though. You're using 12? Seems they didn't bother to fix that one. The node count can be notorious. That's why I make it a habit to break the effect apart after I get the desired setting and enter a value of 1 in the simplify slider to delete the extra nodes...
Vector eye. Thanks for the tip. I'll keep this in mind and bookmarked for future reference. Trace is really getting outdated...as with several other Corel products...
Painter Classic is a fun app. As nice or even a bit nicer than Artrage. You should also check it out as soon as you get your tablet...

[sallybode]

Grafixman:

Png works in 12.0, your choice are in the first dialog box to check that you want transparency and then if you select masked area, you can choose the color of your mask or to invert it and it saves transparency.

I have not used 11, so maybe it doesn't work.

Sark:

That Vector EYE sounds very interesting, have to check it out.